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Vacancy: Collections Development Officer, UK Data Archive

The UK Data Service provides users with seamless and flexible access to a wide range of data resources to facilitate high quality social and economic research and education. The wide coverage of the service and combination of historically separate data services have led to a diverse technology portfolio with core holdings spread across a range of legacy systems.

The UK Data Archive at the University of Essex is now seeking to appoint a Collections Development Officer to join our Collections Development team.

Duties of the Role

The primary responsibility of the role will be to coordinate the acquisition, quality assurance and appraisal of data offers and deposits to the service, ranging from large scale surveys to qualitative collections and big data, and assist senior staff in disclosure risk and metadata quality reviews of received data collections to ensure delivery of high quality data and metadata for use by academia.

You will liaise directly with data owners including ESRC award holders, government departments and survey agencies in answering queries on data preparation, data deposit and Research Data Policy issues. You will also report towards the ESRC grants evaluation team and provide data download metrics reports for data owners and internal business operations, along with contributing to the UK Data Service training programme, on creating high quality data and documentation.

Qualifications and Skills required

Among the key skills required by the successful candidate are competency in handling and querying social science data, especially survey data, and a good understanding, and some experience of, ethical and legal issues surrounding the collection of data in research and onwards sharing.

You should be highly computer-literate, have excellent written and verbal communication skills and strong analytical and problem solving skills. It is essential that you hold a first degree in social sciences or a related field, or have similar level experience.

We welcome applications from those from an ethnic minority as they are under-represented in the UK Data Archive.

The UK Data Archive is registered for ISO 27001 compliance and this post will be subject to the staff vetting process. Further information can be found in the job pack.

Closing: 3 February 2019

Location: Colchester

Salary: £22,017 – £25,483 per annum

Employment type: Fixed-term, full-time, until 31/03/2021 due to funding.

Further detail: Collections Development Officer jobpack

Applications