Research Officer posts (Ref 06/504)
UKOLN, University of Bath

Further Details and Person Specification

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Job Description - JISC Repositories Support Project and JISC Shared Infrastructure Services
Job Description - Research Officer: JISC Repositories Support Project
Person Specification
About UKOLN

UKOLN has vacancies for:

Research Officer: Repository Support Project
Research Officer: Repository Support Project (0.5FTE) and Shared Infrastructure Services Programme (0.5FTE)

UKOLN is a centre of expertise in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information, education and cultural heritage communities by:

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath directed by Dr Liz Lyon and currently has a staff of twenty-nine. UKOLN is funded by the Council for Museums, Libraries & Archives (MLA); the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the funding bodies for higher and further education in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland; as well as by project funding from the JISC, EPSRC and the European Community. UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based. More details on UKOLN activities can be found on its website: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/

UKOLN aims to inform practice and influence policy in the areas of: digital libraries, metadata and resource discovery, distributed library and information systems, bibliographic management, and web technologies. It provides network information services, including the Ariadne magazine, and runs workshops and conferences.

2. Repositories Support Project

As part of its Repositories and Preservation Programme, JISC has recently made substantial funds available to establish a support infrastructure to assist all higher education institutions (HEIs) in England and Wales to establish their own institutional digital repositories. The Repository Support Project (RSP) is a 2.5 year project to provide institutions with the practical advice, guidance and expertise that they require in order to create, manage and develop their own digital institutional repositories. RSP staff at UKOLN will work closely with external partners in the RSP project. The project is led by SHERPA, University of Nottingham, with core partners, the University of Wales Aberystwyth, and UKOLN. Other funded partners are the University of Southampton and the Digital Curation Centre. All partners represent key centres of expertise regarding repositories, and the project will build on their previous national and international activity across the repositories landscape. The project will run from 1st October 2006 until 31 March 2009.

UKOLN has funding for two RSP research officers, with .5 FTE already allocated to Maureen Pennock to represent the Digital Curation Centre on the project. The RSP staff will work closely with the JISC Repository Research Team as well as with other Digital Curation Centre staff.

The target audience for the RSP will be HEIs, in particular researchers, lecturing staff, repository managers, technical support staff and senior management. The RSP research officers at UKOLN, in collaboration with RSP partners, will develop a databank of expertise, know-how and best practice targeted at these audiences. Support materials will concentrate on three broad themes:

RSP staff will have a crucial co-ordinating role, collating, interpreting, re-working and generally disseminating good practice in a style and format that makes it accessible to the target audiences. RSP staff will provide guidance in a number of forms:

RSP staff will assist in organisation of regional and national events on aspects of repository development and use. Outreach activities planned include regional seminars focussed on the needs of particular stakeholders and an annual summer school.

UKOLN has responsibility for leading the Technical Support and Repository Management Support work packages.

Technical Support Work Package: Whilst detailed technical advice on installation and configuration of repository software will be offered by other RSP partners, UKOLN will take responsibility for addressing a variety of technical issues such integration within individual institutions, exposing content to Google and other services, metadata formats, managing different resource formats (images, data, learning materials), persistent identifiers.

Repository Management Support Work Package: Support will be provided to enable repository managers to establish good practice and to define appropriate policies. Other issues will be addressed such as repository certification, digital rights management, establishing workflows. RSP will establish an informal network of repository experts, including representatives from existing JISC funded services, other national and international services, as well as a range of research projects and programmes. The network will encourage information exchange to identify the availability of existing resources. UKOLN will collaborate with AHDS, JORUM, CETIS, JISC Legal, JISC funded projects, DAREnet, ARROW.

3. Shared Infrastructure Services Programme Support

The recent JISC Circular 4/06: Capital Programme call includes funding for four projects within a Shared Infrastructure Services strand. These projects are intended to progress JISC's strategic aim to develop a common, integrated information and communications environment.. As part of the coordination of the programme activity the JISC has agreed to fund a .5 FTE Programme Support post for Shared Infrastructure Services to be based at UKOLN. The support post-holder will work closely with the JISC Shared Infrastructure Services Programme Manager, who will have overall management responsibility for this strand of the Capital Programme.

The intention is for four new projects to be funded under this strand:

  1. pilot implementation of a licence registry
  2. pilot implementation of a name and factual authority file service
  3. scoping project to assess requirements for and the potential of a terminology registry
  4. scoping project to develop a technical architecture for digital policy management

In addition JISC intends to develop an Information Environment (IE) Testbed that will help integrate Shared Infrastructure Services with other components of the JISC Information Environment.

The programme support post will work across the funded projects, the JISC IE Testbed, and other services emerging within the JISC Information Environment. funded projects and co-ordinate infrastructure work between all relevant projects within the wider repositories programme.

The post-holder will work as part of the Repository Research Team and with other staff at UKOLN who provide strategic support to the JISC Information Environment.

The post-holder will be responsible for reviewing and progressing the development of standards, specifications, protocols and frameworks to support the programme. An important part of the role is to synthesise the relevant outputs from the programme in ways that disseminate lessons to the broader community, across UK further and higher education and beyond.

The range of issues that the work will involve includes the following:

Contributing to organisation of programme level events.

4. Attributes and skills

The post-holders will require good communications skills, interest and awareness in technical and interoperability issues, and experience across education communities. The post-holder should be able to demonstrate the following skills and attributes:

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Page last revised on: 20 December 2006

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