Rachel Deblinger (PhD 2014)

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Congratulations to Rachel Deblinger (PhD 2014) who just accepted the position of Director, Digital Scholarship in the University Library at UC Santa Cruz, directing the outreach, services and space associated with the recently opened Digital Scholarship Commons in McHenry Library.

In her position as Director, Rachel will work to build and sustain an intellectual community and to make the best use of the new infrastructure and services represented by the Commons. She will have primary responsibility for day-to-day operations of the center and conduct outreach with faculty, students, and the broader Digital Scholarship community to support the growing interest in digital work on campus and maintain a broad and bold vision for integrating technology into the research, teaching, and learning of UC Santa Cruz.

“I’m very excited to be taking on the position of Director of the Digital Scholarship Commons at the UC Santa Cruz University Library,” Rachel shared. “I started working at UCSC nearly 2 years ago as the library’s first-ever Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow and jumped right into 1) building a community around Digital Humanities with a group of faculty already engaged in developing digital projects and 2) articulating a vision for a new space within the library that would offer infrastructure and support for digital research, teaching, and learning.”

“Not only will I continue to lead the effort to develop and support digital scholarship on campus, but I will be part of the Center for Jewish Studies and a lecturer in the History Department starting this Fall. I feel incredibly lucky to develop a career that allows me to exist in this hybrid space between librarian and historian and I don’t feel like I have to choose between the two. In fact, in most contexts – conferences, campus presentations, and one-on-one conversations included – these dual identities both serve me well and I now have the opportunity to develop a voice as a scholar that integrates both of these perspectives. I certainly couldn’t have anticipated this career path when I first started at UCLA, but my experience there set me up well for this kind of position and I’m excited to see how this work continues to evolve.”