The MIT Libraries will host a Software Curation Postdoctoral Fellow as part of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. CLIR Fellows work on projects that forge and strengthen connections among library collections, educational technologies, and current research.

Software plays a dynamic and growing role in shaping the scholarly record, both as a component of research methodology and as a research outcome. This presents academic libraries with a challenge — as well as an opportunity — as we contemplate practices and possibilities for acquiring, appraising, describing, documenting, preserving, and disseminating software’s broad impact on the scholarly record.

The Software Curation Fellow at MIT will lead an investigation to inform the Libraries about immediate and long-term implications of collecting and curating software and of providing software curation services to our community. The primary focus of the fellowship will be to contribute to the development of a software curation model for the MIT Libraries built on representative use cases. Software curation is a digital sustainability research interest at MIT Libraries.

The Libraries will support the Fellow in identifying collaborators in the digital curation community and in the Departments, Labs, and Centers at MIT, such as the Composite Information Systems Laboratory (CISL), the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and the MIT Media Lab.

Learn more about the Software Curation Postdoctoral Fellowship. To apply, complete CLIR’s online application.

CLIR is an independent nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning.