As Head of Digital Infrastructure, I lead the team within Art UK responsible for managing all aspects relating to the organisations digital platforms and infrastructure. Specific areas of responsibility include:

• Lead on development of digital strategy for the organisation as relates to digital infrastructure, systems, and products.
• Act as the Tech Fellow and project lead for the Museum Data Service project.
• Line manage and support the Commercial Platforms Manager in the redevelopement of Art UK’s e-commerce platforms.
• Lead major technical projects undertaken by the organisation, working with multi-disciplinary teams, subject specialist advisers and suppliers to ensure successful delivery on time and within set budgets ranging from £10-£115K.
• Manage the organisations technical maintenance programme and budget.
• Management of technical suppliers engaged with development/maintenance of Art UK’s systems e.g collections information system, DAMS, e-commerce and CRM.
• Additional responsibilities as described in Technology Manager summary (see below)

As Art UK’s first in-house technical hire, I was responsible for establishing and leading a new department within the organisation that would manage all technological aspects relating to the artuk.org digital platform. Specific areas of responsibilty included:

• Managing the organisations technical maintenance programme and budgets.
• Oversight of technical suppliers engaged with development/maintenance of Art UK’s systems e.g collections information system, DAMS, e-commerce, CRM.
• Oversight of maintenance of Art UK cloud infrastructure (AWS).
• Utilising research, reports, and analytics data to assess performance of systems and workflows, and to identify and quantify improvements to these for user experience and efficiency.
• Researching latest developments, technologies and projects related to digital collections and report to senior management team on opportunities for the organisation.
• Writing reports and delivering presentations on projects and departmental activity to the director, senior management, advisory panels, and trustees.
• Providing technical training sessions across teams, identfying and recommending development opportunities.

As Data and Content Assistant, I made significant contributions towards the redevelopment of the National Galleries of Scotland’s digital platforms, in particular their collections online website. The key objectives of my role were to:

• Work alongside the collections management division to optimise data records and subject taxonomies published to the collections site, to improve access and discoverability of over 90,000 artwork records for our key audiences. This included pilot projects around integration of Linked Open Data.
• Research and report to Digital Content Manager on key technical developments and best practise for publishing collections online, feeding into organisations digital engagement and content strategies.
• Supporting Digital Content Producers in the planning, creation and publication of audience focused content around key subjects in the National Galleries Scotland collections and its public programme, including major exhibitions and touring displays.

Seconded from the National Galleries of Scotland, I worked within the Digitisation team at the library to capture, process and ingest items from their rare books collection, including 17th and 18th Century pamphlet and manuscript materials; as well as digitising microfilm collections.

During this time, I also worked with the Digital Preservation Officer on projects to assess digital surrogates within the library’s collections; developing a tool to assess video content during this time.

As Digitisation Assistant, I worked as part of the recently established Photography team to digitise ~40,000 items from the collections of the Scottish National Gallery and Scottish National Portrait Gallery; focusing primarily on the photography and works on paper collections. The key tasks in this process involved:

• Assessment of artworks to ensure their suitability for capture based on advice from conservators, and undertaking basic collection care tasks where appropriate.
• Digital capture of items using Phase One medium format camera systems.
• Processing of images using Capture One and Adobe Photoshop software.
• Quality Assurance of images and data, and ingestion to the galleries key databases.

In this role, I was also seconded to the Digital Media department where I supported the team by:

• Researching and writing online interpretation for collection items, including artwork captions, artist biographies and collection blogs and features; including an extended essay on works by Titian in the collection.