Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives

Starting date: October 01, 2022

Application deadline: Open until filled

Full- Or Part-Time: Full-Time

Location: Budapest

The Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives (OSA) at Central European University (CEU) based primarily in Budapest but with teaching tasks in Vienna, Austria invites applications for the Digital Archivist position.

Blinken OSA is part of Central European University (www.ceu.edu), one of the most multinational graduate institutions in Europe, engaged primarily in the humanities and social sciences. Blinken OSA is a complex institution of memory that supports scholarship, is engaged in research, is the initiator of high visibility public programs, and manages the Archives and Evidentiary Practices specialization at the History and Legal Studies Departments at CEU. Blinken OSA is an "archive of last resort", the archive of (politically) endangered collections.

Blinken OSA hopes to attract an unusual intellectual who is ready to experiment and to take calculated professional and intellectual risks; who is passionate about new archival and library theories, technologies, trends in digital media, digital humanities, and open access; and who is highly knowledgeable about emerging IT solutions.

General Function of the Digital Archivist

The Digital Archivist is responsible for all digital holdings of the Archives, whether resulting from digitization of analog materials, born digital or acquired from external sources. This responsibility extends to the creation and maintenance of metadata records and to policies regarding the creation, organization, description, storage, and preservation of, as well as access to digital materials. In close collaboration with the Chief Archivist and the Head of IT, the Digital Archivist takes lead role in the development and implementation of a digital preservation strategy and digital asset management policy across the Archives. The Digital Archivist provides support in digitization and digital humanities projects for other professional staff.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Oversees digitization procedures by implementing and refining methodologies and practices for sustainable and secure digital archiving, for both born-digital and digitized records.
• Creates and updates policies and procedures for managing digital materials for ingest, storage, preservation, organization, description, and access, including the Archives' Digital Preservation Policy and Digital Asset Management Policy. Creates and maintains inventory for the digital assets of the Archives.
• Ensures the accessibility of the Archives' digital assets and other special collections by determining their appropriate intellectual organization and digital storage structure.
• Takes part in designing the key elements of the digital preservation workflow (technical metadata collection, checksum, creation, modification, and last access dates, as well as file formats and sizes).
• Understands the use and problems of migration strategies, and, in cooperation with the Head of IT proposes and devises related tasks and assigns necessary resources.
• Provides periodical review of digital preservation activities and preservation strategy by adjusting them to the latest standards.
• Actively works together with the Archives' IT unit on improving the functions of the Archival Management System (AMS), testing newly implemented features, collecting feedback about the software, and registering feature requests.
• Oversees, in cooperation with Blinken OSA's Counsellor copyright and access rights terms of existing digital materials and helps implement a sustainable rights management policy.
• Provides technical support for professional staff in initiating and pursuing digitization projects, creating, or updating Curated Collections and other digital humanities projects.
• Keeps abreast of the latest trends in his field through self-study, networking (in and out of the Central European University) and participating in professionally relevant training and development courses.

Required Knowledge and Skills

• Relevant experience in life/cycle management of digital records (born-digital and reformatted legacy holdings), digital preservation and information management.
• Experience in writing institutional policies and guidelines is an advantage.
• Knowledge of current trends and protocols in digital archiving and of tools and software used to capture and manage digital records.
• Understanding of local and hosted file servers, file transfer utilities, and networking; and of digital textual and audiovisual file formats.
• Knowledge of obsolete storage formats (floppy disks, CD-ROMs, DVDs) is an advantage.
• General knowledge of web archiving, cataloging, and preserving web sites.
• Knowledge of handling email archives is an advantage.
• Familiarity with metadata standards, information taxonomies and other standards in arrangement, description, and management of digital materials.
• General knowledge of archival theory and best practices.
• Excellent analytical, interpersonal, time management, and organizational skills.
• Excellent written and oral communication abilities in English.
• Ability to multi-task, prioritize, and meet deadlines.
• Ability to work creatively, both independently and collaboratively.
• Basic programming skills (such as Python and/or JavaScript). Basic knowledge of database design is an advantage.
• MSc or an advanced degree in any related field is an advantage.

Compensation

We offer a competitive salary that is commensurate with experience as well as a dynamic and international academic environment. The initial contract is for one year with the possibility of renewal.

How to apply:

Applicants need to submit:

• CV
• Cover letter
• Contact information for two referees

We do not ask for reference letters at the first stage of application; the referees may be contacted for references later by CEU.

Informal inquiries may be addressed to Katalin Gádoros, Head of Administration at gadoros@ceu.edu.

Please send your complete application package to advert041@ceu.edu – including the job code in the subject line : 2022/041.

CEU is strongly committed to the promotion of gender equality and equal opportunities within our institution. Previous training, work experience and/or engagement with matters of equality, diversity and inclusion at the organizational level will be an asset.

The privacy of your personal information is very important to us. We collect, use, and store your personal information in accordance with the requirements of the applicable data privacy rules, including specifically the General Data Protection Regulation. To learn more about how we manage your personal data during the recruitment process, please see our Privacy Notice at: https://www.ceu.edu/recruitment-privacy-notice (Hungary: Közép-európai Egyetem, Central European University) or https://www.ceu.edu/recruitment-privacy-notice-austria( Austria: Central European University, CEU Central European University Private University).

About CEU

Central European University (CEU) is a research-intensive university specializing in the social sciences, humanities, law, public policy and management. It is accredited in the United States, Austria and Hungary. CEU's mission is to promote academic excellence, state-of-the-art research, research-based teaching and learning and civic engagement, in order to contribute to the development of open societies. CEU offers bachelor's, master's and doctoral programs and enrolls more than 1,400 students from over 100 countries. The teaching staff consists of resident faculty from over 50 countries and prominent visiting scholars from around the world. The language of instruction is English.

For more information, please visit https://www.ceu.edu/.