I have already announced on this list that the Great Britain Historical GIS
project has been awarded new funding by the New Opportunities Fund for a
project that involves constructing both a systematic historical gazetteer
for Britain and a systematic (although not, so far, comprehensive) database
of information, mainly local, drawn from historic census reports.
The grant will fund a team including Geographical Information Systems
specialists (both already appointed), a database developer (just
advertised) and an Information Officer who will be responsible, in
particular, for working with the database developer on implementing
metadata standards. We expect to be implementing the Alexandria Digital
Library project's gazetteer content standard and the Data Documentation
Initiative's extensions covering aggregate data. Both are formally defined
as XML DTD's, but are under active development and the appointee could well
become involved in that development process.
This is very definitely a job for someone with training in Librarianship or
Information Science, which is not my field. MY IMMEDIATE REQUEST IS FOR
ADVICE ON WHERE TO ADVERTISE THIS JOB, most probably early next month. It
will obviously be announced on FISH and a few other specialist lists
(IASSIST, archives-nra), but given that the likely salary is around
18,000-22,000 a year (or less if we spend a lot on the database officer),
my guess is that the person we are looking for is not already working on
information standards; the ideal person is (maybe) someone who finished a
librarianship course with a strong IT component a couple of years ago,
enjoyed the more theoretical parts of the course (e.g. principles of
thesaurus construction) and by now is feeling a bit frustrated because
their day to day job as a librarian makes so little use of it.
Where would they be looking for jobs?
If we are talking about traditional publications, cost is certainly an
issue (we spent a lot advertising the DB developer post) but so is
publishing frequency -- we cannot really wait for a quarterly publication
to come out. I have been advised that an ad in the Library Association
journal for one somewhat similar post was not cheap and got a very limited
response.
Please reply off list.
Incidentally, if someone more experienced IS interested, we would be happy
to explore the possibility of secondment although NOF rules mean the
funding would then be used to pay for a temporary replacement where they
normally work.
With thanks for any advice you can give me.
Best wishes,
Humphrey Southall
======================================================
Humphrey Southall
Reader in Geography/Director, Great Britain Historical GIS Project
Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth
Buckingham Building, Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE
Until September 2001:
Visiting Scholar, St. Catharine's College,
Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RL
Portsmouth HGIS team: (023) 9284 2500
Cambridge Tel: (01223) 523854
Mobile: (0796) 808 5454
