"A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities."

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.

Person Specification

1. The post

This position provides an excellent opportunity to enhance valuable skills in an interesting environment at the leading edge of digital information developments. The post holder will work within the Research and Development Team at UKOLN and contribute to IMPACT (Improving Access to Text), an important European project that is setting up a distributed centre of competence for the large-scale digitisation of historical texts. The project is working with some of Europe's leading digitisation centres to help resolve some key challenges that relate to the digitisation of historical texts, including the enhancement of the results of OCR. The project consortium is made up of national library-based digitisation programmes as well as commercial companies and research centres specialising in text digitisation and language technologies. More information on the project and its aims can be found at http://www.impact-project.eu/

2. Attributes and skills

You will be happy working as part of a distributed team, be able to work independently and prioritise tasks and be confident in dealing with a range of external contacts, specifically the IMPACT project office at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands), the sub-project leaders at the British Library, and other consortium members. The post holder will play a key role in the delivery of two work packages within IMPACT's capacity building sub-project. You will, therefore, have an enthusiasm for promoting best practice in digital collection management, as well as a desire to develop your own knowledge of digitisation processes and workflows.

The following attributes and skills will be assessed at application and interview stages of the recruitment process.

Criteria	Essential	Desirable	Assessed by
Qualifications:			A/F	I/T	R
Educated to degree level	x		x
Experience/Knowledge
Knowledge of digitisation workflows, technologies and concepts	x		x	x
Knowledge of the wider contexts of large-scale text digitisation initiatives	x		x	x
Knowledge of digital library standards relevant to digitisation, e.g., image formats, metadata	x		x	x
Knowledge of community needs for digitisation training and information		x	x	x
Practical digitisation experience in the MLA (museums, libraries, archives) sector		x	x
Experience of working in Higher Education		x	x
Skills
Good organisational skills	x		x	x
Good inter-personal skills and a proven ability to work in (distributed) teams	x		x	x
Event organisation skills		x	x	x
Attributes
Ability to write and present ideas well	x		x	x
Ability to work independently and to prioritise, organise, analyse and solve problems effectively	x		x	x
Confidence in dealing with external contacts	x		x	x
Code: A/F – Application form, I/T – Interview/Test, R - References

3. Further details

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 Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (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.

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.