Collection Metadata Analyst

Location: Boston Spa
Contract: Permanent
Hours: Full time (36 hours)
Grade: B
Salary: £32,619 per annum

About the role
The British Library's Metadata Services team manages a range of processes involving incoming and outgoing content and metadata. The Library's collection is its core asset, but our bibliographic resources must have good descriptive records in order to be discovered by customers. Our metadata is therefore an asset in itself.

Metadata Services work with a wide range of metadata providers and consumers to assist with cataloguing activities in our own institution and in others around the world. We need a Metadata Analyst to work on the ingest of material such as e-books, with an emphasis on the records that describe each item. The British Library has over 22 million records, and is constantly adding to its collection. To keep pace with our high rate of ingest, Metadata Services develop automated processes to import and analyse records from external providers, often matching against our existing metadata and upgrading it. We also export and tailor the Library's records, delivering products like the British National Bibliography.

An applicant for a British Library role would clearly benefit from having a library or publishing background. For this role, a familiarity with standards such as ONIX (Online Information Exchange) or MARC21 would be valuable. However, we would welcome a candidate with relevant, transferable skills: any applicant with a firm knowledge of XML and XSLT may be well-suited to this role. Experience of scripting, Excel formulas and regular expressions would be an asset. Above all, applicants must be attentive to detail, and be able to work with precision and accuracy.

Closes 23:59 on Sunday 17 May 2026

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