Technical Lead, Digital Collections

Description

The Technical Lead, Digital Collections will manage the day-to-day operation of the Yale Library Digital Collections System. This position will provide operational and technical consulting excellence by partnering with clients to design, develop, implement, support, and provide training for ingest workflows and digital collections technology solutions. This position will oversee, monitor, and administer the functional and technical components of these tools, including digital collections specific platforms.

The position will require a successful candidate to create mutually beneficial relationships to provide consultative support for the respective user communities. The successful candidate will be technically adept, hands‐on, a self‐starter, passionate about technology, communicative, and collaborative. The position will work closely with the associated product owners and the library's senior leaders with strategic responsibility for these service domains. The Technical Lead is a member of the Yale University Library IT department, reporting to the Director of Client Services and IT Operations.

The Technical Lead will:

Manage ingest processes and queues, ensuring that collection content and associated metadata meet repository requirements.

Serve as the primary point of contact for technical support of current and future digital collections.

Provide ownership for the resolution of system failures and change management activities.

Provide project management support for digital ingest workflow process harmonization throughout the YUL and for digital collections migrations.

Manage and support digitization workflow platform, Goobi.

Manage and support legacy digital collections systems until their deprecation.

Work in collaboration with collection owners, digitization units, and Digital Preservation group to ensure that content is accessible and preserved.

Provide day-to-day and long-range administrative oversight of the YUL digital repository and associated systems.

Provide resource planning and infrastructure monitoring to optimize system performance for steady-state and bulk ingest activities.

Respond to client issues, including account handling, client communications, and answering queries from client and other in-house departments.

Coordinate staff service roles and responsibilities as digitization and repository services evolve.

Collaborate with the LIT Software Engineering and DevOps teams, as well as Yale central ITS, to ensure that appropriate stability, security, backup and software support are available for existing systems.

Develop and maintain technical and workflow documentation related to the digital repository.

Keep up to date on technology trends related to digitization, object repositories and metadata, digital archiving, and digital preservation.

Required Education and Experience

Bachelor's Degree in a relevant technical field and a minimum of four years of related technical experience or an equivalent combination of education and experience.

Required Skill/Ability 1:

Excellent customer service skills, flexibility, and a strong commitment to innovation, creativity, and excellence. Proven ability to provide customer satisfaction, needs, and confidence in services.

Required Skill/Ability 2:

Demonstrated business systems analysis and project management skills. Ability working to assess client requirements, matching technology to business needs.

Required Skill/Ability 3:

Demonstrated experience working collaboratively and independently with various groups within a complex organization and rapidly changing team environment.

Required Skill/Ability 4:

Demonstrated ability in developing, implementing, and supporting production ingest workflows for digital repositories.

Required Skill/Ability 5:

Strong analytical, organizational, and facilitation skills. Excellent oral and written communication skills.

Preferred Education, Experience and Skills:

Hands-on experience working with cloud platforms including AWS. Knowledge of applications in the digital repository and preservation space (e.g., Goobi, Preservica). Knowledge of Unicode, XML, and other standards for library collection data’s electronic representations such as METS, MODS, MARC, EAD, etc. Familiarity crafting and executing SQL queries.