Digital Librarian at International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA)

IITA is an international non-profit agricultural research-for-development (R4D) organization established in 1967, governed by a Board of Trustees, and a member of the CGIAR Consortium. Our R4D approach is anchored on the development needs of tropical nations. We work with partners to enhance crop quality and productivity, reduce producer and consumer risks, and generate wealth from agriculture. We have more than 100 internationally recruited scientists from about 35 countries and 900 nationally recruited staff based in various stations across Africa.

We are recruiting to recruiting to fill the following position:

Job Title: Digital Librarian

Conditions: 2-year renewable contract
Location: Ibadan, Oyo State

Job Description
The Knowledge Center (KC) seeks to become the manager of IITA institutional repositories. To achieve this goal, the KC must develop and support the development of digital collections repository, providing curation and access to a wide range of digital content and media through both custom interfaces and through existing discovery systems. The KC will also support data management and curation for researchers in collaboration with IT.
The Digital Librarian’s role is to establish and manage the Knowledge Center information repositories. This includes ensuring that the storing, archiving, and taxonomical layout of information resources are consistent across and throughout the organization. The Digital Librarian is also responsible for developing and implementing search and retrieval processes, as well establishing a plan to preserve digital data and information. The Digital Librarian's duties include setting up asset catalogs, organizing collections of material, creating and maintaining relationships between assets, creating and enforcing naming taxonomies and metadata schema, tagging files with relevant and accurate metadata.

Responsibilities

• Working closely with researchers to advice on policies, standards and workflows for acquisition, description, and preservation of digital collections including text, images, audio, video and research data.
• Participating in the design and development of services to support preservation of and access to digitized and born-digital content.
• Developing architecture for managing and integrating heterogeneous metadata to facilitate interoperable discovery across systems.
• Assessing the requirements for the new data sets to add to digital repositories, identifying and assessing potential data sources and working with data owners to add data incrementally to digital repositories.
• Working with domain experts to understand the structure and relationships of data sets, and design a representative ontology.
• Develop a comprehensive taxonomy for organizing information resources based on research and business goals and requirements from stakeholders.

Requirements

• Masters degree in library/information science from an accredited institution.
• Five years of academic or research library/information experience.
• Experience with information repositories, digital preservation, indexing systems, taxonomy, metadata, and data curation, and developing standards.
• Understanding of collaborative online tools is required
• Candidate must have excellent oral and written communication skills; display maturity and interpersonal skills, be patient and have high stress tolerance.
• Proficiency in the use of computers and quick at analyzing issues

Remuneration
We offer highly competitive salary with equally attractive fringe benefits and excellent working conditions in a pleasant campus environment.

Application Closing Date
19th December 2013

Method of Application
Interested applicants should forward their applications with detailed curriculum vitae saved with their names in Microsoft word format. The application must include the names and e-mail addresses of three professional referees which must include either the Head of applicant’s current or previous organization or applicant’s direct Supervisor/Superior officer at work and evidence of current remuneration package to IITA website.

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