Applications Developer, HathiTrust Government Documents Registry

Description

 HathiTrust, a collaboration of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future, is seeking an application developer to design, implement, and populate a Registry of metadata describing and identifying the comprehensive corpus of U.S. federal government documents.

Government documents offer an interesting metadata challenge, with authoring entities (e.g., committees and agencies) changing names, merging/splitting, and generally complicating the publication history of monographs, series and serials. The successful candidate will work to understand and model these relationships, working closely with the HathiTrust government documents Registry Analyst and consulting/collaborating with developers, subject experts, and others in the HathiTrust and/or broader library community as needed.

The Registry will be used as a resource for an initiative to expand and enhance access to US federal government documents. Development work for this project is being managed in the Library Systems Office (LSO), a part of the Library Information Technology division (LIT) of the University of Michigan Library.

The University of Michigan, a leader in undergraduate and graduate education and one of the world's premier research universities, has prominent faculty, rigorous academic programs, and a diverse cultural and social environment. By advancing new modes of scholarly communication, engaging users in innovative and relevant ways, and developing collections and services that directly support the teaching, learning, and research mission of the University, the University of Michigan Library is leading the re-imagining of the research library in the digital era.

This is a two year term-limited appointment with the possibility of extension.

Responsibilities
Reporting to the Head of Library Systems, the Registry Developer will collaborate with the Registry Analyst to determine appropriate technologies to model, store, and query government documents metadata in order to satisfy functional specifications for the Registry. The developer will be expected to use/adapt existing software and tools (with a preference for open source software) where possible, and do original development of specialized components where appropriate tools/software cannot be identified. Major areas of effort will include:

• Developing and/or refining procedures to identify relationships between the government documents described by different metadata records created under different cataloging rules. (e.g., duplication, hierarchical parent/child or sibling relationships, etc.)
• Developing procedures to identify gaps in the metadata in the Registry. We need tools and processes to help us understand what we don't yet have.
• Identifying appropriate platform(s) and software to house the repository of bibliographic metadata that will form the core of the Registry, building structure(s)/schema(s), ingest processes, etc.
• Developing appropriate user interfaces and/or APIs to support user interaction with the Registry. Supported functions will include discovery, reporting, export of selected metadata, etc.
• Developing Registry management tools that enable ingest, editing, merging, etc. of metadata records as needed over time.

For more information, please see the UM Job Detail page for this position.