Employment Opportunities at AustLII

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27 November 2000

Expressions of interest sought for positions commencing in 2001

The Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII - http://www.austlii.edu.au/) is employing new staff members for 2001 and beyond. We encourage people who are suitably qualified for and interested in the positions described below to apply. Applicants may apply for more than one position.

The positions will be located primarily at AustLII's offices at the Markets Campus of the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), in the Faculty of Law. AustLII is a joint facility of the Faculties of Law at UTS and UNSW. AustLII employees are employed as employees of UTS. The positions are offered as full time positions but opportunities are available to accommodate the completion of tertiary studies.

Information about AustLII's operation can be found in summary form in 'About AustLII', and in more detail in 'The AustLII papers 1999' as published in 2000 (1) JILT. Additional background information can be found in 'The AustLII papers 1997' as published in 1997 (2) JILT.

Applications for this round of AustLII's appointments in 2001 will close on 18 February 2001. However, further appointments are likely to be made next year, and expressions of interest are welcome at any time.

AustLII is looking for staff to fill some or all of the following positions:
(1) Project leader / Manager for Legislation Databases
(2) System administrator and software developer
(3) Project officer(s)

(1) Project leader / Manager for Legislation Databases

This position is part of the team responsible for AustLII's primary legal materials which consists of over 60 large scale databases of case law and legislation. This collection has an extensive coverage from all nine jurisdictions in Australia and an increasing range of materials from overseas jurisdictions. The Manager, Legislation Databases will have principal responsibility for the management and development of all legislation databases on AustLII. This position reports to the Executive Director and involves the supervision of other members of the team. This position will involve the design and development of appropriate architecture and software needed for the Project. This position will also involve liaising and working with various data providers to improve the quality of the data feeds in light of the project goals.

This position is mainly funded from an ARC SPIRT collaborative research grant. The project title is "Automating improvements to the authority and interactivity of legislation-like instruments, to benefit government and business performance". One of the main goals of this project is to generalise and automate the process of building point-in-time legislative instruments (acts and regulations, treaties, and industrial awards) based on the interaction among these classes of legal documents.

Qualifications: Tertiary qualifications in Computer Science (or equivalent degree) is essential. Qualifications in law is highly desirable. Applicants require a sound knowledge of, and experience in the use of HTML, XML and internet protocols. Good communications skills, and knowledge of Unix, Perl, C and any database and text management tools are highly desirable. Experience in working with large scale databases and the supervision of project staff is desirable. Depending on qualifications and experience, this position may be offered as a three-year contract.

(2) System administrator and software developer

AustLII's main server is a Sun Enterprise E4500 server with a E3000 acting as a backup server. AustLII also has a number of Ultra 1s and Ultra 5s, as well as PCs and Macs. The servers receive over 300,000 'hits' per day. AustLII develops and uses a lot of its own software including a search engine, and web indexing software. This position is part of the team responsible for:

Administering servers running e-mail, WWW, databases, firewall, and other applications.
Configure, optimise, maintain, and troubleshoot hardware and software.
Manage backup, recovery, and security procedures.
Developing data management software.

Qualifications: Tertiary qualifications in Computer Science (or equivalent degree) is essential, but applicants who are near to completion of qualifications will be considered. Applicants require a sound knowledge of internet protocols, and experience in administrating Unix systems (Solaris, OpenBSD) and Apache servers. Knowledge of HTML, C and Perl is desirable.

(3) Project officer(s)

One or more positions are available as part of the team responsible for AustLII's legal materials - over 80 large scale databases of primary materials (case law and legislation) and secondary materials (including law journals and law reform commission reports). Members of the team each have responsibility for management and development of sets of databases, and (depending on qualifications and experience) on the development of new software for text processing.

Members of the team are involved in various research projects funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) and other funding bodies, including research into new forms of legislation and case law databases as well as developing subject-specific databases and organisational home pages.

At present these include the following:

Improving the quality of case law and legislation databases by the use of standards and automated tools.
Resources concerning law reform reports (Australian Law Reform Commission), community legal information (Hot Topics).
Other home pages and databases in AustLII's secondary legal materials.
Aspects of the Australian Treaties Library, Indigenous Law Resources, Intellectual Property Law Project, and Industrial Law resources on AustLII.

Qualifications: Tertiary qualifications in law and/or computer science (or equivalent degree) are highly desirable. A sound knowledge of, and experience in the use of HTML and internet protocols may be accepted. Knowledge of Unix, Perl, and any text management tools is desirable. Good communications skills is desirable.

Please contact ...

Anyone interested in submitting an expression of interest in the positions which are to be created should send the following details by e-mail to AustLII:

A short letter explaining which of the above-listed positions they feel that they are interested and qualified to fill.
A brief resume of their qualifications, employment history and experience in creating internet resources.

Details should be sent to AustLII's Administrative Officer, Cathy Thomson (cathy@austlii.edu.au). If any attachments are included with your email, please ensure that they are in rtf (rich text format). We cannot guarantee that we can read other forms of attachment.

Telephone enquiries should be directed to AustLII's Executive Director, Philip Chung, on 02 9514 3175.