Digital Preservation Librarian

Description

The University of Toronto Libraries (UTL) system is the largest academic library in Canada and is ranked third among peer institutions in North America, behind just Harvard and Yale. The system consists of 44 libraries located on three university campuses: St. George, Mississauga, and Scarborough. This array of college libraries, special collections, and specialized libraries and information centres supports the teaching and research requirements of 215 graduate programs, over 60 professional programs, and more than 700 undergraduate degree programs. More than 150,000 new print volumes are acquired each year. The Libraries data centre houses more than 200 servers with a storage capacity of 1.5 petabytes.


About Scholars Portal:

Scholars Portal, a department within the University of Toronto Library, is the digital service arm of the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), managing infrastructure and services that support Ontario’s 21 university libraries. The Scholars Portal team of 24 librarians, developers, and systems staff support services in four broad areas: research & member services; data and geospatial services; digital collections; and digital preservation services.

The Opportunity:

The University of Toronto Library invites applications for a Digital Preservation Librarian. This individual will work as a member of the Scholars Portal Team. Scholars Portal is mandated to manage and preserve the shared collections of OCUL libraries. To support that mandate, Scholars Portal has established a digital preservation program, including policies, procedures and systems, to ensure for the long-term preservation of the extensive electronic journal collections of OCUL. The digital preservation program of Scholars Portal has been audited and certified as a Trusted Digital Repository (TDR) using TRAC criteria based on the OAIS Reference Model.

The Scholars Portal Digital Preservation Librarian is responsible for ongoing maintenance and review of the policies and practices of the SP TDR, ensuring these are updated to reflect changes in processing of our journal collections. S/he is also responsible for ongoing research into new tools and software to support our preservation programs and to extend the TDR to encompass other digital formats managed by Scholars Portal, including numeric and geospatial data and electronic books. Specific projects include a review of Archivematica as a processing tool for the formation of standard archival information packages; development of a digital asset management system for managing archival packages; exploration of options for web archiving for Scholars Portal and OCUL; and development of hosted preservation services for OCUL member libraries looking for ways to bring their local digital collections under archival management. The Digital Preservation Librarian also acts as an expert resource for OCUL libraries on preservation issues, working with OCUL community groups such as the Digital Curation Community on sharing best practices and identifying new services for OCUL.

The Digital Preservation Librarian requires a broad range of knowledge and skills in digital preservation practice, acquired through course work and hands on practice with managing a variety of digital formats. Knowledge of key auditing standards including OAIS, TRAC, ISO16363, and DataPass as well as implementation standards such as PREMIS, PRONOM, METS, LC BagIt and others is critical for success in this position. Understanding of tools for file identification and normalization , such as FITS, as well as tools for managing digital objects, such as Fedora, would also be useful. Excellent writing and presentation skills would be beneficial in the outreach work required for the position with respect to supporting OCUL libraries in local digital preservation initiatives.