The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University Libraries will hire a full-time software engineer to provide the Libraries with support for digital preservation and strengthen their partnership and collaboration.

Since 2018, the University Libraries and NCAR have collaborated to provide NCAR scientists and other staff with library access and research support. This includes subscriptions to scientific journals and databases to support its research into atmospheric and related Earth system science and their mission, “Science with, and for, Society.” In return, NCAR provided the Libraries with software engineering support, which often took the form of consulting from various staff from the Computational and Information Systems Lab (CISL).

“Our relationship with the University Libraries has been extremely valuable to the scientists, research engineers and post docs at NCAR,” said Jennifer Phillips, director of the NCAR library. “Gaining access to their scientific journals and databases has expanded our ability to do rigorous and cutting-edge research. These subscriptions can be extremely expensive and are often only available to large academic libraries. We would not have broad access to the most up-to-date scientific literature, which is critical to our research, without the Libraries.”

This position will support the Libraries in the development, reliability and security of services such as Colorado GeoLibrary and CU Scholar. 

“We are excited to evolve and advance our collaboration with NCAR,” said Jamie Wittenberg, assistant dean of Research and Innovation Strategies for the University Libraries. “This new position is the culmination of a years-long strategic partnership between NCAR and the Libraries.”

This isn’t the only benefit the partnership has garnered. In late 2022, Matthew Mayernik, deputy director of the NCAR Library and project scientist in the field of data curation, and Andrew Johnson, research data librarian at the University Libraries, received a collaborative grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a project designed to focus on making scientific research more open and transparent.

“I am pleased to see our partnership with NCAR strengthen over the last few years,” said Robert H. McDonald, dean of the University Libraries and senior vice provost of Online Education. “It embodies our values of collaborative alliances that support research and provide access to research data and new knowledge creation.