Vacancy Details

Description

Full Time Fixed Term for 7 months

The British Library is home to the nation’s Sound Archive, an extraordinary collection of over 6.5 million recordings of speech, music, wildlife and the environment, from the 1880s to the present day. The vast majority of these recordings are held on physical media - tapes, discs, cassettes - in more than 40 different formats. As these items physically degrade and as the means of playing them disappear from production, the recordings on them must be preserved. Today, that means digitisation; creating and storing stable, digital files, accompanied by rich descriptive metadata.

In 2015, the Library launched its eight-year Save our Sounds programme, an ambitious initiative to help safeguard the national sound collection. To support and to showcase the Save our Sounds programme and the HLF-funded Unlocking our Sound Heritage project, the Library is creating a new space for audio online. This will replace the existing site at sounds.bl.uk, itself a rich source of music, and spoken word across all genres.

As a part of this web development project, the 90,000 sound recordings available through the British Library Sounds must be migrated to this new website. This migration will be a complex process and an audit is required of the preservation and cataloguing status of all recordings on the current website, with a view to ensuring all material is fully preserved and catalogued prior to the new site launch in 2019.

As an Audio Migration Analyst, you will work closely with technical, metadata and web teams to audit the collections available through British Library Sounds, locating master copies of audio, image and document files relating to material available online and assessing their cataloguing status. You will write a summary report on the status of the collections, make a plan and recommendations for their migration to preservation storage and to the new website and lead on the migration process.

With an analytical mind, the successful applicant will have a keen attention to detail and a proven systematic approach to working on complex projects. You will have professional experience working with the technology that supports digital preservation, including XML, and of working with digital files and metadata, at scale. Good communication skills will be required, including the ability to negotiate timescales and priorities and to communicate complex ideas clearly and on time.

In return we offer a competitive salary and a number of excellent benefits.  Our pension scheme is one of the most valuable benefits we offer, as our staff can become members of the Alpha Pension Scheme where the Library contributes 20.9%. Another significant benefit the Library provides is the provision of a flexible working hours scheme which could allow you to work your hours flexibly over the week and to take up to 5 days flexi leave in a 3 month period. This is on top of 25 days holiday from entry and public and privilege holidays.

This is a limited-funded position for 7 months

More about the British Library

As one of the world’s great libraries, our duty is to preserve the nation’s intellectual memory for the future. At the moment we have well over 150 million items, in most known languages, with three million new items added every year. We have manuscripts, maps, newspapers, magazines, prints and drawings, music scores, and patents. We operate the world’s largest document delivery service providing millions of items a year to customers all over the world. What matters to us is that we preserve the national memory and enable knowledge to be created both now and in the future.

Closing date: 5 July 2018

Interview date: 25 July 2018

Disability Confident

We are a Disability Confident employer, and make a commitment to recruit and support disabled people. We guarantee an interview for disabled candidates who meet the minimum (essential) requirements for a vacancy.

In order to apply for this vacancy, you must be able to supply the required answers to the following questions: