JISC Repositories Research Team, UKOLN Research Officer (Ref 07H215A) Person Specification

Further details

UKOLN has a vacancy for a Research Officer in the JISC Repository Support Team (1 FTE)

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

• Influencing policy and informing practice
• Promoting community-building and consensus-making by actively raising awareness
• Advancing knowledge through research and development
• Building innovative systems and services based on Web technologies
• Acting as an agent for knowledge transfer

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.

JISC Repositories Research Team

As part of the Digital Repositories Programme, JISC have established the Repositories Research Team. The remit for the work of the research team is quite wide and includes helping projects find and exploit synergies across the programme and beyond, gathering scenarios and use cases from projects, liaising with other national and international repositories activities, including liaison with the e-Framework, synthesizing project and programme outcomes, and engaging with interoperability standards activity and repository architectures.

The Repositories Research Team is a collaboration between UKOLN and JISC CETIS. UKOLN have worked previously on repositories in a number of contexts including ePrints UK, the Open Archives Forum and Delos, and JISC CETIS, the JISC Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards, has considerable experience in supporting the development of digital repositories for e-learning.

The post holder will work within the Research and Development Team at UKOLN liaising with other JISC projects based at UKOLN, including eBank, the Repositories Support Project and the Digital Curation Centre.

Attributes and skills

The post-holder will require good communications skills, interest and awareness in digital repository development, and experience across HE communities. The post-holder should be able to demonstrate the following skills and attributes:

• Interest in the development of digital repositories within the education sector; both in the UK and more widely.
• Awareness of information and resource discovery technologies and standards
• Understanding of technical and interoperability issues related to repositories and digital library infrastructure services.
• Awareness of copyright and digital rights management issues
• Good communication skills including the ability to present to a variety of audiences and to produce a range of publications (including research reports, journal articles, briefing papers, wikis and web pages).
• Good interpersonal skills with the ability to support advocacy and advice sessions with academic and support staff within universities at a variety of operational levels
• Ability to work with small groups
• Ability to work independently, prioritise tasks and be confident in dealing with a range of external contacts

Web page content by Shirley Keane of UKOLN
Page last revised on: 04-Jun-2007

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