The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is an internationally renowned centre for plant science and conservation. Our collections are at the heart of our mission to explore, explain and conserve plant diversity, and include a living collection maintained across our four sites, a Herbarium of 3 million preserved specimens, the nation’s botanical Library, and Archive. Our vibrant digitisation programme is helping to improve the accessibility of our collections.
We are now recruiting talented people for a major programme to digitise natural science collections throughout Scotland.
The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and National Museums of Scotland are establishing a national hub and network of partners for specimen digitisation in Scotland as part of DiSSCo-UK. One of the most ambitious research and digital infrastructure programmes ever undertaken in the cultural or environmental sectors, DiSSCo UK is a £155 million, 10 -year national mission to digitise the UK’s natural science collections and transform how they fuel world-class research, innovation and public value. The programme is coordinated by the Natural History Museum (NHM) in partnership with UKRI, and will unlock tens of millions of specimens as open digital assets, establishing a sovereign national information resource that underpins UK leadership in tackling biodiversity loss, climate change, biosecurity and sustainable development.
We are looking for a National Data Manager to join the Scotland national hub team. Working closely with project leadership at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and National Museums of Scotland, the National Data Manager will be responsible for data management to support delivery of digitised specimens to the DiSSCo-UK portal.
Reporting to the Deputy Director of Science (Collections) and working closely with the Keeper of Natural Science Collections at the National Museums of Scotland, you will ensure consistent, efficient and accurate sharing of digital specimen images and metadata from multiple natural science collections in Scotland to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).
You will be involved on a daily basis in decision making and technical support within expert teams of curators at the national hub collections. You will collaborate with the relevant technical teams to embed robust data infrastructure and management procedures that support long-term preservation of digital specimens. You will also design and implement a robust approach to inform data management, sharing and preservation at diverse partner institutes, ranging from council-owned museums to historic University collections.
This role provides strategic and technical leadership focused on delivery: leading on data management, developing and coordinating data sharing pipelines, monitoring data quality, resolving issues, and supporting institutions to meet agreed data standards and schedules.
With a track record of successful design and implementation of data management protocols, you will play a key role in establishing and maintaining a reliable, unified national dataset for Scotland that meets FAIR principles.