Our beginnings

Coherent was founded in 2018 by Stephen Rhind-Tutt and Toby Green. Stephen had previously cofounded Alexander Street Press. Toby was previously Publisher and COO at the OECD and created the iLibrary database.

Soon after, they were joined by five executives who had previously worked at Alexander Street—Peter Ciuffetti (creator of KnowledgeCite), André Avorio (creator of the Open Music Library), Eileen Lawrence (cofounder of Alexander Street), Elizabeth Robey (counseling publisher), and Jenna Makowski (anthropology publisher)—along with Carolina Tobon from the OECD. In 2020, Genevieve Croteau joined the company as COO, coming from  ITV America and the Washington region's NPR station, taking over a wide range of responsibilities including sales, marketing, finance, and human resources. Today the team numbers more than thirty-five staff located in seven countries on four continents.

The principles for the company came from an article by Christian Dupont, Associate University Librarian at Boston College and founder of the Aeon special collections software. He posited a series of principles behind what he describes as a call to massively externalize user data and collections data in order to build a library and archives that are truly of the web, by the web, and for the web. These principles formed the basis for a system of rapid, low-cost cataloging and a fault tolerant retrieval engine, now known as the Coherent Commons platform.

In January 2023, Coherent was one of Outsell’s “Top 50 Emerging Companies.”

In November 2020, Coherent launched Mindscape Commons. The database indexed and delivered over 300 virtual reality experiences and was the first VR database collection specifically designed for libraries. Developed in collaboration with Pennsylvania State University, Mercer University, and others, it was formally launched in March 2021. It went on to win a number of awards including the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing 2021 and Best Reference Database from Library Journal.

Policy Commons followed shortly after, indexing and preserving public policy reports from think tanks, IGOs, NGOs, and research centers from around the world. The database uses techniques suggested by Christian Dupont’s article to increase the speed and lower the cost of indexing and preserving materials, including content created by organizations no longer active, therefore in danger of disappearing.

In 2022, Coherent announced its intent to build Africa Commons, with a mission to enable the discovery, access, and preservation of born-African content. Africa Commons was launched in November 2022. The (then fourteen) universities of the BTAA (Big Ten Academic Alliance) were founding members.

Additional Commons launched subsequently include History Commons, Canada Commons, South Asia Commons, Applied Science Commons, Oceania Commons, and Latin America Commons.

In July 2021, Coherent entered an agreement with Trojman Corporation to acquire the Canadian Electronic Library from Gibson Publications. This collection of 85,000 books and documents from approximately eighty publishers, sixty-five think tanks, and over 300 public policy organizations is used by more than 200 Canadian academic institutions. Books were licensed from major Canadian university presses (French and English), a variety of literary presses, and other commercial presses that cover Canadian topics. The database was relaunched in May 2022 as part of Canada Commons.

In November 2021, Coherent acquired the digital primary source collections from Taylor & Francis. They included the South Asia Research Archive, the world’s largest database of South Asian materials for libraries, and four history collections produced in collaboration with The National Archives in the UK. The South Asia Research Archive was relaunched in July 2022 on South Asia Commons. The history databases were relaunched in October 2022 as part of History Commons.

In June 2022, Coherent acquired the Current Urban Documents and Index to Urban Documents databases from ILM Corporation. In September 2022, these were incorporated in a new database within Policy Commons called World Cities and Local Governments.

In June 2023, Coherent acquired Accessible Archives. This brought twenty-four new collections to Coherent’s portfolio and expanded its North American history coverage. During 2024, the Accessible collections were migrated to Coherent’s History Commons platform.

In February 2024, Coherent acquired McLaren Micropublishing, a company founded in 1973 by Duncan McLaren, a librarian at the University of Toronto. For the next five decades, his company specialized in creating microfilm collections on a wide range of topics including art, architecture, Canadian history, LGBTQ history and culture, and women's history. Many of the materials in the McLaren collections are extremely rare, and more than sixty percent of them had never been digitized. The McLaren collections are published on the Canada Commons platform, further strengthening our Canadian offerings.

In February 2022, Coherent signed an arrangement with the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc) to make its databases available in the United Kingdom. In June 2022, Coherent signed a similar agreement with the Center for Research Libraries for the United States and Canada. In November 2022, at the Coalition for Networked Information, Coherent and the Council for Library and Information Resources (CLIR) announced an arrangement to collaborate in the creation of African digital materials and other digital initiatives. Coherent has license agreements with numerous publishers, film companies, newspapers, and other content owners, including the Guardian, Wiley, The National Archives in the UK, the South Asia Research Archive, Moi University in Kenya, and many others. It also distributes databases created by Sabinet, a leading South African electronic publisher.

As of early 2025, Coherent Digital serves hundreds of thousands of researchers, students, and faculty from over 1,250 organizations around the world.  It has over sixty databases that  index, preserve, and deliver more than twenty-five million items.