Job Descrption
About Us
We are a world-class visitor attraction and leading science research centre. We use the Museum's unique collections and our unrivalled expertise to tackle the biggest challenges facing the world today. We care for more than 80 million objects spanning billions of years and welcome more than five million visitors annually and 16 million visits to our website.
Today the Museum is more relevant and influential than ever. By attracting people from a range of backgrounds to work for us, we can continue to look at the world with fresh eyes and find new ways of doing things.
We employ 900 staff in a variety of roles, all united by our vision of a future where people and planet thrive. We need everyone to have the passion and drive to help us with our mission to create advocates for our planet and inspire millions to care about the natural world.
Diversity and inclusion matter to us.
Our vision is of a future where both people and the planet thrive. Diversity is one of our... core values and we strive to build a workplace where everyone feels a sense of belonging. All new staff who join us learn about the importance of diversity and inclusion to the Museum and how to contribute to creating an inclusive environment.
We know we have more to do, but we are committed to ensuring that everyone who works at the Museum feels they can thrive and feel valued and respected.
About the role
Reporting to the Head of Researcher Services and Digital Delivery the Lead Metadata Librarian is the metadata specialist for library collections. Working closely with the Heads of Modern and Special Collections and the Digital Systems Librarian this role manages all activities that enable the discovery of library collections via the creation, extraction, enhancing and quality control of library metadata.
About you
A key function of the role is to provide leadership for LA’s discovery policies and procedures according to national and international standards (including RDA, Resource Description and Access) and related technologies. You will have the ability to transform and manipulate metadata using supporting tools like MarcEdit and OpenRefine to improve the discovery experience for library users. Driving the development of metadata standards internally you will be a key point of contact for expertise in resource discovery, ensuring that high quality metadata is harvested from and exported to external discovery systems is regularly updated and correctly displayed.
This role manages the LA metadata team (three professional librarians, all 0.5FTE), ensuring that workflows and procedures are efficient and effective. You will exploit the describing functions of our Library Management System (Alma) and so maximise on the discoverability of our collections via our discovery layer (Primo) and ensure that the quality of LA metadata, currently in MARC format, is maintained and enhanced. To enable this, you will also provide training, analyse metrics and report on productivity.
The role is required to keep up to date on current and emerging metadata standards, schemas, tools and cataloguing best practice, providing advice and guidance to members of the LA Management Team as well as supporting other LA and Museum staff. As part of the LA and wider Museum strategies the metadata team plays a central role in developing and enhancing how we describe our collections for discovery.
Thriving at the Museum: the way we work
We are proud to work at the Museum and have identified the qualities we all need to embody to reach our shared ambition. This sits alongside the Museum’s values and forms the framework for the way we work.
Find out more here
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