Located in New York City, the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) is a non-profit organization working to develop and maintain essential library services throughout New York City and Westchester County. The METRO membership consists of a diverse group of over 200 libraries, archives, and information organizations ranging from New York’s largest libraries to small community archives. METRO provides professional development and continuing education opportunities for our membership, in addition to digitization, metadata, hosting and support services for digital collections plus the development of custom digital projects.
POSITION OVERVIEW:Reporting to the Assistant Director for Digital Strategy, the Digital Projects and Metadata Librarian manages data, metadata, media imports and exports including transformations and quality assurance across all METRO supported platforms.
The Digital Projects and Metadata Librarian works side by side with METRO’s software development team to incorporate critical Metadata and Linked Data expertise. This person will gather local use cases and help to devise innovative solutions to challenging cataloging and workflow issues, in order to grow and support METRO’s digital repositories
As an active member of the Archipelago Commons Open Source project team, the Librarian will discuss, evaluate and propose improved workflows, existing and new functionality to leverage the platform’s philosophy and to support METRO partner institution’s metadata needs. The work will also include public community engagement, knowledge sharing, and collaboration.
The Digital Projects and Metadata Librarian takes a lead role in developing and applying workflows and procedures for processing metadata and associated digital resources into METRO repositories and performs a variety of administrative tasks related to ingest, migrations and partner communication.
Candidates should be enthusiastic about supporting and expanding access to digital resources from New York GLAM institutions of all sizes and to make learning a constant and iterative process. Creativity, flexibility, critical thinking, self driven research, and the ability to question everything while following and anticipating emerging technologies will be essential.
This a remote position; there is no residency requirement. Some travel required.
IF YOU FILL THIS POSITION, YOU WILL BE ASKED TO:
- Support METRO digital repositories and hosted collections by performing related metadata, data and media tasks (ingest, export, transformation) in METRO’s Archipelago and Islandora repositories.
- Be an active member of the Archipelago Commons development team and help test and release new features and versions.
- Support METRO in metadata, data, and media migrations between systems.
- Train and assist partners who are creating metadata for digital objects.
- Participate actively in Github discussions and our Community forums.
- Create webforms, Twig templates, and workflows for editing, ingesting, exposing and exporting digital resources in Archipelago and Islandora.
- Ingest simple and complex objects into Archipelago and Islandora using a variety of tools and workflows.
- Create and maintain guidelines, documentation, training materials and workflows in Github.
- Maintain content and perform basic administration of repositories.
- Coordinate statewide Metadata and Semantic working groups to support and promote metadata quality and shareability in New York State.
- Serve as liaison to other New York City and state digital collaborations (ESLN, WikiData, WikiMedia, WikiPedia, others).
THE IDEAL CANDIDATE WILL HAVE:
- Master’s Degree in Library and Information Science or a related degree.
- Demonstrated success working a remote and distributed environment.
- Knowledge and experience working with metadata standards/ontologies such as Dublin Core, MARCXML, MODS, Schema.org, Europeana Data Model, the various IIIF APIs.
- Knowledge and experience working with Linked Data technologies (RDF, JSON-LD) and Querying Languages like GraphQL, Gremlin, SPARQL.
- Deep practical understanding of JSON, including JMESPATH and JSONPATHS.
- Experience working with digital collections systems and frameworks including CONTENTdm, Islandora, Samvera, CollectiveAccess, ArchiveSpace, DSpace and Omeka/Omeka-S.
- Knowledge working with CMS systems like Drupal 7/8/9 and WordPress.
- Basic understanding of programming languages like Python, PHP and Javascript and markup languages like HTML and associated technologies like CSS, markdown and pseudo languages like TWIG.
- Comfortable reading software code.
- Understanding of cloud service providers and technologies.
- Understanding of relational databases, document stores and fast indexes and their underlying technologies like SQL Solr, ElasticSearch.
- Comfortable using Linux/Unix terminals (sh/bash/zsh).
- Understanding of the state of open source communities and their software such as Islandora, Fedora, Samvera.
- Understanding of what Archipelago Commons, our development platform and repository is, does, and does not do.
- Knowledge of XML and related technologies like XSLT, XPath and XQuery.
- Experience with mapping and transforming a range of metadata schemas and standards.
- Knowledge of metadata harvesting protocols like OAI-PMH,OAI-ORE, JSON API, IIIF Collection and Search APIs and in general HTTP based API interactions via command lines.
- Experience with metadata cleanup utilities such as OpenRefine, Catmandu.
- Knowledge of file formats and common compression methods for Public access and preservation. Includes best practices and EXIF manipulation.
- Comfortable speaking in public and leading meetings and training sessions.
- Comfortable defending ideas in software development teams.
- Comfortable presenting publicly at conferences and other professional events.
- Knowledge of LIS operation, workflows and MARC.
- Bi-lingual or better (Human Languages).
APPLICATION DETAILS:Compensation for this role will be non-negotiable at 70K/yr, with health benefits. To apply, please send a pdf copy of your resume and cover letter along with any other material you would like considered part of your application to info@metro.org. Final candidates will be required to provide names and contact information for three professional references. This position remains open until filled; METRO is accepting applications on a rolling basis. METRO is an equal opportunity employer.
