The National Archives (UK) is looking for an enthusiastic and skilled Data Analyst with experience in web crawling, scraping, or analysis, to support workflows, help understand more about collections, and grow web archiving capability.
Web archives are fascinating. At The National Archives, we deliver three public web archive services. They are vast collections of government websites and social media. The scale of these collections, the variety of users’ needs, and the complexity of the data make them challenging and fertile ground for innovation. This role is fundamental to our mission to improve our collection processes, ensuring the highest quality and fidelity, understanding our collection, and conveying these insights to a range of people.
About the role:
As The National Archives’ Web Archiving Data Analyst and Crawl Engineer, you will bring your expertise and in-depth knowledge to develop and shape key aspects of our web archiving services and therefore you will be a key member of the team as we evolve our services.
We work with suppliers who deliver us many technical services, but we are increasing our in-house capability and expertise. These workflows are now important parts of our service and you will own them and develop them, including through finding ways to improve efficiency and resilience. You will embrace challenge and look for opportunities to do things differently.
Working closely with the Senior Data Engineer and our Web Archivists, you will help deepen our understanding of our web archiving and social media collections and use these insights to help tell the story of government online. This includes engaging with experts within The National Archives as well as with external organisations across the digital preservation community and other government departments, by sharing your knowledge with others and raising the profile of our work.
You will be passionate about data and technology. You will thrive in an environment which values and supports continuous learning and self-development.
Web archiving is an exciting, specialist, varied and rapidly evolving field that is a lot of fun to be involved in. Building and maintaining excellent web archiving services calls on a range of skills: problem solving, creativity, developing new techniques for capturing and replaying content, as well as supporting research, and managing stakeholders and projects.
You will support others’ research by delivering development that will help users explore our services “as data”. You will also contribute to the team’s tools and processes, ensuring that we can go about our work as efficiently and effectively as possible.