Trinity College Dublin is hiring a Junior Software Engineer to support the Digital Repository of Ireland’s participation in the EnrichEuropeana+ project.
Trinity College Dublin is hiring a Junior Software Engineer to support the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI)’s participation in the EU-funded EnrichEuropeana+ project to enhance the Transcribathon Platform as a service for cultural heritage institutions.
The Junior Software Engineer will develop tools and workflows to integrate Transcribathon outputs with the DRI’s repository platform, using application programming interfaces (APIs) and standards-compliant data structures and formats. They will also maintain and enhance the repository platform in line with the goals of the DRI and the EnrichEuropeana+ project.
Context
The role holder will work as part of a small team of Linux oriented software engineers in the DRI group of the Research IT unit in Trinity College IT Services. They will also work closely with other DRI team members in Trinity College Dublin, the Royal Irish Academy, and Maynooth University to identify areas where the repository functionality can be expanded to better support the aims of the project and the DRI as a whole. The DRI is a CoreTrustSeal-certified Trustworthy digital repository for Ireland’s cultural and social data. It consists of a consortium with staff in three partner institutions in Ireland: Trinity College Dublin, the Royal Irish Academy, and Maynooth University.
Trinity College Dublin is a partner in the EU-funded project ‘Enriching Europeana through citizen science and artificial intelligence – unlocking the 19th century’ (EnrichEuropeana+), which runs from April 2021 to September 2022. This project will increase the amount and quality of 19th-century handwritten content in Europeana, add automated handwriting recognition to the Transcribathon platform, and enhance the results of Transcribathon activities by ensuring that transcriptions and metadata enrichments can be fed back to the Aggregator and Content Provider platforms, and to Europeana.
The DRI involvement in the project includes aggregating content to Europeana and using the Transcribathon APIs to retrieve transcriptions and enrichments and integrate them with the authoritative records in the Repository. This will involve working with APIs and developing a user interface for content providers to review content from Transcribathon. The repository platform is based on widely used technologies such as Apache Solr, Ruby on Rails, Fedora Commons/Samvera, MySQL, and RESTful web APIs.
Main Responsibilities
The successful candidate will help develop tools and functionality to retrieve content from Transcribathon, allow it to be reviewed by the content provider, and integrate and display approved content within the DRI repository. The main duties are:
Systems:
- Develop tools and workflows to retrieve transcriptions and enrichments from the Transcribathon platform
- Develop a user interface to allow DRI Collection Managers and content providers to examine and review content from Transcribathon as part of the Repository application
- Explore ways to integrate transcriptions and enrichments into the DRI Digital Object records
- Contribute to guidelines for archiving and preserving user-generated content
- Contribute to bug fixing, documentation, software maintenance, and other development activities as directed by the DRI Technical team
- Provide support for data and metadata mapping
Organisation:
- Participate in DRI staff and project meetings, DRI cross-functional task forces, and other DRI activities as required
- Occasional travel to project meetings and conferences in Ireland and Europe or online participation as required
- Assisting in project management activities such as project planning, reporting, and project metrics, helping to organise and run events and meetings, publicity/dissemination of project results
General
- Deputise for colleagues as required and represent the manager or department at meetings and events
- Any other duties that arise from time to time as directed by the manager or nominee
Person Requirements
The role-holder will require the following knowledge, skills, and attributes for successful performance in the role.
Qualifications
- Degree in Computer Science/Software Development, or another relevant field -essential
Knowledge & Experience
- At least one years’ experience in a software development role – essential
- Demonstrated ability to work well with a range of technical and non-technical staff to contribute to the development of functional requirements, specifications, work plans, and schedules – essential
- Experience working in Linux environments – essential
- Experience developing applications using web frameworks such as Ruby on Rails – essential
- Demonstrated proficiency with team collaboration tools (issue-trackers, wikis, etc.) and version control systems (e.g., Git or Subversion) – essential
- Understanding of digital preservation technologies and processes
- Experience with the Samvera Repository Framework
- Expertise developing applications with Ruby on Rails
- Familiarity with a range of data formats such as XML and JSON
- Experience with metadata standards, e.g., EDM, Dublin Core, MARC, MODS, EAD, OAI-PMH
- Experience working with APIs
- Demonstrated experience contributing to community-based open-source projects
Skills
- Strong analytical skills and attention to detail
- Excellent communication, written, and interpersonal skills
- Demonstrate a clear understanding of the role and responsibilities and be confident about delivering same
Personal Attributes
- Solid organisational and time management skills – the ability to work under pressure to complete tasks, meet deadlines, to multi-task and prioritise
- Ability to work independently with initiative and to participate well within a distributed team environment
- Takes responsibility for delivery of set goals
- Asks questions to ensure understanding
- Shares all relevant information with appropriate others and seeks others’ input
- Flexible approach to working hours as the demands of the post may require work outside normal office working hours from time to time
- Competent in using technology in own work
This post is a specific-purpose contract and the appointment will be made on the Administrative 3 Salary Scale (€39,656 – €50,190 per annum) at a point in line with current Government pay policy.
For more information about this job opportunity and to apply by the deadline of 24 Nov 2021 at 12:00, please visit: https://jobs.tcd.ie
