National Data Manager Scotland

Contract type: Fixed term (18 months)
Working hours: Full time (35 hours per week)
Location: Edinburgh
Salary: £49,204
Department: Preserved Collections
Division: Science

Job Description

Purpose

The National Data Manager Scotland is the central role overseeing data management, data sharing and aggregation between a national hub for specimen digitisation in Scotland—hosted jointly by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and National Museums of Scotland—and a network of partner natural science collections. The project is part of DiSSCo-UK, funded by UKRI.

This role provides strategic and technical leadership focused on delivery: leading on data management, developing and coordinating data sharing pipelines, monitoring data quality, resolving issues, and supporting institutions to meet agreed data standards and schedules.

Main Duties

Data management (70%)

Develop and implement a data management plan for the digitisation of natural science collections Scotland, aligned to data management plans for the national collections.

• Oversee the end-to-end process of data transfer from consortium members to the national aggregator.

• Develop, maintain and manage data sharing pipelines.

Agree schedules and workflows to ensure timely and complete data submissions from partners to aggregators.

Track data delivery performance across institutions and work with the project team to proactively address delays or gaps.

• Maintain current documentation relevant to all data management practices.

Data governance and quality assurance (20%)

• Define agreed data standards, including metadata schemas, controlled vocabularies, and formatting requirements, for all collections to follow.

• Conduct regular audits of incoming data to identify errors, inconsistencies, or missing fields.

• Provide clear feedback and guidance to work package leads and partner institutes to resolve data quality issues.

• Provide focused support to national collections and partner institutes to resolve data quality and sharing issues.

• Maintain dashboards or monitoring tools that track data completeness, accuracy, and compliance.

Horizon and network (10%)

Participate in the Scotland project meetings, activities and training delivery as relevant.

Maintain dialogue with DiSSCo-UK regarding data management, standards, sharing and aggregation.

• Communicate and review sector developments to the Scotland project team.

• Participate in sector-wide discussions regarding R&D for automated data handling processes for digitisation and curation.

Person Specification

Essential

• High level of data literacy, including working directly with datasets.

• Practical experience of managing and coordinating data flows between organisations.

• Experience designing or managing end-to-end data pipelines.

• Confident working with structured data sets in SQL, DarwinCore and other biodiversity data standards.

• Experience in data quality management, including validation, reconciliation, version control and auditing.

Ability to define and manage data submission schedules, workflows and dependencies across partner organisations.

• Ability to understand and communicate technical issues clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Experience maintaining data management documentation including standards, workflows and guidance for contributors.

• Experience implementing data governance arrangements including agreed standards, responsibilities and decision-making.

• Knowledge of data standards and metadata schemas, and the ability to support partner organisations to implement them consistently.

• Awareness of data protection, licensing and ethical considerations for sharing data.

• A relevant degree or equivalent experience.

Desirable

• Experience aligning local collection data with national/international standards.

• Experience supporting organisational change related to digitisation or data standards.

• Familiarity with data aggregation platforms or national/international data infrastructures.

• Knowledge of biodiversity and natural science data standards.

• Working knowledge of SQL or basic querying concepts, scripting tools such as Python or R, and APIs.

• A postgraduate degree in a relevant subject.