ABOUT US
From a 2018 founding to a platform serving 1,500+ institutions worldwide — here's how Coherent Digital came to be.
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, and Jenna Makowski — along with Carolina Tobon from the OECD. In 2020, Genevieve Croteau joined as COO, 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 were inspired by a talk and conversations with Christian Dupont, Associate University Librarian at Boston College, who conceived and led the development of Atlas System’s Aeon special collections request and workflow management software. Dupont 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 named one of Outsell's ‘Top 50 Emerging Companies.’
Our first database — over 300 virtual reality experiences for libraries. Won the ALPSP Award for Innovation in Publishing 2021 and Best Reference Database from Library Journal.
Indexing and preserving public policy reports from think tanks, IGOs, NGOs, and research centers worldwide.
Born-African content, partnered with the Big Ten Academic Alliance as founding members.
Expanded our mission beyond preservation to tracking how knowledge is used — analytics, reach, and audience engagement so organizations can demonstrate measurable real-world impact.
Acquired from Gibson Publications with Trojman Corporation — 85,000 books and documents from 80 publishers and 65 think tanks. Relaunched May 2022 as part of Canada Commons.
Including the South Asia Research Archive (world's largest South Asian materials database) and four history collections produced with The National Archives UK. Relaunched 2022 on South Asia Commons and History Commons.
Current Urban Documents and Index to Urban Documents. Incorporated September 2022 as World Cities and Local Governments within Policy Commons.
Twenty-four new collections expanding North American history coverage. Migrated to History Commons during 2024.
Founded in 1973 by Duncan McLaren at the University of Toronto. Microfilm collections on art, architecture, Canadian history, LGBTQ history and culture, and women's history — many extremely rare, sixty percent never digitized. Published on Canada Commons.
Founded in 2005 by Joe Collins to identify, license, and preserve influential magazines on public policy, culture, and social issues — particularly those at risk of disappearing.
In 2022, Coherent signed agreements with the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc) for the UK and the Center for Research Libraries for the US and Canada. Today Coherent has agreements with Lyrasis, GWLA, and other library consortia.
At the 2022 Coalition for Networked Information, Coherent and the Council for Library and Information Resources (CLIR) announced a partnership to collaborate on African digital materials and other digital initiatives.
Coherent has license agreements with publishers, film companies, newspapers, and content owners including the Guardian, Wiley, The National Archives in the UK, the South Asia Research Archive, and Moi University in Kenya. Coherent also distributes databases created by Sabinet, a leading South African electronic publisher.
Coherent Digital serves hundreds of thousands of researchers, students, policymakers, and practitioners across more than 1,500 organizations worldwide — universities, governments, think tanks, and corporations.
Our platform spans over 60 databases delivering tens of millions of items drawn from more than 40,000 content-producing organizations, capturing a vast body of real-world knowledge often missing from traditional academic sources.
We go beyond access by helping organizations understand and demonstrate the real-world impact of their work. Through analytics and tracking, we reveal how content is discovered, used, cited, and applied in research, teaching, and policy development — strengthening the case for continued investment in mission-driven knowledge.
