Digitization Technician

Description

The Bentley Historical Library seeks to hire a Digitization Technician as part of its deliberate growth in the area of digital curation of archival collections. The Bentley holds large numbers of photographic prints and negatives, manuscripts, maps, architectural drawings, and legacy audio and moving image materials, including reel tapes, audiocassettes, phonograph records, film reels, and U-Matic, Betacam, and VHS cassettes.  Given the difficulty of providing access to these materials and the preservation risks associated with the original physical formats, the library has initiated a systematic digitization program in addition to digitizing materials on-demand in response to requests from researchers, donors, university units, and library staff.   

The digitization technician will report to and work closely with Bentley archivists to prepare materials for digitization, ship and receive items from vendors, perform in-house digitization, conduct quality assurance, create descriptive metadata, and ensure that original media are returned to their proper locations.  The technician will assist with the creation of inventories, prioritization of collections within the digitization queue, and the creation of reports and statistics on the library’s digitization.

NOTE: This is a 50% appointment, 20 hours per week.
Responsibilities*

• Assist in the creation of inventories of materials and assessment of their physical condition.
• Prepare shipments (both regularly-scheduled and on-demand) for digitization vendors, including steps to check out materials from stacks, verify or create archival description and metadata, assign unique identifiers, rehouse materials, create entries in the project tracking database, generate manifests, and pack shipping crates.
• Receive, check-in, and reshelve materials shipped back from vendors.
• Complete automated and manual quality assurance, post-processing functions (such as audio normalization) and additional description of digital surrogates as needed.
• Perform in-house digitization under supervision of archivists.
• Track shipments and project status in a local Filemaker Pro database and spreadsheets.
• Assist in the development and revision of workflows, guidelines and other documentation related to digitization.
• Maintain an orderly and functioning workstation.
• Keep statistics for own production work or projects and write reports. 
• Perform other duties as assigned.