LAC Federal is seeking an experienced Project Manager / Senior Serials Cataloger to lead a comprehensive cataloging, metadata enhancement, and bibliographic records modernization program supporting a major federal cultural heritage and research institution in Washington, DC. The successful candidate will oversee a team of professional catalogers, library technicians, and remote foreign-language cataloging specialists while providing hands-on expertise in complex serials cataloging, bibliographic data remediation, and quality assurance. This position will play a key role in optimizing workflows following a recent migration to Ex Libris Alma, resolving legacy metadata issues, reducing cataloging backlogs, and improving access to extensive multilingual research collections. The ideal candidate combines advanced technical cataloging skills, strong project management capabilities, and demonstrated proficiency cataloging materials in at least one language other than English.
Duties and Responsibilities
- Lead daily operations of a cataloging and metadata support program, including work planning, staffing coordination, task assignments, scheduling, productivity monitoring, and performance reporting.
- Perform and oversee complex original and copy cataloging of print and electronic serials using RDA, MARC 21, OCLC WorldCat, and applicable CONSER practices.
- Direct the remediation of legacy serials records, including title changes, bibliographic relationships, enumeration and chronology, holdings inconsistencies, duplicate records, and obsolete metadata.
- Manage bibliographic data cleanup and quality improvement following migration to Ex Libris Alma, including resolution of UTF-8 encoding errors, diacritical inconsistencies, authority control issues, and malformed MARC records.
- Establish and maintain standardized cataloging workflows, procedures, quality-control processes, and production benchmarks for original cataloging, copy cataloging, and metadata enhancement.
- Supervise and coordinate professional catalogers, paraprofessional library technicians, and remote specialists providing cataloging support for foreign-language materials.
- Personally perform original and copy cataloging in at least one required foreign language, ensuring accurate description, subject analysis, transliteration, and authority control.
- Oversee multilingual cataloging workflows, including digital surrogate preparation, assignment to remote language specialists, OCLC record creation or enhancement, and import into Alma.
- Develop and execute cataloging backlog reduction strategies, including workload assessments, prioritization, production tracking, and resource allocation.
- Coordinate bibliographic and holdings maintenance activities, including inventory reconciliation, withdrawals, disposition processing, and updates to Alma holdings and item records.
- Monitor cataloging quality, conduct technical reviews, resolve complex bibliographic issues, and ensure compliance with established metadata standards and institutional policies.
- Prepare regular project status reports, production metrics, quality assurance findings, risk assessments, and recommendations for process improvement while serving as the primary operational liaison with designated customer representatives.
