Open Position: Director of Content Operations

Are you a seasoned cataloger or librarian with a knack for content production and management? Perhaps you’re looking to move into management? We’re on the hunt for someone just like you to lead our content operations team. If you have over 10 years of experience in academic or electronic publishing, or you’re passionate about innovating in metadata, digital archiving, and building sustainable workflows, we want to hear from you!

In 4 years we’ve built one of the largest library collections in the world. We’ve worked out how to curate, index and enrich millions of documents that otherwise might have gone unnoticed. We’ve innovated with customers and with business partners and invented new ways of doing cataloging. We’ve preserved numerous documents from now defunct organizations. We’ve helped bring voices from the global south to the world’s attention.

Now we’re looking to build on these techniques. We need someone who’s able to inspire and manage others to use these techniques and to develop new processes around them as we continue to grow the company.

In this role, you’ll be at the heart of our mission, ensuring we deliver top-notch content on time and on budget. You’ll be leading and building a team, creating efficient systems for content enrichment, and will manage relationships with our partners. Your expertise will help us keep our products growing and evolving. Plus, you’ll get to be part of a friendly, professional but informal, collaborative work environment where your ideas and contributions make an immediate and important impact.

Check out the job description below and drop me a line with your resume if this sounds like you!

André Avorio
Chief Product Officer, Coherent Digital
aavorio@coherentdigital.net

Director of Content Operations

Position Impact:

1. Deliver new products on time and on budget according to the company's Product Roadmap.

2. Establish and deliver on coverage and content growth targets for all live products.

3. Create and implement efficient methodologies for acquiring content and metadata.

4. Recruit and manage staff, contractors, and vendors to enable processes.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience managing content production in academic or electronic publishing.

• Driven to build scalable, sustainable systems and workflows for digitization, content harvesting, metadata curation and more. 

• Familiarity with relational databases, MARC records, controlled vocabularies, metadata and library standards (e.g., Dublin Core, RDF). Experience using Content Management Systems (CMS), Digital Asset Management Systems (DAMS), Excel, and other tools to manipulate data.

• Thoughtful, collaborative, and communicative co-worker. 

• Structured thinker who can clarify goals, innovate, and design solutions.

• In-depth knowledge of content production pipelines from research to ingestion.

• Willingness to be hands-on and part of an agile and interdisciplinary team.

• Experience using web crawling and harvesting tools. 

• Experience designing controlled vocabularies.

• Understanding of digital archiving and preservation best practices.

• Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) valued, not required.

In the job, you will

Plan content targets and delivery across the product portfolio (10% of time)

• Develop a bi-annual production plan, setting clear growth targets and execution strategies for all new and existing “live” products.

• Identify resource requirements based on these plans and ensure the departmental budget is approved and aligned with the overall plan.

• Balance priorities to ensure timely delivery of new products while maintaining and enhancing existing products.

Lead the growing content ops team: (30% of time)

• Lead a growing team of content operations specialists and contractors. 

• Recruit, hire, train, and manage team members to ensure high-quality deliverables.

• Foster a positive and inclusive work environment.

• Integrate company culture, policies, and performance initiatives as needed.

 Scale and improve content operations capabilities over time (10% of time)

• In collaboration with the Technology team, create and implement the most efficient methodologies for acquiring content and metadata.

• Manage relationships with harvesting partners and other vendors as needed.

• For projects that require digitization, manage sourcing and conversion partners.

Manage the go-to-market process as the central project manager (20% of time)

• Develop content specs and detailed plans to deliver new products on time and budget.

• For product launches, ensure seamless coordination across Editorial, Content Operations, Technology, Sales and Marketing teams.

• Hold Product Forum meetings, track deliverables, ensure decisions are being made and communication is flowing.

Sustain living databases (20% of time)

• Nurture existing subscription products.

• Respond to external and internal content suggestions.

• Build sustainable workflows to continually ingest new content.

• Monitor content growth rates and ongoing content harvesting and ingestion.

• Ensure sales, marketing, and editorial teams have up-to-date key content metrics.

Execute Content Ops Tasks (10% of time)

• Ensure in-depth process and workflow knowledge by providing hands-on support as needed.

To get started, send an email with your resume to aavorio@coherentdigital.net