Job Posting: Editor and Community Liaison Lead - AI and GLAM Coordination Initiative
The Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy is seeking an Editor and Community Liaison Lead for a new project that is part of its GLAM-E Lab.
This part-time role supports a six-month pilot project to help the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) community better share information about how they respond to bots scraping open-access collections. The Editor and Community Liaison will confer with GLAM institutions, learn about the measures those institutions have deployed to counter bots, and circulate lessons from those efforts in a weekly community-only newsletter. The Editor/Community Liaison will have primary responsibility for conceptualizing, writing, editing, and distributing this newsletter, with assistance and collaboration from the Engelberg Center and GLAM-E Lab.
Background
Over the past two to three years, digital GLAM collections have experienced a destabilizing uptick in traffic. A significant portion of this traffic can be attributed to swarms of bots that scrape these collections to build data sets for training AI models. These swarms can overload existing infrastructure and take collections offline (for more, see the GLAM-E Lab report Are AI Bots Knocking Cultural Heritage Offline?).
The size, sophistication, and resources for the technology teams supporting these online GLAM collections vary, from single part-time volunteers to full DevOps teams. The community has collectively responded to bot-related challenges in a number of ways, in an evolving game of cat-and-mouse with the parties deploying the bots.
The GLAM community has made use of new and existing channels to share information and intelligence about their efforts with regard to the bots. However, these efforts are constrained by limited capacity in the community to coordinate them.
This pilot project is an attempt to inject additional capacity into the community, with a focus on identifying experimental efforts to deal with scraping traffic and then rapidly disseminating information about those efforts within the community itself. The pilot project will also act as a demonstration of the approach to potential additional funders.
Role and Responsibilities
The Editor and Community Liaison Lead will have three primary tasks.
First, they will identify individuals and institutions within the GLAM community taking steps (both successful and less so) to mitigate the impact of bot traffic. They will conduct outreach to those institutions and open up communications with the teams responsible for managing such bot traffic. They will seek to understand why the team chose their particular approach, how the approach is implemented, and the impact of the approach on traffic.
Second, the Editor/Community Liaison will summarize and circulate lessons learned and circulate them to the larger community in a weekly email newsletter. This newsletter will not be publicly available, in order to extend the time between when a new technique is circulated within the GLAM community and when the bot-builders integrate countermeasures.
Third, the Editor/Community Liaison will use the discussions and newsletters to build a larger sense of shared community and mission within the diverse teams attempting to support the availability of GLAM collections.
Qualifications
Candidates for this position must have:
- Experience communicating technical concepts to a range of audiences
- Strong writing and editing skills
- Ability to manage projects independently
- Track record of setting and meeting deadlines
- Experience interviewing individuals and teams for publication
Ideal candidates for this position will also have:
- Experience building online communities and audiences
- Familiarity with the GLAM sector
- Familiarity with open access to culture
- Familiarity with technologies used to host content online
- Familiarity with bots, scraping, and other automated ways to access information online
Compensation and Structure
This is a 6 month pilot project under a part-time contract. The contract will pay $1,000/week for 26 weeks. Candidates must be eligible to work as a contractor in the United States, and have a flexible enough schedule to be able to hold occasional interviews in time zones from the U.S. West Coast to Europe. The role will report to Engelberg Center Executive Director Michael Weinberg.
Application Process and Timeline
Applications will be reviewed starting September 23, 2026 and on a rolling basis thereafter. We hope to begin the contract as early as October 2026 (if possible).
To apply, please complete this form:
https://forms.gle/1V63i4QxChqKc8L29
And email your resume to engelberg.center@nyu.edu, with the subject line “Editor and Community Liaison Lead Resume”. Feel free to leave the body of the email empty.
The Engelberg Center strongly encourages all people to apply (please circulate widely), especially those who hold the following intersecting identities: Black, Native or Indigenous, People of Color, LGBTQIA+, non-binary, poor or working class, persons living with disabilities, neurodivergent, young, speak English as a second language, and others with lived experience in overlooked and/or underestimated communities. If you have any questions about this position’s objectives, requirements, and/or language used in this job description, please email engelberg.center@nyu.edu.
