Cambridge University Libraries are about to embark on an exciting five-year Digital Preservation Programme to establish the Cambridge University Libraries Digital Preservation Service.
Based at the main University Library, an exciting opportunity has come up for a Technical Lead on the Programme. This is a new role for the Library that is essential for delivering the digital preservation service and contributing to a wider Digital Transformation Programme, both of which will support the Library's vast and diverse collections of digital materials as well as digital materials held by other libraries and University bodies.
The Digital Preservation Programme is a first for the University Library. It is ground-breaking and transformative, delivering the foundations for the managing digital collections for the future, with ambitious goals to achieve the best user experience and maximise the potential of precious digital collections in a long-term sustainable way.
The digital preservation service will support digital collection materials from when they are acquired or created to when they are accessed, used, and re-used by readers, as well as the stages in between, to ensure that current and future users can access and use these materials of cultural and historic importance and of global significance. The Library's digital collection materials consist of digitised images created from print and physical artefacts, research publications and data, and born-digital archives, amongst others.
Based within the Digital Innovation and Software Development team and working with the Programme's Technical Director, the Technical Lead is a dedicated role to develop the architecture and lead the implementation of systems and tools required to deliver a digital preservation service that meets the needs of collection materials and users within the Libraries and the wider University.
The scope of this work includes a cloud-native and open-source digital repository and digital preservation system to underpin activities that ensure current and ongoing access to digital materials, as well as the implementation of additional tools that provide capabilities for the deposit of digital materials as well as search, discovery, access, use, and re-use.
The Technical Lead will manage the Programme's developers and work as part of the Digital Preservation Programme Team, liaising with heads of departments, operational staff, collections staff, and academics.
The successful candidate will have a wide-ranging technical skillset that includes experience with:
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Cloud-native architecture and development
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Agile development methodology
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IT infrastructure, security, and current standards
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Databases (structured and non-structured), data standards, and data formats, as well as transformation tools
The Libraries are currently offering limited in person services, and as such, our staff are working a mixture of on premises and remotely. It is envisaged that the successful post holder will work largely remotely for the foreseeable future, but the details of this will be discussed at interview.