Senior Director Archives, Licensing & Digital Asset Operations

This is a Full Time Job


Madison Square Garden may be best known for being home to the New York Knicks, New York Rangers and Live Events, but its storied history extends back to 1879 when the then-open-air arena graced the intersection of E. 26th Street and Madison Avenue. As Senior Director, Archives Licensing & Digital Asset Operations, you will be responsible for overseeing strategy and operations for physical and digital properties and content, including over 300,000 artifacts & over a petabyte of digital media assets, that help tell stories of the World's Most Famous Arena, and its affiliated properties: The Theater at MSG, Radio City Music Hall, the Beacon & Chicago Theatres, Sphere, the New York Knicks, New York Rangers, Hartford Wolfpack, Westchester Knicks and Knicks Gaming. You should have experience managing an extensive collection of media, content and properties consisting of contemporary material culture, fine art, ephemera, and digital media of varying formats; conducting inventories; developing strategies, including monetization, creating workflows, instilling process, and policies, supervising external vendors; and overseeing exhibit installations/de-installations. Additionally, this position requires prior experience with strategic collections planning, rights management, licensing, and reproduction. He/she/they will work in lockstep with MSG's Legal team to put license and acquisition agreements in place, and to determine usage parameters and manage both internal and external research requests. Comfortability working in research and archival settings, as well as in a corporate office, is essential.

What will you do?
• Develop, implement, create synergies, and scale technology solutions across Archives (H5) , Digital Asset Management (AWS) and Photography Systems (Photo Shelter).
• In collaboration with the internal team and external partners, prioritize collections for digitization and research.
• Will develop guidelines, where appropriate and with Legal oversight, to help advise internal partners on asset permissions. Ensures that copyright and usage restrictions, release of assets/collections, and rights and reproduction information is diligently tracked in object records.
• Develop global strategies and solutions to access, showcase and monetize collections.
• Provides administrative collections oversight by refining the Company’s Collections Management Policy. Works with Legal to put standard gift, loan, license, and acquisition agreements in place and serves as the primary point of contact with private individuals and outside institutions in gift and loan negotiations.
• Implements workflows for physical and digital asset collection and ensures thorough provenance documentation.
• Responsible for recommending archivally-sound methods for artifact display and maintenance at MSG properties. Should proactively propose preservation and care of assets and maintenance of collections.
• Maintain up to date historical records on concerts/events at our venues, team records and sports properties events.
• Develops plans and policies on how employees and contractors can access assets that encompass responsibilities such as management of usage rights and file permissions while managing rights down to the asset level.
• Create process and workflow to inform how and when digital & physical assets are archived.
• Responsible for maintaining and enhancing easily accessible archival system housing all MSG related physical and digital assets.
• Provide support to business units by pulling together information on historic sports, entertainment, media, venue, production, event and creative events in a thorough and timely manner for presentations or project needs.
• Provide areas of opportunity and reporting to advance the use of the assets and tell the story of company history.

What do you need to succeed?
• 12-15 years’ experience building workflows, procedures, strategies, rights management, and policies for collecting and accessing legacy physical and digital assets in a corporate environment.
• Experience working with physical collections and born-digital assets, electronic records, websites, and photo/video.
• Comfortability using collections management databases. Previous experience refining cataloguing practices, overseeing quality control and metadata clean-up, strongly preferred.
• Knowledge of methods and processes for conducting historical research and preserving and maintaining assets.
• Expected to have an established professional network, and excellent relationship-building skills to create and nurture partnerships with colleagues, external vendors, other institutions, artists, collectors, and stakeholders.
• Excellent project management and organizational skills, plus the ability to manage multiple projects simultaneously.
• Experience managing departmental budgets.