Description

Information about the organization

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is a federally chartered, nonpartisan institution that was created by the US Congress to serve as America’s national memorial to the victims of the Holocaust and an educational institution dedicated to the history and lessons of the Holocaust. The Museum seeks to educate Americans from all 50 states and all walks of life as well as international audiences. The Museum has three areas of expertise: Holocaust remembrance, Holocaust scholarship and education, and genocide prevention.

In carrying out its important memorial and educational mission, the Museum is guided by its institutional values for our workplace: Honor the memory of the victims; carry out our work with dignity, humility, integrity and respect for others; and strive for excellence through teamwork, rigor, and a culture of continuous learning. Consistent respect for others is the foundation for trust, collegiality and inclusion. 

Information about the role

The Museum seeks a Director, Digital Asset Management Ecosystem Strategy to lead the Museum’s efforts to harness the potential of our 97+ million historic digital assets and 3+ million institutional digital assets by creating the governance and systems required to allow Museum staff and audiences to discover and use the full range of the Museum’s historic and institutional digital assets.

This position resides initially within the Office of Museum Experience and Digital Media (MEDM). The Museum Experience and Digital Media Office (MEDM) creates and maintains experiences in physical and digital spaces that encourage people to think about how and why the Holocaust happened and the lessons it holds for us today. The office applies an audience-centered approach, best practices in storytelling, and new technologies across platforms to create experiences for a variety of audiences. These include the general public, Museum visitors, students, educators, policy makers, staff, and donors, among others.

This is a full-time donated position (non-Federal) paid with the Museum’s private funds. Salary is commensurate with experience.

Duties, and Responsibilities for the role

The incumbent is responsible for defining, developing, and supporting digital asset management ecosystem strategy (DAMES) functionality; maintaining complex collection information systems and the DAMS (digital asset management system); integrating DAMS, collection systems and archive systems; developing recommendations, solutions, and functionality for management and preservation of digital assets and metadata; and determining business processes to promote the usage, discovery, access, and delivery of digital assets.

Specifically, the incumbent will:

-Establish a new unit to support this effort, lead, and develop this team, including staff and contractors. This is a team with diverse technical expertise that collaborates with units across the institution.
-Collaborate with the cross-enterprise Digital Asset Management Ecosystem Strategy (DAMES) Governance Steering to set strategy, review and update DAMES policies and procedures to align with overall Museum goals and practices; and determine DAMES data and systems ownership.
-Lead metadata governance. This includes creating an inventory of the existing digital historic and institutional assets to determine the scope, quality, uses, and metadata requirements; establishing USHMM data standards and taxonomy that align with industry standards; and creating data quality management policies and workflows to support the agreed-upon standards and taxonomy.
-Support staff adoption through training. The incumbent will establish an ongoing training program for the DAMS that includes central, shared documentation for metadata standards and DAMS workflows.
-As owner of the DAMS (OpenText) and online public access to the Museum collection, lead enhancements, expand the data architecture to support new metadata needs, provide updated functionality and user experiences to support new workflow, and user needs.
-Develop and maintain a set of metrics that track the performance and use of the Digital Asset Management Ecosystem, and use the metrics to inform recommendations and roadmap planning.
-Maintain and share a three-year rolling roadmap for the digital asset management ecosystem (DAMES). This includes needs for staffing, training, metadata, workflow, policies, and system updates, and budget.
-Supervises a team of at least three staff providing leadership and direction, promoting Museum values, employee development, and team building/engagement. -Develops performance standards and job descriptions, approves leave, and evaluates performance of direct reports and the division overall. Responsible for management decisions related to hiring, promotions, awards, disciplinary actions, and other personnel matters.

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications for the role

-7 to 10 years of digital asset management experience in either a collecting institution, historical archives, or similar that has multiple types of digital assets such as documents, photographs, audio, and video. At least five years of experience in an institution that provides public online access to the digital collection and has at least 10 million assets in its collection.
-3+ years of experience leading, supervising, and managing a team of at least three staff in addition to contractors. This includes experience hiring, writing performance plans and reviews.
-Demonstrated expertise with documentation standards, digital asset management standards, metadata standards and management, and creating workflows to support them.
-Experience with collections management systems; enterprise Digital Asset Management Systems (DAMS); and an audience-facing web experiences such as collections.ushmm.org
-Experience creating and supporting digital systems that meet the needs of both the public (family history researchers, students, scholarly researchers, filmmakers, etc.) and staff; has worked with a DAMS that supports a content management system (CMS); has maintained a three-year plan and collaborated with colleagues across an organization to ensure all organizational needs are understood.
-Experience creating and managing administrative plans and budgets; writing donor reports and proposals; presenting vision, budget and plans to colleagues, leadership, team, and financial donors.
-Solid project management skills, including aspects of agile, sprint planning, and stakeholder management and skilled in facilitation, conflict resolution, roadmap planning, and continuous improvement.
-Ability to communicate effectively, in both written and spoken form, at all levels of the organization around project progress, risks, and opportunities, and in group presentations internally and externally.
-Effective collaborator and leader in an environment that can require multiple reviews and matrixed communication with buy-in at many levels; comfort with building new processes and flexibility with regard to changing circumstances and priorities. 

Preferred Qualifications for the role

-B.A. or B.S. in Library/Archival or Information Sciences or related fields
-Experience with collections management systems, EMu; enterprise Digital Asset Management Systems (DAMS), OpenText™and ResourceSpace; archives information management applications, ArchiveSpace;
-Familiarity with the history of 20th-century Europe and the Holocaust.

Interested applicants must send their resume and cover letter; applications without a cover letter will not be considered.

The application deadline for this position is April 19, 2026