Assistant Director Information Technology

Description

The Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP) is looking for an Assistant Director Information Technology to help set and execute ReCAP's product strategy, IT infrastructure policies and the overall product and technical roadmaps, including the development of ReCAP's cloud and digital preservation platforms. As part of their daily responsibilities, they inform and facilitate software selection, development, and licensing, maintain relationships with ReCAP partners, and engage in collaborative projects in support of ReCAP's strategic priorities. The Assistant Director also works on strategic collaborations with peer institutions and ReCAP partners and is expected to maintain a professional presence by attending and presenting ReCAP's work at key conferences and other professional events.

Responsibilities

IT Management

* Manages local and outsourced IT services and ensures that strategic ReCAP IT services (SCSB Middleware, IMS, etc) work cohesively to provide a unified set of services.
* Manages vended and campus services and identifies opportunities for continuous improvement to provide more robust services
* Assists the Executive Director in making strategic product decisions and setting priorities accordingly.
* Ensures the system is available and operational among the partners on a day-to-day basis.
* Collaborates with stakeholders to translate business needs into systems requirements and scoping, including with the Product Steering Committee to establish product roadmap and milestones, the Technical Project Committee, and vendor(s) to develop technical roadmap and validate architecture and solution design.
* Ensures adherence to best practices in overall design, upgrades and versioning.
* Analyzes and flags security, compatibility or dependency issues, and larger strategic business decisions.
* Ensures that project stakeholders are informed promptly of issues or adjustments as they arise; provides tactical guidance on ways to mitigate issues.
* Prepares both written updates and oral presentations.

ReCAP Partner Library Engagement

* This position represents ReCAP IT at the administrative level, working closely with colleagues in ReCAP's partner libraries, the IT Directors at the partner libraries, and Princeton University who serves as ReCAP's administrative host.

Additional Duties

* Strategic and External Engagement: Maintains awareness of trends in academic library computing by engaging with partner organizations on collaborative initiatives and taking opportunities to share information.
* Campus Community Engagement: Represents ReCAP on relevant, operational IT-related committees and working groups and leads ReCAP's role in collaborations with other departmental IT groups, such as that of the OIT and the Princeton University Library IT Department. Works with OIT's Architecture and Security Review group (ASR) on the procurement of new software.
* Professional Engagement: Attends relevant conferences, training, and other events to ensure that their skills and knowledge of trends and best practices in the academic and library IT profession are up to date, and that Princeton is adequately represented in the professional arena.

Qualifications

Required:

* Bachelor's degree or equivalent
* At least 7 years relevant work experience
* Demonstrated experience in successfully managing technology staff, teams, and projects, including management and supervisory experience.
* The ability to develop creative solutions, meet deadlines, and a demonstrated record of and achievement in the academic library profession or a related profession.
* Maintains an active professional presence in the IT community through presenting on relevant work, participating in professional organizations, attending and hosting meetings and conferences.
* Outstanding interpersonal, analytical, and problem-solving skills, including excellent communication skills with a diverse set of colleagues who possess different skills and areas of expertise.

Technical skills and experience:

* Senior Java developer experienced in providing consulting and advisory services for complex enterprise systems.
* Adept in Agile software development practices, test-driven development, and workflows using tools like GitHub and JIRA.
* Demonstrated background in conducting thorough system reviews, including code review in an Agile environment and architecture refactoring initiatives.
* Effective and demonstrated strategic thinker up to date on trends and industry best practices.
* Proven ability to assess and analyze complex systems.
* Experience working on or contributing to open source software projects.
* Knowledge of Apache Solr, Amazon Web Services (AWS), relational databases, ActiveMQ, REST, and microservice design/architecture required.
* Knowledge and experience with library technologies, such as ILS, standard protocols and APIs would be highly beneficial.

Preferred:

* Prior experience as a product owner and developing product roadmaps.
* Demonstrated knowledge of current trends and issues in the application of technology to libraries and higher education, especially in areas related to digital preservation, repositories, and digital libraries.

About ReCAP
The Research Collections and Preservation Consortium (ReCAP) was created in 2000 to support its members' goals of preserving their library and archival collections, and making them available to researchers. The ReCAP facility consists of a preservation repository and resource sharing services, and is located on Princeton University's Forrestal Campus. ReCAP is jointly owned and operated by Columbia University, Harvard University, The New York Public Library and Princeton University. More than sixteen million items are currently in ReCAP's care and they are used to fulfill approximately 250,000 requests for materials each year, from its partners and from libraries around the world. The ReCAP members are engaged in a major shared collections initiative that has identified millions of items at ReCAP that will be kept in perpetuity and shared seamlessly among ReCAP members, and allows the partners to cooperate on extensive collection and preservation efforts for the printed record.