About Us
Born-Digital works with cultural heritage institutions, libraries, and museums to promote public access to their collections. We build intuitive and durable discovery and access systems with open source tools, often migrating digital objects and metadata from proprietary legacy systems and offline physical drives.
We take great pride in being a true ally to collections management teams, providing long-term support, maintenance, and continuous enhancement services. Our most fulfilling collaborations are enabled by pooled-resource funding models, allowing consortial clients to obtain and utilize systems which would be financially burdensome to support individually. We are proud to carry this work even further by contributing the fruits of our labor back into the open source community, lowering the cost of entry for additional institutions. We are similarly always energized by ambitious grant-funded initiatives. Learn more about our approach.
Our Team
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Noah Smith
Founder + CEO
Noah Smith co-founded Common Media in 2007 after completing a Master’s degree in Computer Science at Tufts University. Since then, Noah built Common Media into an award-winning boutique web development agency, then spun off the Born-Digital business unit to focus on digital repository software solutions. Noah was named to BusinessWest’s 2014 Forty Under 40 class.
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Sarah Goldstein
Director of Operations
Sarah has been supporting digital repository development, overseeing cultural heritage digital preservation/ DAM initiatives, and leading technology-centered library departments for over fifteen years. She has extensive experience with cross-institutional digital programs management in academic environments, and is happiest collaborating with libraries, archives, and museums to help them build and preserve digital collections.
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Dara Virks
Project Management Lead
Dara has 10+ years of experience managing technical projects. She spent several years overseeing online product development at Pearson Education, followed by 4 years managing Drupal projects. She has a Master’s degree in Information Technologies from Marlboro College.
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Danny Lamb
Lead Islandora Developer
Danny has over a decade of experience as a leader in the Islandora community. He came to Born-Digital in 2021 from the Islandora Foundation, where he served as the Islandora Technical Lead. Prior to his role at the Islandora Foundation, Danny spent nearly four years at discoverygarden, Inc. Danny is a long-time committer to the Islandora 7.x-1.x project and the primary architect of Islandora 2.0. He is also an experienced presenter and Islandora Camp instructor.
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Derek Merleaux
Senior Consultant + Project Manager
Derek has over 20 years of experience working with technology and collections in academic libraries, archives, and museums. He managed digitization programs and systems at Yale University Library’s Manuscripts & Archives and built a digital collection from the ground up at Florida International University’s Wolfsonian Museum and Rare Books Library.
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Liza Coburn
Senior Project Manager
Liza joined Born Digital at the end of 2021 with 10 years of experience in research data curation and digital asset management. Her previous roles include: consulting on and managing Islandora projects, serving as the data librarian at a world-renowned research institution and most recently, coordinating the Data Curation Network. Liza has a BA from Grinnell College and an MSLIS from the University of Illinois.
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Gavin Morris
Senior Systems Developer
Gavin is an enthusiastic and driven Systems Developer who has been creatively aligning information technology with business needs in a variety of industry sectors such as software development, healthcare, and communications since 2001. At Born-Digital, Gavin has most recently headlined efforts to Dockerize Islandora and now leads our systems team. Gavin is also an ISLE maintainer, and more recently has become an Islandora committer.
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Pat Dunlavey
Lead Archipelago Developer
Pat has been creating sophisticated web applications since 2004, when he helped to develop Advokit, an open source voter mobilization application for Rock the Vote. He has worked at Common Media and Born-Digital as a Senior Drupal Developer and Database Migration Specialist since 2011, now focusing on Islandora development and facilitating seamless content migrations.
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Alexander O'Neill
Senior Developer
Alexander has been a software developer in the digital preservation and academic publishing worlds for 15 years. Alexander was one of the original developers of Islandora at the University of Prince Edward Island and is delighted at the growth and health of the community and the project. Hobbies include writing and hosting pub-style trivia quizzes and reading history.
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Kelsey Socha-Bishop
Accounts & Project Manager
Kelsey has 8+ years of experience working with libraries, archives, and museums. Highlights from previous roles include the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) and the Westfield Athenaeum. Kelsey has a BFA in Theatrical Design & Production from the University of Michigan and an MLIS from Simmons University, where she also received a postgraduate certificate in archival management.
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Mitchell MacKenzie
Maintenance & Release Developer
Mitch has been developing with Drupal for over 15 years and feels privileged to remain involved in open source software. As a former contributor to the Islandora 7 project, Mitch also has experience with a variety of modern frameworks as a developer and product manager and has a deep interest in serverless computing.
Current Openings
Born-Digital currently has no positions listed.
If you are interested in a future position at Born-Digital, please fill out our general interest form by clicking the “Careers at Born-Digital” button to the right.
Born-Digital is committed to equal employment opportunity for all persons.
It is the policy of Born-Digital to provide equal employment opportunity without regard to race, color, national or ethnic origin, age, religion, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, military status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected under applicable federal or state law (collectively “Protected Characteristics” and singularly “Protected Characteristic”).
Internship Program
Born-Digital is committed to growing the Islandora and Archipelago communities and offers internships to students at Simmons University to help build the next generation’s skills. Our internship projects range from metadata remediation and migration to Drupal development. The ideal candidate is detail oriented and self-motivated, with experience in metadata, coding, Drupal development, or systems administration and is available to work 10 hours per week for a full semester. Born-Digital will work with each intern to craft a semester project that will satisfy the requirements of LIS 512 Advanced Field Experience in Library and Information Science.
Meet Our Interns
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Shriram Saravanan
Spring 2023 Technical Intern
Shriram is a student at the University of Prince Edward Island, and spent the spring of 2023 working on our automated testing suite. His tests will be used to validate new builds and monthly security releases.
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Will Hathaway
2021 Technical Intern
Will’s internship projects saw him using regular expressions to “clean” and reformat metadata as well as implementing Backstop.js to support quality assurance automation.
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Margaret Youngberg
Fall 2021 Metadata Intern
Margaret’s internship project had her creating sample collections from open sourced digital objects and their metadata that could be exported and ingested into Islandora. Margaret was subsequently hired full time!