Digital Manuscripts Program Manager

Description

Stanford University Libraries (SUL) has an ongoing program to become one of the leading digital libraries in the world.  Digital Library Systems and Services (DLSS) support that mission by developing cutting edge, state of the art information systems and services that enable new types of scholarship and research through digitization, management, long-term preservation and access to digital content. The incumbent fills a high profile, high-impact role in enabling and ensuring that Stanford University develops and maintains a leadership role in next generation scholarship.

As the Digital Manuscripts Program Manager, the incumbent defines, leads and coordinates the development and delivery of techncial solutions that support SUL’s collection development and research services in support of manuscript-related studies, including fostering acquisition of new medieval resources and grant opportunities.

S/he also coordinates Stanford’s internationally recognized digital manuscript interoperability & research efforts, coordinates cross-institutional development efforts, including those focused on evolving tools and standards such as IIIF and Shared Canvas, and fosters new resource and grant opportunities.  This includes collaborative grant development, proposal writing, project management and grant reporting for one to three major, related inititiaves at a time. The Digital Manuscripts Program Manager will also be responsible for representing interoperable methods of cutting edge scholarship to faculty, researchers and technologists within the digital library and digital humanities arenas, across the world and will also drive opportunitites for transferring Digital Manuscript program technologies to other humanities domains/efforts

As part of these duties, the incumbent serves as the Product Manager for the “Parker on the Web” Service, driving the product roadmap, working with various constituents to define marketing and service plans, defining and managing customer support requests, and ensuring that the Parker service leverages new and existing digital manuscript technologies as well as preservation management, access and discovery infrastructure services developed by DLSS.

This position also fills a role as a Product & Services Manager in DLSS and is responsible for organizing, managing and ensuring the development and operation of services that support DLSS’s mission to enable new types of scholarship and research through digitization, management, long-term preservation and access to digital content.   In particular, this role serves as the DLSS Accessioning Service Manager and is responsible for defining the programmatic technologies, processes, and user documentation and tools necessary to support content accessioning into SDR by non-DLSS staff, including both SUL staff and third party depositors.

In both of these roles (managing the digital manuscripts program and managing the accessioning function the incumbent requires expertise in digital preservation and information systems analysis.  Primary activities for both functions include in-depth analysis of business requirements, the ability to contribute to, and sometimes drive the definition interoperable standards, the ability to define functional specification of system and workflow components, the ability to lead quality assurance and acceptance testing of implemented systems, and the ability to define and develop system and policy documentation as well as lead user outreach and support.
Technical management of complex and ground-breaking systems and solutions is a key component of both roles and is key to the incumbent's ability to drive strategy and work definition, task and schedule tracking, and service delivery for services that support both Stanford University as well as other institutions.   In both roles the incumbent must demonstrate the ability to work with a broad range of constituent groups with varying levels of technical expertise, from software engineers, information systems architects, through librarians, as well as the international community of medieval scholars.

This role reports to the Manager of the Product and Service Managers team in DLSS; in cases where digital manuscript content is being acquired, s/he will work under the guidance of the head of Special Collections.

Duties
30% Digital Manuscript Program Management. Incumbent has duties related to programmatic success of Stanford University’s Digital Manuscript program.   Responsible for oversight, and key contributor to the definition of, the development and delivery of SUL digital manuscript programs, including Stanford-based digital manuscript interoperability and research efforts and for-fee cross-institutional services such as Parker on the Web.  Responsible for driving the success of these efforts as well as the development of SUL programs and holdings in digital medieval manuscripts, including fostering acquisition of new medieval resources and grant opportunities.  Responsibilities include oversight & management of contractor resources, including management and review of task assignments. 

20% Technical Analysis in support of Digital Manuscript Technologies.  Responsibilities include technical analysis and market research necessary to develop requirements definition & specifications for solutions that meet functionality requirements of the scholarly community for access to and use of digital medieval manuscripts in research and teaching. Responsible for articulating requirements to cross-institutional project teams, developing and specifying user interfaces, as well as conducting metadata analysis and transformations.  The incumbent will serve as the lead technical analyst in specifying technologies to be built and implemented, including creating interoperable metadata schemas for describing diverse digital medieval materials. 

10% Grant Development and Administration.  In consultation with key stakeholders, incumbent leads development of grant proposals, creating the majority of the grant proposal content.  For successful grants, incumbent is responsible for overall tracking and reporting of grant proposal compliance, including operational decisions regarding grant funds expenditure and tracking of funds expenditure against budget.

40% General DLSS Product & Service Management. Participate in the definition and assessment of evolving technologies and processes that support DLSS efforts to delivery digital library projects and initiatives.  In particular, responsbile for oversight of accessioning processes and policies that ensure smooth and efficient coordination of DLSS engineering, project management and digitization labs and for ensuring consistent and transparent communication within DLSS and with DLSS constituents.  Duties include overall prioritization, management of accessioning queues across various intake sources, including DLSS digitization labs, 3rd party content providers, definition & specification of solutions in support of accessioning, coordinating consistency and repeatability of processes.



Qualifications

• An advanced degree, preferably a PhD in a relevant subfield of medieval or early modern studies, with significant experience and background (formal or informal) in descriptive metadata encoding of digital manuscripts.
• 5-7 years related work experience
• In-depth knowledge of both the content and technical architecture of current major digital medieval manuscript projects, including Parker Library on the Web, Roman de la Rose, and e-codices.
• Expertise in XML, and its related transformation and query languages, such as DTD, XSLT,  and XForms,
• Demonstrated experience with the following library descriptive schemas:  Encoded Archival Description (EAD), Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS), Textual Encoding Initiative (TEI).
• Familiarity and experience with prevailing digital library management and discovery environments, such as Fedora, Blacklight, Archivists’ Toolkit, and Orbeon XForms.
• Experience building websites, with specific expertise using the Drupal content management system.
•Prior and ongoing experience working on digital projects as well as active participation in some area of academic medieval studies.
•The ability to blend domain expertise in medieval manuscript studies with technical expertise in prevailing standards and best practices in the development of digital manuscript tools and repositories.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including demonstrated ability to develop and deliver compelling presentations and marketing materials to a broad spectrum of audiences such as academic conferenes, techincal audiences, and institutional leadership of potential technology adopters
• Demonstrated technical project organizational and management skills in complex environments including the ability to create requirements documents and implement project plans and schedules, develop system design documents, and analyze/select software to meet library business requirements.  Proven ability to meet deadlines.
• Proven ability to define and implement service processes in support of evolving technologies and services.
• Demonstrated ability to work collaboratively and successfully in a fast-paced, technology-heavy team-based environment where processes and technologies are in the process of being developed.