Metadata Technical Specialist

Description

About Corbis
Corbis is a leading digital media company empowering advertisers, publishers and other media producers to break through the industry clutter through deep access to and integration with the world's great creative content. Corbis has offices in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia that serve more than 50 countries. For more information, visit www.corbisimages.com.

Who We Are
At Corbis we value innovation, creativity, teamwork and accountability. We have a results-oriented, customer-centric, fun and highly creative culture. Corbis employees receive a generous benefits package and enjoy working with and learning from the best and the brightest in this dynamic industry. We recognize and reward outstanding performance, and we encourage growth through our ongoing learning and development programs.

About the Metadata Production Team
Customer search experience is key to Corbis’ success and our metadata is critical to the search experience in all languages across multiple websites. The Metadata team is responsible for the ingestion of metadata for Corbis. The metadata from Corbis images is mapped to the keyword vocabulary and connects customers’ words with our images, powering search in a consistent and comprehensive way. The ingested metadata is tightly linked to the work done by the Vocabulary team and to troubleshooting search issues on CorbisImages.com, since search issues often intersect with recall, precision, automapping, and ingested, searchable metadata.

About the Position

The role of the Metadata Technical Specialist is to improve the customer search experience by combining programming, metadata, and taxonomy skills. The position is responsible for being part of the team that improves the Corbis metadata workflow and keywording quality assurance, as well as developing new software and tools for related areas that affect the controlled vocabulary, website search and auto-mapping systems.

The position splits time between executing metadata and keywording projects, participating in vocabulary-related initiatives such as localization support, software development, integration of systems, data migration, and third party metadata management and automapping. This position uses SQL to target customer-focused search and metadata improvements, and requires programming skills.

Duties and responsibilities:

•Software programming based on taxonomy and metadata needs, including establishing and maintaining existing tools, and developing new tools to improve the current metadata and taxonomy processes.
•Testing and reviewing results outsourced and crowdsourced metadata and taxonomy projects for quality purposes, to make process improvements, and to enable database automation.
•Developing and documenting metadata and taxonomy related projects.
•Leverage SQL to perform targeted vocabulary and metadata tasks, e.g. metadata gap analysis, outsourcing project setup, creative research vertical analysis, search log analysis, search evaluations and CV metrics.
•Troubleshoot search and metadata issues on a variety of websites, keywording or correcting wrong tags on media partner and contributor images as needed.
•Keep abreast of the latest metadata advances and trends and offer improvements to our semantic data, controlled vocabularies, metadata automapping processes and search features.
•Use SQL to identify and perform metadata quality assurance across the archive and improve the correctness and consistency of product data across collections. Improve the relevancy of customer search results by performing metadata clean-up tasks downstream of controlled vocabulary changes.
•Maintain up-to-date knowledge and understanding of Corbis, Veer and Greenlight keywording and vocabulary standards as well as database and search engine intricacies.
•Develop and document metadata and keywording standards.
Contacts:
This position will primarily have contact with the Metadata Production Manager, as well as with the other members of Metadata team, and with the Controlled Vocabulary team. Additionally this position will work closely with: Localization, Production, Technology Core Systems, Business Intelligence and Creative Intelligence.

Required Qualifications:
•3-5 years Taxonomy, Metadata experience
•Experience with Java, Perl and/or other programing languages
•Experience writing SQL queries and performing search log analysis
•Experience with search engines
•Experience with semantic web data and structures
•Experience with outsourcing tools and processes
•Experience with keyword and metadata editing
•Experience with bulk, text manipulation within Excel or Access
•Experience doing library and online research
•Strong English language writing skills, including proficiency in grammar and spelling
•Good visual interpretation skills
•Broad cultural awareness, including breaking news and popular culture
•Extremely precise attention to detail
•Experience developing taxonomies and thesauri

Recommended Qualifications:
·   A Master’s of Library or Information Science (or similar degree) is preferred, or significant related work experience
·   Fluency or familiarity with one or more foreign languages