STHC-L: The Science, Technology and Health Care Archives Forum

Job: Archivist, Public Health Image Library, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Atlanta, Georgia)

• Date:   Sun, 25 Aug 2002 12:22:40 -0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
• To:   sthc-l@library.ucla.edu, Lynda@library.ucsd.edu
• From:   Russell A. Johnson <rjohnson@library.ucla.edu>
• Subject:   Job: Archivist, Public Health Image Library, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Atlanta, Georgia)
• Message-ID:   SIMEON.10208251240.C@bio-s-his008.library.ucla.edu

Forwarded to STHC-L (The Science, Technology, and Health Care Archives 
Forum) from a message received at our office. For more information, see 
the PHIL website at:
http://phil.cdc.gov/phil/

Russell Johnson
STHC-L administrator

--- Begin Forwarded Message ---
On Wed, 21 Aug 2002 10:48:17 -0400 "Grafman, Eric (PHPPO)" 
[ehg9@cdc.gov] wrote:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is looking for  a 
full-time contract employee to assume the role of Archivist.  Below 
I've included a brief description of the PHIL contents, as well as what 
the Archivist position will require from the person who'll fill such a 
role.  I'm taking a proactive approach to the search process, focusing 
in on established, medically oriented archives as  a start.  Please 
feel free to disseminate this document to whomever you feel might 
qualify for such a position.  Quite sincerely, any help in this matter 
would be greatly appreciated.

The CDC's photographic, A/V, and illustrative archive is primarily made 
up of biologically and medically oriented materials, including  all 
aspects of the public health industry. The data formats include  
audio/visual data in the form of analog tapes and film reels, hard copy 
prints, 35mm slides, digital graphics files, textual documents, sound 
files, computer animations, and 3D models. The PHIL, already on-line as 
you know, will be upgraded to contain all that is organized by the 
Archivist, and will be governed by a versatile asset management system.

What will be required or desired with regards to a candidate's 
experiential and core competencies will be the following.

A Masters Degree will be required, as well as having worked with large 
catalogs of data, constructing, and managing these asset repositories. 
Constructing may be construed as creating from scratch, a taxonomic tree
or skeleton into which was placed the assets in a hierarchical order, as
well as having populated the repository's metadata schema with metadata 
that was pertinent to each respective asset, thereby, facilitating 
end-user search criteria.

Required also, will be the candidate's ability to communicate well in 
both a written and verbal manner, and be facile in communicating in 
general lay terminology, as well as high level technical terminology. 
Much in the way of discussions pertaining to computer-based archiving, 
public health, and medicine will take place, for a majority of the 
holdings fall with these subject headings.

It would be highly desirable if such a candidate had in the past used 
computer-based methods for archiving digital assets, and therefore, 
understands the problems associated with such archiving modalities not 
only from the standpoint of an archivist, but an end-user as well. I'd 
like to include the use of computer- aided image editing such as 
Photoshop when speaking of "computer-based" archiving, for cleaning and 
enhancing imagery plays a large role in the archiving process. An 
understanding of Graphical User Interface, GUI, usability would also be 
very important in an archivist's background, for the PHIL is a 
web-based product, and is continuously being refined based on an 
end-user's experience, i.e. Q/A input.

Finally, it would be desirable, though not required that the archivist 
candidate be acquainted with terminology from the fields of medicine, 
public health, and the  biological sciences. A very large percentage of 
our content is from these scientific domains, and it would merely make 
it that much easier to create, and maintain such a catalog, along with 
implementing appropriate taxonomic metadata.

However, the most important factor is the candidate's ability to create 
from scratch, a large, complex repository, as well as the appropriate 
metadata fields that will accompany each asset.

I hope that this helps you in providing to me in your reply, an 
explanation as to the ways in which your background would enable you to 
be an effective archivist here in the PHIL.

I look forward to reading your reply very soon.

Sincerely, 
Eric Grafman, PHIL Project Lead
(404) 639-1747

--- End Forwarded Message ---