Do you have a passion for archive collections and making them accessible? Do you have an appreciation of modern archives, their challenges, and opportunities? Are you committed to meeting goals with high-quality outcomes?
Special Collections at the University of Leeds holds outstanding collections, encompassing rare books and archives, the University’s institutional archive, the Stanley and Audrey Burton Art Gallery and the Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery. Born digital and hybrid digital/paper material are an ever-increasing part of our collections. The processing, management and discovery of these collections and their related data are major challenges for the service and are a focus of efforts to effectively showcase our distinctive archives for use in learning, teaching, and research.
Your main responsibility will be in the surveying, processing, and cataloguing of borndigital archive materials. You will work on a wide range of collections to extract metadata, establish and implement archival structures, and create and verify metadata according to agreed standards, working in collaboration with the Digital Archivist to implement these standards across the collections. You will be involved in processing collections from their arrival or capture in Special Collections through to their ingest, and will be responsible for the creation of catalogue records for born digital items as well as rights and permissions metadata necessary to facilitate ingestion and access. You will work closely with colleagues across all aspects of the Special Collections team as well as broader Library teams.
You will have a good understanding of archival principles and the challenges presented by digital archives and be comfortable in analysing and understanding their structure and format. You will be a confident user of IT, willing and able to quickly learn and apply new systems, and have excellent problem-solving skills, able to identify and develop practical solutions. You will be a team-worker, able to collaborate productively, and have excellent communication skills – able to explain often complex policies and procedures to a wide range of stakeholders.
If you're interested and have any questions about the role, please get in touch with the Digital Archivist, Chris Grygiel (c.d.grygiel@leeds.ac.uk).
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