Unit 12 – Project Management

Out of the many readings for this week the one that really struck a chord with me was the “How Not to Run a Digital Library Project”.  Two other librarians and I had prepared a presentation for the Bucknell Digital Libraries Conference entitled “How Not to Build a Digital Archive.”  While none of us were the head of that project, it was interesting to read the article and see some of the similarities to our project and some of the things that went wrong.  I won’t attempt to hit all of the similar points (there were many) just a couple of the highlights.

“When it’s late add more people” — We were using student aides to scan and enter metadata for our images.  We used students from the library staff as well as hiring students specifically for this project.  When we began to feel the crunch at the end of the life of the project, not being anywhere close to the promised 5,000 images that were proposed at the beginning of the project, we took on more student aides and pushed them to contribute more images to the pool.  While in theory this was a good idea, in practice it has been anything but.  We don’t allow images to go straight from the students to the repository.  All images must be reviewed for image scan quality and metadata quality before being given a final review for inclusion in the archive.  While we did add more people and images to the ingestion of the images, we failed to add people to the end of the review stage.  As a consequence, we’ve ended the project with more images in the queue than actually in the repository.

“Forget planning – it’s too time consuming” — One of the biggest issues with the project from the start was the lack of a home.  There was talk of servers and storage but nothing about where these servers were to be located and who would do the “care and feeding”.  As Cervone points out “an important aspect of planning is that it generates buy-in.”  While there was definitely planning going on this omission caused a major problem in the later third of the project, due to lack of buy-in.  The group had been planning on using freely available open source software and as such hadn’t budgeted anything for software.  So after trying out different OSS for a year the committee approached the library about hosting the project.  Administration came back with the answer “Sure.  If it’s a funded soultion from our ILS provider.”  To make a long story short the University came through with the money for the software.  If this problem would have been approached from the beginning then maybe we wouldn’t have been spinning our wheels for an entire year looking at software solutions that we didn’t end up using.