Digital Preservation Coalition

Vacancy at the Bodleian Libraries: DAMS Software Engineer

DAMS Software Engineer
Position Type: Full Time, Fixed term (21 months)
Closing Date:  1200, Friday 15th March 2013
Salary: £29,541 – £36,298
Location: Osney Mead, Oxford

Bodleian Digital Library Systems & Services is seeking a DAMS Software Engineer to work on the prestigious Mellon-funded digital humanities research project ‘Cultures of Knowledge: Networking the Republic of Letters’ (http://cofk.history.ox.ac.uk).

You will be a member of the DAMS Development Team within Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services (BDLSS) and work with the DAMS System Architect to develop the DAMS architecture. However, you will work exclusively on the prestigious Mellon-funded digital humanities research project ‘Cultures of Knowledge: Networking the Republic of Letters’ (http://cofk.history.ox.ac.uk), specifically on  tasks related to the ongoing development and enhancement of its flagship union catalogue of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century correspondence, ‘Early Modern Letters Online’ (EMLO) (http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk). You will build on all existing technical aspects of this fledgling collection including software development, documentation, and security.

Now in an intensive second phase of development, EMLO is a freely accessible inventory of correspondence to which individuals and institutions can contribute epistolary metadata, texts and images of individual letters, small calendars of individual corpora, and extensive catalogues of institutional holdings. It consists of a free-standing data collection application based around Open Office; a sophisticated, web-based editorial environment implemented in PHP; and a search and discovery interface implemented in Python/Pylons. Records are available for harvesting via OAI-PMH and OAI-ORE standards in order to maximise reuse in the wider community.

Working closely with other members of a vibrant team (which include academics, postdocs, editors, a visualization specialist, a front-end dev/designer, and a project manager), the post-holder will take primary responsibility for implementing enhancements to the data model and adding exciting new features to the collection tool, the editorial environment, and the discovery interface designed to transform EMLO from a finding aid into a genuine tool of research and analysis. They will also be responsible for packaging code, and developing supporting documentation, for release via open source repositories. This is an exciting opportunity to join a fast-moving, well-resourced digital humanities project at a pivotal stage of its development, and to participate in the creation of a resource that has the potential to become indispensable to the field of early modern studies.  

For more details see: http://bdlssblog.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/archives/454