Job Opportunity at the British Library

BL background information and the team’s address for informal inquiries: https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2024/06/join-the-british-library-as-a-digital-curator-ocrhtr.html

Job description

The British Library is looking for someone to join its Heritage Made Digital team to further improve the access and usability of our digital collections by integrating a standardised Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) production process into our existing workflows, in line with industry best practice. This will allow for greater discoverability of our content and facilitate digital research and engagement.

It is expected that the person appointed to the role will become the established OCR/HTR expert within the Library, be recognised as such across the wider cultural heritage ecosystem, and will use their knowledge and expertise to further advance OCR/HTR technologies.

The successful candidate will have technical and practical experience of working with digital images and operational workflows, as well as experience developing or applying digital research methods and working with the technologies, tools and platforms which enable digital scholarship. They should also have excellent problem solving skills and the ability to communicate enthusiastically and effectively with colleagues from a variety of disciplines.

As one of the world’s great libraries, our duty is to preserve the nation’s intellectual memory for the future and make it available to all for research, inspiration and enjoyment. At present we have well over 170 million items, in most known languages, with three million new items added every year. We have manuscripts, maps, newspapers, magazines, prints and drawings, music scores, and patents. We make our collections and programmes available to all. We operate the world’s largest document delivery service providing millions of items a year to customers all over the world. What matters to us is that we preserve the national memory and enable knowledge to be created both now and in the future by anyone, anywhere.

In return we offer a competitive salary and a number of excellent benefits.  Our pension scheme is one of the most valuable benefits we offer, as our staff can become members of the Alpha Pension Scheme where the Library contributes a minimum of 26.6% (this may be higher dependant on grade. Another significant benefit the Library provides is the provision of a flexible working hours scheme which could allow you to work your hours flexibly over the week and to take up to 5 days flexi leave in a 3 month period. This is on top of 25 days holiday from entry and public and privilege holidays.

Important note

BL is unable to provide sponsorship under the UK Skilled Worker visa for this role, as it does not meet the eligibility criteria required for this immigration route