The University Libraries hires graduate assistants each year. These positions, located at the University Park, change yearly with hiring typically occurring in the Spring, and the Libraries works directly with colleges and departments to find candidates. The endowed positions below are hired on a yearly basis; please reach out Monica Gingerich mcg5660@psu.edu for more information.
Charles L. Blockson Collection on African-American and the African Diaspora Graduate Assistant (BGA)
Will staff the Blockson Collection Room during its hours of operation; provide reference for the collection; participate in collection maintenance and preservation projects; assist with outreach, including exhibitions, tours, promotion, and publicity. The assistant will provide basic and specialized assistance in support of managing, interpreting, and promoting the Blockson Collection by performing: Bibliographic and archival collection targeted research; Reference, project, and other support; Outreach to promote the collections content to students, faculty, and local communities.
Digital Preservation Graduate Assistantship
This paid graduate assistantship assists the Preservation, Conservation, and Digitization department with the development and implementation of the digital preservation program plan. Graduate assistants have helped to prepare digital content for preservation, performed content analysis, ingested digital objects into our digital preservation repository, and developed custom scripts for automated workflows.
Harriman Expedition Digital Project
Continue to research and properly identify the Indigenous items in concert with the Indigenous communities from which they originated. Research other expedition journals in library collections that might be linked and provide additional context and perspectives on the expedition. Continue to build a digital collection and update archival finding aid with special attention to ethical and reparative descriptive practices.Use digital humanities tools for annotation and mapping to build a curated digital project to place the collection in its broader contexts (climate change and decolonizing the archive, for example) and in doing so make the collection more widely accessible to the Penn State community and beyond.
Big Data Analytics Graduate Assistant at the Data Learning Center
This paid graduate assistantship assists the Data Learning Center in supporting researchers at Penn State in the areas related to big data analytics and ML/AI. Support services include providing consultations and reference, as well as designing workshop plans and reusable training materials.
Candace and Patrick E. Malloy Graduate Assistantship in the University Archives
This graduate assistantship support students working on projects in the University Archives, which serves as the institutional memory for Penn State.
Hemmingway Letters Project
Research Assistants for the Hemingway Letters Project use digital, print, and archival information sources to research, document, and draft annotations and other components of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, a multi-volume scholarly edition being published by Cambridge University Press.
Data Access and Research Consultant
This paid graduate assistantship provides access and public services support for advanced data resources and tools, particularly the LexisNexis Web Services API. The graduate assistant collaborates with the related subject librarians to support researchers involved with text and data mining through consultations and presentations. This assistantship is funded in part by the Robert and Sandra Poole Graduate Assistantship in the Libraries, in part by the Richard and Carol Steinhauer Endowment for Graduates in the Schreyer Business Library, and in part by central funding.
Open Homework Systems
This assistantship is housed in Library Learning Services and is overseen by Bryan McGeary.
Researcher Metadata Enhancement Assistant
Over the past 15 years, the University Libraries have created and supported a significant amount of metadata related to our faculty publications (Scholarsphere, Digital Measures, Researcher Metadata Database ). However, this metadata is walled off from the library's bibliographic data and its catalog. This paid graduate assistant works with members of Cataloging and Metadata Services to create a database pairing researcher identifiers from the Researcher Metadata Database with those from traditional and emerging sites of bibliographic description.
Textbook Affordability Coordinator
Open education is an area that directly impacts student access, agency, and equity and the Graduate Assistant (GA) who serves as the Textbook Affordability Coordinator will be working closely with Penn State faculty and students to expand the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) through a combination of data analysis, outreach, and research.