JOB PURPOSE

The National Trust for Scotland is Scotland’s largest membership organisation and Scotland’s largest charity land manager. We manage many of Scotland’s most significant woodlands, from the extensive Caledonian pinewoods of Mar Lodge to rainforest hazelwood’s in the Hebrides and endemic Whitebeam woodlands on Arran.

As a founding member of both the Alliance for Scotland’s Rainforest and Caledonian Pinewood Partnership and as a key delivery partners with the Scottish Government for landscape scale ecological restoration of native woodland in Scotland, we are recruiting a post to help drive this exciting work.

You will lead the Trusts outreach for native woodland restoration across Scotland, developing several large scale projects. You will build partnerships with private landowners, communities of place and communities of interest, including other eNGOs and conservation organisations. You will have the backing and support of our nature, fundraising, planning, community engagement, estates and media teams.

The focus of your work will be developing two Alliance for Scotland’s Rainforest landscape scale projects in West Lochalsh and on Arran and provide initial contact and support to pinewood managers who look after threatened remnants, to bring their sites into recovery.

We are looking for strong communication & diplomacy skills, which can be influential at a network scale. Someone who can build trust and influence in land management situations, across a diverse range of partners with different interests and objectives. Someone who can develop partnership project plans, acting as the bridge between our internal expertise, existing and new partners. In particular you will develop delivery project content to a “shovel ready” stage, so your fundraising colleagues can draft applications.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Making initial contact, maintaining and/or developing ongoing communication and liaison with external landowners, stakeholders and associated organisations.
• Understanding external landowner’s and communities’ values, objectives and constraints and communicating the Trusts, with a view to building trust, understanding and cooperation in relation to collaborative, nature positive land management.
• Develop collegiate partnership operations and memoranda of understanding with both internal and external stakeholder input and support.
• Liase with internal NTS expertise across multiple disciplines, to inform your delivery of external communications and advice to stakeholders.
• Develop collaborative landscape scale funding bids across multiple estates and landholdings, including both NTS land and externally owned land, in association with the Trusts fundraising team.
• Supporting applications for government grants including Scottish Forestry Grant Scheme, Agri Environment Climate Scheme, Nature Restoration Fund etc.
• Coordinate delivery of landscape scale nature restoration projects across multiple estates and landholdings, including both NTS land and externally owned land, including budget management.
• Procure and manage contracts associated with landscape scale nature restoration projects, monitor delivery of grant conditions and complete grant claims & reports.
• Organise partnership meetings and events to strengthen networks and collaboration within the partnership.
• Write reports for partners and funders showing progress against agreed objectives and funding obligations.

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.