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.