Taxonomy and Metadata Specialist, Scholastic, New York, NY
Posted September 9, 2014
For consideration, please send resume and cover letter with salary requirements to [email protected].
Scholastic Inc. is currently seeking a Taxonomy and Metadata Specialist to join the Software and Technology Services’ Taxonomy and Metadata Services Group (TMSG) to support channel-specific and enterprise-level initiatives. This is a full-time, permanent position located in Scholastic’s New York City offices.
Job Description
The person filling this position joins the TMSG with responsibility for designing and implementing taxonomies and metadata structures for a variety of applications with a high degree of usability for both internal and external Scholastic clients.
Responsibilities include, but are not limited to:
- Develop, refine, and implement multi-faceted taxonomies and thesauri to enable consistent description, discovery, and reuse of company assets.
- Collaboratively develop and implement an Instructional taxonomy that aligns with Common Core State Standards and Scholastic skills vocabularies.
- Conduct iterative evaluations of taxonomy design based on feedback from internal users and external customers.
- Assist with the definition and modeling of structural and descriptive metadata frameworks for content management (CMS), digital asset management (DAM), and centralized book marketing systems.
- Support on-going enhancements to CMS, DAM, and centralized book marketing systems to include automated metadata feed rules, data transformation and normalization, classification and enrichment, and search and discovery.
- Create tagging workflows and documentation.
- Coordinate, assemble, and maintain business metadata across a variety of product and asset types, to include books, articles, videos, instructional collateral.
- Lead and support tagging projects staffed with both internal and remote tagging teams.
- Advise on search and navigation projects.
- Educate stakeholders and advocate for taxonomy and metadata best practices.
- Participate in and oversee data governance at both a business and enterprise level.
- Work collaboratively, plan, and lead meetings and working sessions across all parts of the organization including, but not limited to: TMSG team, DAMs and CMS teams, Technology support (development and QA), eScholastic (customer-facing website), Education Group (Instructional taxonomy development), and other lines of business such as Trade, Reading Clubs, and Classroom Magazines.
Qualifications
- Strong understanding and experience with taxonomy and thesaurus standards and best practices; information organization and architecture; content classification and enrichment; metadata modeling, mapping, and transformation; and, digital asset management and/or content management.
- Demonstrated initiative and flexibility to work both independently and as part of teams to develop new strategies and improve existing strategies for information organization, management, and retrieval.
- Excellent interpersonal skills with ability to clearly articulate strategies, benefits, and requirements to both technical staff and business, always reflecting and promoting customer service and professionalism.
- Comfortable working through ambiguity to assist businesses in understanding and defining their requirements.
- Comfortable working on multiple projects simultaneously across a complex organization and product/content base.=
Requirements
- Library Science degree or equivalent education and experience
- Minimum of 4 years’ experience and demonstrated success with taxonomy, thesaurus, and metadata framework development, using standards and best practices
- Experience working with digital asset management or content management systems
- Subject indexing (tagging) and cataloging experience
- Detail-oriented, decisive, self-motivated, and calm under pressure
- Ability to handle multiple tasks and meet deadlines
- Strong ability to build credibility with business leaders
- Excellent analytical and communication skills
- Ability to quickly understand complex ideas and communicate them in simple language
- Advanced Microsoft Excel skills
- Background in publishing is a plus
- Understanding of K-12 instructional materials is a plus