Do you want to push forwards operational understanding of how to preserve the nation’s digital knowledge?
Do you have a natural curiosity to investigate problems and understand the deeper cause?
We are looking for someone with good software development experience and an eye for detail, who has a natural curiosity to investigate our digital collections, understand what’s going on, and provide guidance and solutions to stakeholders across the Library.
The British Library's digital collection is vast and varied, with everything from digitised manuscripts and books, to born-digital personal archives, eBooks and eJournals, digital electoral registers, sound content, the UK Web Archive, and much more. In total, the collection comprises many millions of individual digital objects and millions more digital files, amounting to well over a petabyte of data.
One moment you might be analysing a collection as a whole to understand the scope or mitigate a preservation risk; another time you might be investigating aspecific digital file to determine why it doesn’t render. Or you might be developing some new software to support our on-going work, test a hypothesis, or validate a file. You will need to be creative, methodical, tenacious, able to work independently, and with an instinctive drive to research and investigate problems to their root cause. We work with teams across the Library and beyond, both curatorial and technical, so you will need to have good verbal and written communication skills to ensure you effectively communicate findings and guidance.
The successful candidate will join our team of Technical Analysts who contribute to the development, enhancement, and operational deployment of the tools, services and projects we undertake - such as our Minimum Preservation Tool, our work on emulation, or the analytical support we provide to migrating to our new digital repository system. We also work with the broader community to support and enhance digital preservation tools of relevance to our work. Primarily we make use of Python, however we have to work with third party tools in whatever language they use (e.g. Java), so a willingness and ability to quickly learn new skills is helpful.