JOB PURPOSE

As Scotland’s leading conservation charity, the National Trust for Scotland cares for, shares and speaks up for Scotland’s heritage. Since 1931, we’re pioneered public access to and shared ownership of some of the most magnificent buildings, collections and landscapes in Scotland. We care for ancient houses, battlefields, castles, mills, gardens, coastlines, islands and mountain ranges, as well as the plants, animals and birds that live there.

To share these special places, we hold approximately 50,000 image assets to promote and explain the purpose of the Trust. We are conscious that we do not have a robust digital asset management system to store and manage access rights to these images. These include images of:

People
Places – castles, gardens and landscapes
Conservation in action
Wildlife and nature
Note: there is an existing database (Portfolio) which holds imagery of collections items (as undertaken in a previous digitisation project).
Currently, these assets are saved across a range of locations: SharePoint, locally on people’s own machines, Flickr, on external hard drives. There are significant risks to the Trust having no coherent storage system:
Misuse of imagery (contravening IP/copyright information) because we have no way of securely tagging and storing contracts/permissions forms alongside imagery
Loss of assets (many are currently stored on external hard drives)
Difficulty of sharing imagery both internally and externally
Storage costs from duplication of images across personal machines

This immediately affects Content/Marketing, Communications and Fundraising within Audiences & Support. We currently do not have the resource or expertise within the Directorate to initiate this project so are looking for an external expert to develop a plan for how to transition to a DAMs.

The purpose of this role is to assess our current position, auditing our assets and putting in place a robust plan for an intuitive, well-governed asset management system in line with the work already done by the Collections team. We would like to use Portolio, a system already in place in other areas across the Trust, but would like the successful applicant to assess the efficacy of Portfolio, and report on its benefits/issues/whether we can optimise it to work for us, or whether an alternative package should be considered so we can make an informed decision. This will ensure a consist approach to asset management is taken across the Trust.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES AND ACCOUNTABILITIES

Audit assets (video, imagery, illustrations) within the Directorate to gauge the scale of the requirements and clarify work required on copyright records.
Assess the functionality of Portfolio for imagery, including a report on whether any development work is required to ensure it is suitable for the needs of the directorate.
Build upon the work already done by the Collections Team to develop clear cataloguing standards for the DAMs to improve access and rights management and to ensure that a consistent approach is taken to asset management across the organisation
Develop a plan for how to transition live imagery to Portfolio, and how to manage the transition of the image backlog.
Design a plan for the implementation of workflows for good digital asset management including a review and disposal criteria policy and ongoing resource requirements.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS, SKILLS, EXPERIENCE & KNOWLEDGE

Qualifications

Essential

Strong track record in DAMs management and/or commercial digital image library management
Desirable
Educated to a degree level in a relevant heritage or information technology subject
Experience
Essential
Technically knowledgeable, technically experienced person
Proven experience with Portfolio and other DAMs systems
Thorough understanding of the cataloguing and meta data protocols for the retrieval and exploitation of digital assets
Experience of planning and delivering a DAMs audit/approach project
Ability to work independently
Experienced and independent self-starter, with the knowledge and confidence to review existing systems
Excellent knowledge of copyright and other legal compliance issues
Experience of develop digital management workflows

Desirable

Experience in a charity, heritage or cultural organisation.

DIMENSIONS AND SCOPE OF JOB

Scale

Working with c50,000 digital assets (imagery, video, illustrations),
Digital assets scattered across the organisation – whilst there is a central image bank, it’s not comprehensive
Accompanying rights information

People Management

Whilst this post has no line management responsibilities, the successful candidate will have responsibility liaising with Portfolio client managers, the Collections Digital Asset Management team, and employees within Audiences and Support

Finance Management

The post holder has no budgetary responsibility.

Tools / equipment / systems

Extensis Portfolio
Microsoft 365
SharePoint Online, Teams and OneDrive

Click apply now for more details

2 contract Heritage / Culture / Library jobs in Penicuik, Midlothian