Available Position (Company name withheld)

DIRECTOR, RECORDING & ARCHIVE INNOVATION

Department: Recording & Archive

Division: Programs

Location: NY Tri-State area preferred.

Travel Percentage: 10%

Reports To: Chief Strategy & Program Innovation Officer

Status: Full Time/ Regular/ Exempt/Non-union

Salary: $100,000–$120,000

THE ROLE

StoryCorps is in a new era. We are an organization that has spent 20 years building the largest collection of authenticated, consented human voices in American history — and we are now asking a more ambitious question: how do we ensure those stories never stop traveling? Our organizational strategy, One Story, Many Lives, is a mandate that every story we collect is designed from the start to live multiple lives across formats, platforms, and audiences. The Director of Recording and Archive Innovation is the entrepreneurial, technology-forward archival leader who makes that possible from the inside out.

This is not just a caretaker role, but a builder's role, too. The Director is responsible for stewarding the integrity, quality, and accessibility of StoryCorps' archive — over 83,000 born-digital signature audio interviews and more than 240,000 interviews recorded through the StoryCorps App — while simultaneously pursuing new approaches, methodologies, technologies, and partnerships that expand how we capture, preserve, and disseminate human stories. In the One Story, Many Lives era, the archive is not a vault. It is an active, appreciating asset. The Director is its chief steward and its chief innovator.

The Director leads the Recording and Archive department in developing policies, procedures, and best practices — and in questioning those policies when new technology or new methods offer a better way forward. This includes overseeing the integration of emerging recording technologies, contributing to the development of AI-powered archive tools, and ensuring that how we collect stories is always informed by where those stories need to go.

The Director works closely with the Digital, Interview Collection, Studios, and Marketing teams to ensure the archive is not only preserved but activated — surfaced, licensed, distributed, and experienced by new audiences in new ways. They serve as a primary contact for external archive partnerships, rights of use requests, and represent StoryCorps' archive expertise to the Library of Congress, peer institutions, and the field at large. 

The Director oversees a small but expert team of archivists, recording specialists, and contractors. Candidates with experience working at the intersection of archival practice, emerging technology, digital product management, and content distribution — and who are energized by the idea of making a historic archive more alive and more useful every year — are strongly encouraged to apply.

WHAT YOU’LL DO 

Archive Stewardship

• Serve as primary liaison with the Library of Congress's American Folklife Center and other major archive partners, maintaining and deepening StoryCorps' most important institutional relationships.
• Develop, document, and implement policies, procedures, and best practices for archiving StoryCorps interviews; oversee all archival processing functions and manage the lifecycle of StoryCorps' digital assets, including file transfer, processing, and dissemination of audio, photo, and interview records.
• Collaborate with the Digital team on oversight and upkeep of file systems, automated infrastructure, AWS storage, and the Online Archive — ensuring storage and delivery systems align with best practices for born-digital preservation.
• Oversee StoryCorps' research and content use program, including standards and guidelines governing archive access by scholars, educators, and commercial partners.

Recording Technology and Field Innovation

• Lead the evaluation, piloting, and adoption of emerging recording technologies and methodologies — including portable professional systems, virtual platforms, and community-based collection models — that expand where and how StoryCorps captures stories.
• Work with the Interview Collection Unit to determine optimal equipment for recording venues, establish field procedures, and provide technical support to staff.
• Manage the creation of Recording and Archive sections of the Facilitator Training Manual; oversee the design and delivery of corresponding training to field staff.

Archive Activation and Distribution

• Develop curatorial experiences and content partnerships that bring the archive to new audiences — operating from the conviction that the archive grows more valuable as it is used, not only as it is preserved.
• Serve as a key partner in the development of AI-powered archive tools, and work closely with the Digital team to ensure the archive is central to the user journey and as discoverable as it is comprehensive.
• Oversee StoryCorps' rights of use and content licensing program, ensuring archive access for research, education, brand partnerships, and commercial licensing remains consistent with participant consent and StoryCorps' values.

Strategic Leadership and Cross-Departmental Collaboration

• Participate in organizational strategic planning, bringing an innovation-forward perspective to institutional decision-making; lead cross-departmental project teams relevant to archive policy, procedure, and product development.
• Work closely with facilitation teams, Studios, Marketing, Interview Collection, and Development — serving as the connective tissue between the archive and the teams who depend on it.
• Support Development in grant writing and funding research for archive and recording innovation initiatives.
• Supervise full-time archivists, recording specialists, and interns; manage department budget; support interdepartmental efforts to increase diversity in the archive.

ABOUT YOU

Required:

• You believe in and are energized by the mission of StoryCorps — and by the idea that a historic archive can be a living, generative, ever-more-valuable asset.
• You hold a Master's degree in Library and Information Science or a related field, or a Bachelor's degree plus equivalent relevant work experience.
• You have experience supervising staff and evaluating staff performance.
• You have experience with digital preservation and user-facing access platforms.
• You have experience developing, delivering, and evaluating training — especially technical training.
• You have knowledge of and experience working with professional recording equipment and digital audio.
• You have demonstrated planning ability, leadership, sound judgment, and the capacity to develop proposals for improving policies and procedures.
• You are curious about emerging technologies — AI-assisted retrieval, portable recording systems, conversational interfaces — and excited to evaluate and pilot them in a real-world context.
• You understand that distribution is part of the archive's mission: that a story preserved but not found has not fully fulfilled its purpose.
• You have excellent interpersonal, written, and verbal communication skills, and can translate technical concepts for non-technical audiences.
• You are organized, adaptable, and comfortable operating in a growing, changing organization where the strategy is evolving in real time.
• You demonstrate cultural competence and the ability to work successfully with diverse groups of people.
• You are willing to travel occasionally to support recording, archiving, or organizational activities.

Preferred:

• Master's of Library and Information Science or equivalent 
• Experience contributing to the development and implementation of software and databases.
• You have advanced skills in Excel/Sheets, experience in Wordpress, SQL, and Python. Experience with AWS and other cloud infrastructure is a plus.
• Experience working with oral history projects or collections is a plus.
• Experience with public-facing archives, user experience, and product design.

ABOUT STORYCORPS

Founded in 2003, StoryCorps has given over 600,000 people, in all 50 states, the chance to record interviews about their lives. The award-winning organization preserves the recordings in its Online Archive and at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered, and shares select stories with the public through StoryCorps’ podcast, NPR broadcasts, animated shorts, digital platforms, and best-selling books. These powerful human stories reflect the vast range of American experiences, engender empathy and connection, and remind us how much more we have in common than what divides us. StoryCorps is especially committed to capturing and amplifying the voices least heard in the media. The StoryCorps MobileBooth, an Airstream trailer that has been transformed into a traveling recording booth, crisscrosses the country year-round, gathering the stories of people nationwide. Learn more at storycorps.org.

In-Office Work: 

Working at the StoryCorps office is optional except in certain circumstances, such as in-person training, if your position requires some in-office presence, or if your manager needs an in-person individual or team meeting. 

For those who prefer to work in the office, that option remains. 

IN-OFFICE WORK:

Working at the StoryCorps office is optional except in certain circumstances, such as in-person training, if your position requires some in-office presence, or if your manager needs an in-person individual or team meeting. For those who prefer to work in the office, that option remains.