Head of Visual Resources (Maternity Cover)

Job Summary

You will lead a large multidisciplinary customer facing department. At IWM Visual Resources deliver a Museum wide service for on brand events and marketing photography and video, and multimedia digitisation of our collections for access and preservation. These outputs form key aspects of the IWM’s: public; commercial; collections access and preservation; and, learning programmes.

You will inform the strategic development of this service, maintenance of the Collections Digital and Digital Futures Strategies and delivery of its access and preservation digital outputs. You will be skilled in commissioning specialist advice from internationally recognised experts on digital access and preservation, your team and liaison with senior management to recommend and deliver strategic programmes of work (running over several years) from concept to completion.

The post holder is responsible for all elements of management of this team including staff, equipment and systems.

Note that members of the Creative team are located at IWM London, and the Digitisation team at IWM Duxford; you will be expected to travel in this role. This post will be based at Duxford.

Key duties:

1. Strategic activity, provision of advice and external liaison:

• • Management responsibility for delivery of the IWM’s Digital Collections and Digital Futures Strategies.
  • Inform and lead complex projects across the Museum’s branches - integrating specialist stakeholder knowledge for Collections Digitisation for access and preservation.
  • Advise the Collections Management Governance Group on work that requires decision that will have operational and financial impact. Ensure when high impact issues from programmes are reported to this group or the relevant management board.
  • Supporting IWM governance through designing and delivering against KPIs.

2. Programme managing IWM Collections Management Programmes:

• • To develop, and manage budgets (commonly 250K) including budget holder tasks such as completion of outturns.
  • Disaggregating the integrated Programmes into projects and work packages for implementation by IWM managers and external suppliers.
  • Advise the Assistant Director, Collections Management on risks and opportunities paying particular attention to those on the critical path of major projects.
  • Management responsibility for the specification, procurement and delivery of externally contracted work and services drawing on the technical support of your specialist Managers.
  • Recommend policies, procedures and standards for the generation, retention and use of digital assets to the Collections Management Board and Collections Development Committee. Working with key holders (for example, but not limited to, the Heads of Collections Development, Collections Registration, Conservation, Project Delivery, Preservation and the Heads responsible for delivery of the public, commercial and learning programmes. In all cases you will distil your team’s technical knowledge to influence the following:
    • digital assets formats
    • levels of resolution appropriate to the given use case
    • metadata and/or catalogue information for new images
    • robust back-ups for digital assets
    • server space planning
    • business continuity

3. Instil a lessons learnt culture

4. Engage the Assistant Director appropriately

5. Management responsibility for reporting on work delivery to the Collections Management Governance Board

6. Managing the work of the team:

• • Manage specialist managers to deliver accountable, efficient work that complies with all of IWM’s procedures and standards and maintains our reputation. Ensuring that you build the knowledge of the team so all staff can act as internal advisers on their areas of expertise.
  • Manage the Managers and Team Leaders who will allocating work to the team and contact service providers to advance long term priorities and on demand access. You will ensure your team:
    • Secure, allocate and maintain all equipment necessary to deliver the Museum’s programmes of work.
    • Identify suppliers and manage contracts for work contracted to third party suppliers and partners.
    • Provide quarterly and project reporting.
    • Ensure health and safety, risks assessments, COSH and waste management regulations are always met .
    • Plan for the strategic replacement of equipment; provide guidance and training in the use of equipment, software and the application of specialist photographic techniques.

7. Specifically, deliver the following Museum-wide services:

• on-brand events and marketing digital photography and moving image capture. These are customer facing activities and form key aspects of the IWM’s public, commercial, collections and learning programmes.
• collections photography (as required by the IWM’s collections management policies or for record, publication and access purposes) meets the appropriate standards to account and care for the collection in their custody in the timeframe required by Programme of activity as defined by Programme Delivery.
• digitisation of our collections (including, stills and time-based media) and (when appropriate) production of facsimiles.

8. Compiling business analysis, management information and funding applications for the Assistant Director, Collections Management

For a full list of duties and the person specification (which your application will be marked against) please view the Job Description.