Cataloguer, Hebrew Manuscripts Digitisation Project

£31,076 to £35,202 per annum
Fixed term contract to 31 March 2016
Hours: 36 hours per week
Location: St. Pancras, London
Ref: S&C00393

The British Library leads the way in advancing world’s knowledge. We have entered a major partnership which will allow us to open up on-line access to a large number of Hebrew manuscripts from the collection, making them freely available to scholars, researchers and the public worldwide. The manuscripts included in the project represent centuries of Jewish culture, history and tradition. We are keen to recruit people to help us deliver this exciting new programme.

This is an excellent opportunity to be part of a small team creating the metadata and contextual information for over one thousand manuscripts chiefly in Hebrew, and also in Arabic and other Jewish languages using the Hebrew script. The collection embraces many areas of Hebrew literature both religious and secular, and its geographical spread takes in Europe, North Africa, the Middle and Near East, as well as various countries in Asia.

You will be responsible for retro-converting existing printed catalogue records of over 1000 manuscripts (chiefly in Hebrew) that were acquired in the 19th century, to digital format. You will research and enhance the records to modern standards in TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) and XML formats, and create metadata for the digital objects from the TEI textual descriptions.

You will monitor the ingest of metadata and images into the British Library systems.

You will have excellent knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic, a research degree in classical Hebrew or relevant subject, and experience of cataloguing Hebrew manuscripts. You will have information technology skills and the ability to understand and apply complex standards for the cataloguing of digital manuscripts.

Good oral and written communication skills in English will be essential. With the ability to work independently and in a team, and a track record of working to strict deadlines, you will be crucial to the success of the project.

Closing date: 7 April 2013.

To make an application for this role, please click the 'Apply' button below.