Data Specialist

Salary: intend to hire at a minimum of $74,000

Created: August 12, 2025

The University Libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill seeks a Data Specialist to join our Digital Research Services team.

Reporting to the Data Analysis Librarian, the Data Specialist at the UNC-Chapel Hill University Libraries will provide artificial intelligence (AI) and data support for a project funded by the Mellon Foundation called On the Books: AI-Assisted Archives. Previous phases of this project created textual datasets of Jim Crow-era session laws from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia and used machine learning to identify likely Jim Crow laws.

The next phase of the project will expand this work to include the state of Texas and will endeavor to identify both Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws. Additionally, the project will investigate broadly the potential use of various applications of artificial intelligence for archival research. Examples include creating text corpora from historical legal documents, generating descriptions of photograph collections, and performing handwritten-character recognition (HCR) on archival documents.

The Data Specialist will be a member of the Digital Research Services department at the University Libraries as well as a member of the On the Books project team. The On the Books project team will use code and AI tools to create corpora and metadata and use machine learning to identify Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws. The Data Specialist will collaborate with scholars and special collections team members to ensure the work is applied appropriately for legal and historical contexts.

The project team is committed to mentorship and maintaining a growth mindset. This is an excellent, time-limited opportunity for someone to develop their skills in coding and AI.

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Published: Wednesday, August 13, 2025 17:17 UTC

Last updated: Wednesday, August 13, 2025 17:17 UTC