DSpace Technical Expert

- A reliable, secure, and high-performing institutional repository that ensures uninterrupted access to UNEP’s knowledge assets for internal and external users. - Enhanced integrity and trustworthiness of repository content, with significantly reduced spam, unauthorized submissions, and system vulnerabilities. - Improved data quality and discoverability of publications, enabling more efficient retrieval, reuse, and dissemination of UNEP’s knowledge products. - Standardized and streamlined metadata management and workflows, reducing manual intervention, minimizing errors, and increasing operational efficiency. - Strengthened alignment with global best practices in repository management, ensuring scalability, interoperability, and long-term relevance of the platform. - Sustainable system management and continuity, supported by comprehensive documentation and reduced dependency on individual knowledge holders.

NAIROBI

6 MONTHS

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is the leading global environmental authority that sets the global environmental agenda, promotes the coherent implementation of the environmental dimension of sustainable development within the United Nations system and serves as an authoritative advocate for the global environment. The mandate of UNEP is to coordinate the development of environmental policy consensus by keeping the global environment under review and bringing emerging issues to the attention of governments and the international community for action. The Communication Division communicates the core messages of UNEP to all stakeholders and partners, raising environmental awareness and enhancing the organization’s profile worldwide. UNEP has recently launched the UNEP Knowledge Repository, built on DSpace version 8.2, as a freely accessible, open-access institutional platform that gathers, preserves and disseminates UNEP’s scientific, technical and policy knowledge resources. The Repository provides structured, searchable access to the full breadth of UNEP’s intellectual output—including publications, governance and meeting documents, project documentation, evaluations, learning products, communications and legacy materials—to support evidence-based decision-making for a sustainable planet. The platform is designed to ensure that UNEP knowledge products are discoverable, interoperable and reusable by governments, practitioners, civil society and the public. Given its role as a central, open-access knowledge infrastructure handling diverse content types, complex metadata structures, and high public traffic, the Repository constitutes a core enterprise information system. It requires sustained, expert-level technical oversight to maintain platform stability, data integrity, security and long-term maintainability. While technical maintenance and management functions were previously carried out under broader information management roles, the operational demands of a modern DSpace 8.2 deployment—including large-scale metadata normalization, legacy content remediation, software defect resolution, security hardening, and mitigation of automated bot activity—necessitate dedicated, specialized technical consultancy support. UNEP seeks a consultant to provide on-site technical maintenance, system management, security mitigation, data clean-up and feature development for the Knowledge Repository. The consultant will report to the Head of Web Platforms. Duties 1. DSpace technical maintenance and system administration - Provide direct, hands-on technical maintenance of the UNEP Knowledge Repository running on DSpace version 8.2, including both front-end (Angular UI) and back-end (REST API, database, and indexing services). - Monitor application health, system logs, background processes, storage utilization, indexing status, and performance metrics to ensure continuous availability and optimal operation. - Configure, maintain, and fine-tune DSpace components, including submission workflows, authorization policies, metadata schemas, search and browse indexes, and integrations native to DSpace. - Apply configuration changes, patches, and minor upgrades in line with DSpace best practices, ensuring minimal service disruption and full documentation of changes. 2. Troubleshooting, bug fixing and security - Diagnose and resolve platform-level, application-level, and data-level issues affecting the functionality, stability, usability, or security of the DSpace repository. - Investigate and remediate software defects related to submissions, metadata ingestion, authority control, search and discovery, batch operations, administrative functions, and access controls. - Actively monitor the repository for automated bot attacks, spam submissions, scraping activity, and other malicious or abusive access patterns, and implement appropriate technical countermeasures, including submission throttling, CAPTCHA enforcement, IP filtering, authentication controls, and workflow restrictions. - Perform root-cause analysis of recurring, systemic, or security-related issues and implement durable, preventive technical solutions aligned with best practices for open-access repository security. - Maintain clear technical documentation of identified issues, corrective and preventive actions taken, and recommendations for ongoing risk mitigation and system improvement. 3. Manual and automated clean-up of repository content - Conduct a systematic technical audit of existing repository records to identify duplicate items, corrupted entries, incomplete submissions, invalid metadata values, and legacy artefacts. - Perform manual corrective actions where precision or editorial judgement is required, including record-level editing, withdrawal, or consolidation. - Design and execute automated scripts, batch processes, and other appropriate techniques (where appropriate) to address large-scale metadata errors, duplication patterns, or structural inconsistencies. - Ensure that clean-up activities preserve referential integrity, persistent identifiers, and repository audit trails. 4. Metadata and system configuration support - Review and optimize metadata schemas, input forms, authority controls, and field mappings in DSpace to ensure strict adherence to UNEP standards and Dublin Core compatibility. - Strengthen metadata validation rules, required-field enforcement, and controlled vocabulary usage at the system level. - Improve indexing, faceting, and search configuration to enhance discoverability and performance. 5. Feature development and enhancements - Design and implement targeted functional enhancements within the DSpace 8.2 framework in response to clearly defined UNEP requirements. - Develop or customize submission workflows, administrative tools, reporting mechanisms, and user-facing features using supported DSpace extension mechanisms. - Where appropriate, explore enhance or automated approaches for metadata quality control, duplicate detection, or anomaly identification, ensuring transparency and auditability of results. - Document all customizations to ensure maintainability and future scalability. 6. Documentation, training, and technical support - Produce and update technical documentation, system configuration records, and standard operating procedures specific to the DSpace 8.2 deployment. - Provide targeted technical briefings and knowledge transfer to UNEP staff and associated consultants responsible for repository governance and content management. - Support technical reporting on repository performance, risks, corrective actions and enhancements. - Any other DSpace-related technical support, as required.

A master’s degree in computer science, information systems, software engineering, information management, or a related field is required. A bachelor’s degree in a relevant field, combined with two additional years of qualifying experience, may be accepted in lieu of the master’s degree. A minimum of five years of hands-on technical experience with digital repositories or comparable enterprise content systems, demonstrated expertise with DSpace, preferably versions 8 or later, including system configuration and troubleshooting, working with web applications, databases, indexing/search services, and repository security, experience addressing automated abuse, bot activity, and data integrity issues, experience delivering production-grade technical outcomes for large-scale complex projects is required. A minimum of three years of experience using automation techniques for data quality management within an international organization is desirable.

English and French are the working languages of the United Nations Secretariat. For this post, fluency in written and spoken English is required; knowledge of another official UN language is desirable.

Not available.