BL Labs Technical Lead

Description

To provide technical leadership, guidance, and support for the Andrew W. Mellon-funded BL Labs project in order to advance digital scholarship, deepen the Library’s understanding of the needs of scholars, and to open up access to and use of the Library’s digital content and services

To work in a cross-directorate team assembling, designing, implementing, developing and integrating tools to support researchers working with large volumes of digital content.

To significantly advance the technical ability of the Library to support digital scholarship.

Key areas of responsibility

• Lead sprints that establish tools, services, and prepare content for researchers to conduct digital scholarship experiments and short projects.
• Provide technical expertise on a wide range of tools, technologies, and implementation approaches required to support digital scholarship involving large volumes of digital content.
• Determine resource allocations; create suitable phasing and implementation plans.
• Execute plans and coordinate additional resources for technical projects.
• Ensure proposed technical solutions are discussed and agreed in a timely manner with appropriate internal and external stakeholders.
• Evaluate ways in which pilot applications can be scaled to production level operations and services.
• Lead hackathons that bring together researchers and developers to create tools to advance digital scholarship.
• To manage an open source repository of digital scholarship tools and foster a technical and researcher community based on them.

Main tasks

• Apply deep technical expertise to the gathering of requirements, design, implementation, testing and evaluation of software systems and infrastructure components to meet project needs.
• Assist in gathering and assessing requirements from stakeholders and users.
• Communicate technical topics both orally and in writing, to colleagues, and external partners by preparing and presenting reports, preparing, organising, and delivering presentations, and taking a leading role in meetings and discussions.
• Keep absolutely up to date with developments in digital scholarship technology and practice, forming relationships with key individuals and organisations.
• Commit to team working, achieving results and cross-boundary working.
• Expected to demonstrate a willingness to take on a range of tasks and to develop new skills, as appropriate, in own or other departments/directorates to support the delivery of the Library's services as required by line management.

Minimum requirements (essential)

• Proven ability to work in an agile fashion with problem owners to deliver solutions
• Excellent understanding of software development using Java and scripting languages such as Python, Perl or Bash
• Deep knowledge of technologies related to digital scholarship such as OCR, data analysis, data visualisation, computational linguistics, corpus linguistics, distributed computing architectures, Hadoop, Lucene, TEI, EAD.
• Proven ability to learn quickly and implement unfamiliar technologies
• Excellent analytical and creative problem solving skills
• Experience with managing and delivering projects involving complex and innovative technology
• Experience with managing and implementing changes, focus on delivering results.
• Be able to communicate clearly and effectively in various ways, including reports, presentations and taking a leading role in meetings and discussions
• A degree in Computing Science or equivalent experience
• Knowledge and experience of agile approaches to system development
• Experience working with or developing tools for large content and data volumes
• Clear experience of XML, web services, SOA, REST
• Knowledge and experience of configuration management, testing, and change control procedures

Additional requirements (desirable)

• A higher level qualification in Computing Science, Information/Library Science
• Experience of evaluating and using open-source software
• Deep technical understanding of information systems
• Experience in contributing to open source development projects
• Understanding of the key requirements related to digital scholarship
• Good understanding of the overall content and make-up of the Library’s collections
• Experience of demonstrator and research projects in digital scholarship
• Knowledge of metadata
• Experience of working in a research library, archive, or research data centre
• Experience working with a range of computing platforms and storage environments
• Knowledge or experience of structured methodologies (e.g., RUP, PRINCE2, SSADM, change control procedures)

Additional information

This post is for a fixed-term of 18 months.