Digital Library Software Engineer

Description

Come join the fun at Stanford University Libraries. We offer great co-workers, Silicon Valley competitive pay, palm trees, and interesting problems to solve.

  Job ID
  52081
Job Location
  University Libraries
Job Category
  Library
Salary
  4P3
Date Posted
  Apr 5, 2013


Revs Infrastructure Developer, Stanford University Libraries

Classification – System Software Developer
Position: Double posted at the 4P3 and 4P4 levels

Job Objective:

Stanford University Libraries (SUL) is seeking a talented software engineer to support the digitization, collection delivery and collaboration components of the Revs Program at Stanford. This is a two-year, grant-funded position.

This position is part of the Revs Program at Stanford (http://revs.stanford.edu). This program is dedicated to developing an understanding of the impact of the automobile on society, culture and technology. The Revs Program at Stanford was founded to inspire a new trans-disciplinary field connecting the past, present and future of the automobile. The Revs Program fosters an intellectual community bridging the humanities and fine arts, social sciences, design, science and engineering, and the professions. As a part of that effort, SUL will support the dissemination of scholarly research on the automobile; provide digital access to a collection of over two million items relating to automotive history, racing and technology; and, develop a system and service to develop and sustain an online automotive community. Members of the team will play a role in building the world’s leading center on the study of the impact of the automobile on the 20th and 21st century.

The Repository Developer will primarily develop digital library software to enable management, preservation, and online discovery of Revs materials. This will involve deployment of a new repository and web application using the Hydra technology stack (http://projecthydra.org). The Repository Developer will be a core contributor to the open source Hydra project in the process of building the Revs digital repository.

The Repository Developer will be a member of a core team dedicated to the successful completion of this project, and will work closely with the project manager, Revs web developer, the information architect, digital library infrastructure developers, the user experience designer and other developers involved in digital library initiatives. This particular project is highly collaborative, and will involve interactions with developers, scholars and staff across Stanford and from other institutions. As a member of SULAIR’s digital library application development team, the Repository Developer will contribute to the overall development of the Stanford Library’s web and digital library infrastructure, and help plan, specify, and build the technologies needed to support the University’s goal of ubiquitous access to scholarly information.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Design and deploy a world class digital access system for the Revs collection.

• Leverage and further develop SULAIR’s existing work on hydra (http://projecthydra.org/) and Blacklight (http://projectblacklight.org) to serve as a full text, image and media (audio/video) delivery environment.

• Provide analysis and software engineering support for implementing and leveraging the open source Fedora framework, leveraging both XML and RDF-based metadata.

• Enable cross-linking of Revs materials through persistent & well-structured methods, allowing researchers to build associative graphs of related materials in a rigorous and machine-actionable manner.
• Leverage and further develop existing infrastructure to create a text, image & media file processing pipeline for digital Revs content; as materials are digitized by Revs and its agents, this infrastructure will ensure the orderly management of the files and their associated metadata; the processing of these files for activities such as optical character recognition (OCR), and the transfer of a copy of these files to SULAIR for long-term preservation and accessioning into Stanford’s digital library.
• Leverage and further develop existing infrastructure to preserve Revs content in the Stanford Digital Repository.

Required Qualifications and Demonstrated Experience:

• Expertise in Ruby and Ruby on Rails, both for application development and in engineering an enhanced framework, including plug-ins, engines and gems, for developing library and repository applications.
• Demonstrated ability to develop new programming skills quickly, and to grasp unfamiliar architectures and application designs quickly.
• Demonstrated ability to write solid, simple, elegant code both independently and in a team-programming environment and within schedule limitations.
• Demonstrated expertise with XML and related tools and technologies (e.g., XML schema, schema management and databases, XSLT, X-forms).
• Experience with relational database design and management. Experience implementing database applications for SQL Server, Oracle, or MySQL.
• Demonstrated ability to work independently on a project from specification to launch; communicate effectively, orally and in writing; and work with all levels of staff, vendors, and consultants.
• Demonstrated proficiency applying best practices to technical projects, especially test-first development and automated testing. Also must make effective use of team collaboration tools, build management, and version control systems.
• Quick and self-bootstrapping learner. Particularly adept at quickly learning new scripting and programming languages.
• Four-year college degree or equivalent with five to seven years demonstrated experience required.
• At the 4P4 level, more than seven relevant experience plus demonstrated success in software engineering for a digital asset management / digital repository system required.


Desired Knowledge and Skills:

• Advanced degree desired
• Demonstrated success participating in community-based open source projects, specifically those relevant to the Stanford Libraries’ Digital Library architecture, such as Fedora, Blacklight, Solr or Hydra.
• Demonstrated success participating in and contributing to open source software development projects.
• Demonstrated experience with library applications and technology, including experience participating in relevant library open source efforts.
• In-depth knowledge of library policies and practice, metadata standards and the scholarly communication framework
• Familiarity with the process of digitizing images, text, audio and video in cultural heritage institutions.
• Familiarity with RDF, semantic web, and linked data technologies and practices
• Familiarity with XML schemas used to describe digitized cultural heritage materials, such as TEI, MODS, METS, and EAD.
• Prior, successful experience working as a professional in an academic and/or library environment.
• Interest and enthusiasm in the social, technical and economic history of the automobile.