Archivist II, Retained Cache

Retention & Archive holds what the network keeps. Two tiers: the contractual archive, which has a retention clock and a destruction procedure, and the retained cache, which has neither. The archive occupies Halls 3 and 4 at Dunmore Deep and grows by about 11% a year. You will catalogue it.

Responsibilities

• Catalogue inbound material to the schema: origin, chain, format, first-read date, and the fields that only apply to the retained tier.
• Maintain readability. Material from 1994 is still expected to open, which means media migration on a rolling 7-year cycle and keeping one working reader for every format ever accepted.
• Run retrieval requests from Regulatory, Commercial Intelligence and Incident Command. Median request is 40 years old; median turnaround is four hours.
• Operate the destruction procedure for the contractual tier, witnessed, logged, and certified to the customer.
• Record deletion requests against the retained tier. There is no deletion tooling for that tier; the request is logged and acknowledged and the material remains.
• Audit the index against the shelf quarterly. The index is the authority; discrepancies are investigated to a conclusion, not to a tolerance.

Requirements

• Formal archival, records-management or library-science training, or five years doing the work to that standard.
• Media and format literacy across at least three decades, including at least one obsolete tape family.
• Precision as a temperament. The catalogue is the only route to anything down here.
• Comfort working 94 m below grade with two colleagues and a lift.
• Tier 2 screening on offer.

Nice to have

• Preservation-grade metadata standards and a view on which of them was a mistake.
• Experience of an archive with no disposal authority, in any sector.
• Reading knowledge of pre-2000 storage documentation.

Process

1. Application read by the hiring manager, not by a filter. Five working days.
2. Screening call, 30 minutes, with the recruiter for the team named on the requisition.
3. Technical or desk conversation, 90 minutes, with two people you would work beside.
4. Site visit, half a day, at the facility named on the requisition. You will walk a hall.
5. Offer, with the band, the screening tier and the on-call obligation stated in writing.