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Search Specialist, Europeana, The Hague, The Netherlands

Posted April 24, 2018

Monthly gross salary between €3.157 and 3.662

About Europeana

Across Europe, museums, galleries and archives are digitizing their collections. Europeana brings them together online and works hard to make sure people can find and use them. For work, for learning or just for fun.

We work with a network of cultural organizations to provide creative and innovative forms of access to culture. Our work is guided by creative collaboration, supportive teamwork and the idea that sharing and reusing cultural content can transform the world. We represent centuries of trusted guardianship by Europe’s cultural institutions so must always ensure that whilst we’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with today’s technology, our products and resources are robust and reliable. Our office is based in the National Library of the Netherlands, next to The Hague Central Station.

We are looking for a Search Specialist who will take the lead on the research, development and maintenance work that ensures that Europeana’s target users can quickly and efficiently find what they search for and are enabled to further explore related content.

Impact and Influence
As we use technology to transform the world with culture, this position is pivotal to the success of Europeana: we aim to answer the needs of a diversity of users to discover digital cultural material that meets their existing needs and/or stimulate more unexpected interactions with culture. Search has a major impact on nearly all Europeana markets (general users, research, education, creative industries) and a significant part of Europeana’s products and services, as search is a key component of both our Europeana Collections portal (http://europeana.eu) and our API services (https://pro.europeana.eu/resources/apis)

Team
We are a team of 3, this includes a R&D Manager, a Search Specialist (hiring) and a Senior Data Specialist.

We are experts on technological innovation for aggregation, enhancement and publication of cultural heritage data and services on top of it. Notably, we spearhead R&D on data modelling and exchange, data quality, multilingualism, and search.

We engage and collaborate with providers and users of innovative technologies, facilitating the uptake by the Europeana Foundation of R&D results from the whole community. We develop and assess technology and disseminate the knowledge developed in this process.

Main Responsibilities

  • Continuously improve our search engine(s) to meet the functional requirements of our new product and services roadmap and enhance the performance of existing search functions in a massively multilingual context
  • Measure search performance by exploiting search logs, A/B tests and/or user test sessions, and continuously improve existing metrics and procedures
  • Analyze search patterns arising from different types of users, languages, etc.
  • Support development team on search-related tasks
  • Contribute to Europeana’s SEO strategy by helping Europeana to meet its users’ search needs on Europeana’s portal as well as on other web platforms
  • Liaise and coordinate with relevant R&D efforts in Europeana’s Network and elsewhere – expected to contribute to academic publications about significant achievements

Knowledge and Experience

  • Strong information retrieval and data analysis skills
  • Deep experience with Solr and Lucene
  • Experience with semantic/entity-based search and discovery
  • Experience with mining data and logs and using them to improve searches
  • Experience with evaluating/benchmarking search services
  • Proficiency in Java and experience in software testing
  • Experience with highly multilingual search services
  • Experience with content-based retrieval (e.g. image similarity based search)
  • Good sense of UX/Design applied to search
  • Experience with Natural Language Processing
  • Active participant in open-source projects
  • An interest in culture and making the digital treasures of Europe’s libraries, archives and museums accessible to all

Educational background and experience:

  • Min Master’s degree in Computer Science or similar discipline
  • Min 1-3 years professional experience as a developer with a focus on search

Key relationships / customers:

  • Europeana’s product and software development teams working on Europeana’s portal, APIs and data ingestion suite.
  • Technology, design and evaluation partners in Europeana’s projects and related initiatives
  • Europeana Stakeholders and Users

Competencies:

  • Excellent relationship management and communication skill
  • A self-motivated, flexible, solutions-orientated and innovative mentality
  • The ability to build and maintain good working relationships with a culturally diverse team of colleagues and stakeholders
  • The ability to work accurately and carefully for a long period, with an eye for detail, and focused on the avoidance of errors and sloppiness, both in own work and in the work of others.
  • The ability to resolve problems by fraying apart situations, processes and issues and looking at them and judging them systematically.
  • The ability to obtain the required information by asking the right questions, and to identify patterns and make connections by researching and/or sensing the environment.
  • The ability to be customer focused and monitor the wishes and desires of the (internal and/or external) customers and acts accordingly and proactively..
  • The ability to convince others of a certain starting point, aiming to obtain agreement with certain plans, ideas or products.
  • Having and maintaining expertise in own area of practice.

Salary and benefits:

Your monthly gross salary will be between EUR 3.157 and 3.662 (based on full-time employment). Additionally, you will receive a (pro-rated) holiday allowance of 8% and an annual (year-end, pro-rated) bonus of 8.33%. 1 year fixed term contract with possibility of extension depending on funding availability. We offer 42.25 days holiday per year (based on full-time employment).

How to apply:

If you are interested in this position, please send your Curriculum Vitae plus motivation letter, both in English, to [email protected]

For more information, click here.

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