Deadline: November 24, 2023

Who is Eligible: Graduate Students currently enrolled in a University of Idaho program

Fellowship Amount: $5,000

Number Available: 1

Description

This program funds one student each year to work with the faculty and staff at the Library to support the operations of the University of Idaho Library’s Data Hub, a center for geospatial and data sciences support. The Data Hub is intended to provide curricular and co-curricular support in areas such as geographic information systems, data sciences, quantitative data analysis and visualization, and research data management.

The fellowship occurs during the Spring semester with exact dates to be negotiated with the successful applicant. The fellow should plan to spend approximately 10-15 hours per week on the project. Eligible applicants must be enrolled in the spring semester.

In addition to helping with the operation of the Data Hub, fellows will select or propose a project which forwards the goals of increasing the availability of collections or services in support of the U of I Library’s Data Hub.

Potential Projects:

• Identify, prioritize, digitize, and georeference historical aerial imagery of Idaho. The U of I Library manages a large printed aerial photo collection. A project would be to identify and understand items in the printed aerial photo collection, prioritize unique items, and digitize and georeference items to make them more accessible and useable for use by students, researchers, or others.
• Identify and digitize historical data resources relevant to Idaho. University of Idaho physical and digital collections contains numerous sources of tabular and other forms of data, locked in either physical volumes or as scanned PDF documents. A project would be to identify a dataset across a series of publications, either physical or digital and convert those to useable, contemporary datasets for use by students, researchers, or others.
• Create curated learning paths for topics in GIS or the data sciences of a particular discipline. The Library seeks to support learning of data literacy across campus as well as development of open educational resources that can impact teaching. As initiatives such as Data Carpentry workshops and increased focus on data sciences in course work take root at U of I, how can the library help curate resources and provide support for learners in specific areas of data literacy? A potential fellow project would pursue this question, helping to curate resources, develop teaching materials, and deliver programming to meet the needs of the campus community.

The deliverables from the fellowship project will be online resources such as digitized and geo-rectified aerial imagery, data sciences-related learning materials, or digitized and normalized data resources derived from historical material. A multi-modal report documenting the process and resources will be expected as part of the conclusion of the fellowship. All deliverables will be made publicly available through the U of I Library website and other sites as appropriate (e.g. Github).

Call for Applications

The University of Idaho Library invites graduate students from any discipline at the University of Idaho to apply for the Julie and David Levine Library Fellowship. Applicants may select from projects listed below that they find interesting or may submit a proposal for a different project which forwards the goals of increasing the availability of collections or services in support of the U of I Library’s Data Hub. The activities of the fellow will be focused primarily on accomplishing their project, but will also participate in the launch of the new Data Hub services, which may include assisting Data Hub staff with answering questions, preparing web content, or planning events.

To Apply, please visit the form linked below to submit a letter of interest of no more than 500 words describing your proposed project, and how your previous experience, education, and/or training prepares you for the work of this fellowship, as well as a copy of your current CV or resume.

Application Form

Please contact Bruce Godfrey (bgodfrey@uidaho.edu) if you have any questions about the application process or the fellowship.