Book & Text Studies: Humanities Computing
6.1. Project Management
Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa
Friday 12 September
Melissa Terras
Edward Vanhoutte
Certified by the Text Encoding Initiative
- I.1. Friday 12 September: a.m.
- I.2. Project Management
- I.3. This is a difficult session for us
- I.4. Instigation: So you want to run a project?
- I.5. Why digitizing?
- I.6. Selecting and Assessing
- I.7. Assessing the materials
- I.8. Assessing the infrastructure
- I.9. Assessing the user needs
- I.10. Assessing the status of the copyright.
- I.11. Assessing the risks
- I.12. Deciding & Defining the Project
- I.13. Detailed description
- I.14. Detailed description
- I.15. Detailed description
- I.16. Costing
- I.17. People Costs
- I.18. Technical Costs
- I.19. Building Costs
- I.20. Consumable
- I.21. Other
- I.22. Maintaining the records
- I.23. Grant application
I. Friday 12 September Morning Project Management
Friday 12 September: a.m. |    1 of 23 |
- 8.30-12.00: 6.1. Project Management
- Instigation
- Selecting and assessing
- Deciding
- Defining the project
- Costing
- Maintaining the records
- Risk assessment and management
- Grant applications
Project Management | 2 of 23 |
After this course, you should be aware of the issues involved in:
- planning and instigating a project
- costing a project
- describing a project
- running a project
- maintaining a project
- evaluating a project
This is a difficult session for us | 3 of 23 |
- You may be a money generating wonder
- You may be a project spitting wizard
- You may be a whistle shouting morkel
- You may be a consulting adviser to many projects
→ Help us out on this one
Instigation: So you want to run a project? | 4 of 23 |
- Most projects start as an idea:
- Reactive: respons to an external call or funding opportunity
→ Money is available, but which project and how to get the dosh?
→ Thematic or scholarly restrictions by the funding body (subject area, genre, time...) - Proactive: your institution initiates a project based on assessment of the collection or the needs
→ Project is defined, but how to get it funded?
- Reactive: respons to an external call or funding opportunity
Ideal situation: your institution has defined a project based on assessment, and the funding opportunity pops up.
→ But we're not living in an ideal world
Why digitizing? | 5 of 23 |
- Preservation
- Increasing access: high demand vs. historical or intellectual importance
- Functionality
- Collaboration with other project
- Increasing awareness
- Generating income
Selecting and Assessing | 6 of 23 |
Beowulf project?
→ The 'treasures' of the institution may not necessarily reflect the demand from users.
- Assessing the materials
- Assessing the infrastructure
- Assessing the user needs
- Assessing the status of the copyright
Assessing the materials | 7 of 23 |
- What is your corpus like? (type and numbers): journals, letters, pages, photographs, posters, postcards, manuscripts, ...
- Formats and nature of the material: medium, size, black and white vs colour, number of colours, handwritten vs printed
- What is the overal condition of the material?
- Are there any existing non-digital surrogates of the material (slides, photographs, microfilm) and what is their quality and condition?
- What is the overal condition of the material?
- Documentation and catalogues of the material? Can this be used for the naming of the files?
- What is the copyright situation?
- Are any of these materials yet digitized?
- Could the physical format of the material tolerate possibel digitisation?
- Is there need for preparation of the materials? (bindings, light-sensitive materials,...)
- Will there be a need for special digitisation equipment? (cradles,...)
- Can the material be removed to an external location? → Insurance
Assessing the infrastructure | 8 of 23 |
- Do you have digitization equipment in-house?
- What is your current machine park?
- What is your current software situation?
- Local support?
- Do you have trained staff?
- Do they have time in their schedules?
- Do you have office space for the project officer(s)?
- Furniture, computer, telephone, copier, fax machine,...
Assessing the user needs | 9 of 23 |
- Who is your audience?
- Why?
- How big is your audience?
- National of international?
- Statistics from other projects?
- How are you publicizing the project and its results?
- Case reports
- Consultation with user representatives
Assessing the status of the copyright. | 10 of 23 |
- The material is out of copyright
- The material is in copyright, but the rights to re-use are securable
- The material is in copyright, but the ease by which the rights to re-use can be secured is unknown
- The material is in copyright and securing the rights to use it will be difficult or impossible
Assessing the risks | 11 of 23 |
- Technology
- Physical infrastructure
- Staff & staff procedures
- Data integrity
- Documentation
- Insurance
Deciding & Defining the Project | 12 of 23 |
- Cherry-picking
- Prioritizing
- Delimiting
- Definition
→ this leads to a detailed description of your project
Detailed description | 13 of 23 |
- Either on set forms
- Or own format
Detailed description | 14 of 23 |
- Full name of the project
- Abbreviated name which is put on each page in the top righthand corner
- Term of the project
- Budget asked for
- Directors of the project with contact address
- Participators
- Description of the project:
- Contextualisation and definiton of the problem
- Contents
- Objectives
- Contextualisation
- Work schedule (phased)
- Location and description of the materials:
LocationExtent of the corpusAccessibility of the materialsCopyright status
- Project location and exising infrastructure
- Output
- Products: partners?
- Immediate relevance
- Promotion and publicity
- Budget
Detailed description | 15 of 23 |
Get the technical stuff right!!!!!!
Costing | 16 of 23 |
- People Costs
- Technical Costs
- Building Costs
- Consumables
- Other
People Costs | 17 of 23 |
- Salaries
- Package
- Medical Aid etc
- Inflation and bonuses
- Staff Training
- Recruiting
- Advertising
- Interviewing etc
- Insurance
- Membership of Organisations
- Subscriptions
- Visitors
- Consultants
- Health and safety
- Costs with liasing with other staff from other organizations
Technical Costs | 18 of 23 |
- Hardware
- Machines
- Desktops
- Portables
- Servers
- Peripherals
- Scanners
- CD Burners
- Cameras
- Printers
- Projectors
- Etc
- Upgrades of hardware
- Machines
- Software
- Initial costs
- Licensing for other machines
- Training programs
- Documentation
- Upgrades
- Repairs and maintenance
- Insurance
- Networking costs
- Internet
- Intranet
Building Costs | 19 of 23 |
- Office space
- Archive space
- Equipment
- Tables, chairs, etc
- Air conditioning, heating etc
- Insurance
Consumable | 20 of 23 |
- Electricity
- Heating, lighting, air con, etc
- Communication infrastructure
- Telephones
- Internet
- Office consumables
- Printer cartridges
- Removable storage devices
- Disks
- CD-ROM
- Paper
- Postage
- Etc
- Petty Cash
- Entertainment costs
- Contingency fund
- Copyright
Other | 21 of 23 |
- Banking Costs
- Transport
- Between sites
- Digital data
- Publishing
- Advertising and Publicit
- Development for the web
- External Backup services
- Grant Applications
- Feasibility Studies
Maintaining the records | 22 of 23 |
Once your project is finished, it's not over yet
- Secured storage of your data
- Data backups
- Refreshing the data: every x years
- where is it at the moment?
- accessibility check
- error check
- Documentation
Grant application | 23 of 23 |
- Networking: know of opportunities
- Inventory of potential funders, programmes, calls
- Sevetral small amounts of money do make a big sum
- Letters of support (associations, TEI,...)