Start from where you are: Agile methods and digitisation projects
Digitisation projects face unusually diverse and intricate problems such as: collaboration between different institutions, creation of content, website development, developing learning and teaching materials, financial and resource restraints as well as team coordination.
Are there ways in which the specific and difficult problems faced by digitisation projects can be mitigated by investigating different project management methodologies?
Is there anything to learn from the software development community, and their use of agile methodology as an approach to project management?
Cascading Project Management
Many digitisation projects will be familiar with cascading or waterfall project management methodologies such as PRINCE2 . The PRINCE methodology is a very structured approach to project management, allowing distinct project activities such as: a beginning, middle and ending.
PRINCE encourages a robust and structured practice of documentation, allowing a record of progress and decisions and work packages.
It also results in a clear path being constructed; like stepping stones it guides the team on its project journey.
But there are problems with the PRINCE methodology that can directly effect the success of digitisation projects. Below are some of the failings which seem to imapct upon digitisation projects the most. For example:
- Each work package must be completed before being able to move on to the next (hence the waterfall/cascading analogy)
- PRINCE is not good at dealing with change. Most digitisation projects have to deal with software development that requires different versions and changes, and PRINCE is not geared for dealing with these itterations.
- Finally, it is often not enough to simply be linear and logical (think about all those failed Government IT projects)
So what is the alternative, and what can it bring to digitisation projects that a strict PRINCE methodology cannot?
Agile Methodologies
Typically used in software development, agile methodologies attempt to address some of the failings of the more standard approaches to project manage
ment.
Agile shifts the focus of project methodology so that it is the role of the user/customer that is at the heart of the planning for a project.
It also assumes that a project will inevitably change directions and focus and it allows teams to respond to the unpredictability of building software, and to respond and change the direction of a project throughtout its development.
So how can an agile approach to project methodology help digitisation projects?:
- Sustainability is inherently a part of agile methodology, for example: It’s transparent; all about customer collaboration, and; it’s a ‘humane’ way of working, encouraging staff retention.
- Rather than guessing timescales for particular tasks, agile allows for short bursts of development, which can be itterative, and allow for work to be constantly created and improved, all of which can be constrained within the timescales of the milestones.
- Testing, or for Digitisation projects Quality Assurance can be done at the end of each short cycle, mistakes recitfied, and new work spun off.
- Usability and evaluation is embedded within the work, rather than falling at the end.
- Changes can be made at intervals that don’t effect the overall milestones of the project. If you have a set workpackage, then chaging it can impact on every other workpackage.
- Breathing spaces are built into the project. The end of each cycle can be a time for reflection, and allow other team members to engage in areas they haven’t worked on.
- Everyone is involved in the project. Meetings will involve all parties, planning needs to have the involvement of every person, not just managers and directors. New ideas can be born and fed into the planning.
But Digitisation projects are a complex mix of intricate and diffuse problems, so a single project methodology may not necessarily be right to address all the issues projects can find themselves facing.
Is it really Either/Or?
Is there a case to be made for blending the two methodologies? Indeed, it may be that projects already do this, but without consciously acknowledging this.
Digitisation projects are almost always a two part process: the technical side (development of the web page, repository, metadata, OCR etc), and then the practical side of actually digitising the images/documents, transporting the documents etc.
It may be that Digitisation Projects can use a blend of the two methodologies, or can cherry pick from the various methodologies that exist to enhance and maximise the effecacy of their projects.
Project management should never just be an accepted part of the project, instead it must be constantly interogated and assesed as any other risk would be. Maybe our project methodologies are the biggest risk of all!
How to access and deposit learning resources - JORUM training events
Jorum is a free online service providing access to teaching and learning resources, for teaching and support staff in UK Further and Higher Education Institutions.
The Jorum team is organising a series of free training events, commencing September 2009. These sessions will provide a blend of presentations, demonstrations and hands-on activities, including searching and depositing resources into Jorum, and exploring issues surrounding the creation of learning and teaching materials.
Delegates will also have the opportunity to try out the new Jorum OER (Open Educational Resources) Deposit Tool, and see examples of other tools that can assist you in creating learning and teaching resources.
The events are free to attend and are aimed at staff from FE and HE institutions who are involved in producing learning and teaching resources.
Places are limited (according to venue), and will be awarded on a first come, first served basis.
The first training event is scheduled to take place at UCLAN (University of Central Lancashire) on Monday 14th September 2009.
Further training events are being planned – so be the first to know and sign up to the Jorum Update mailing list to receive the dates when they are released.
Visit the JORUM website for further information and booking.
Workshops: Collaborative Scholarly Editing
Following on from their Workshops on the Virtual Manuscript Room, the University of Birmingham are holding a two day workshop funded by JISC on Tools for Collaborative Scholarly Editing over the Web.
Thursday 24 September: ‘Actions: the State of the Art’
Representatives of projects around the world will give presentations on what they have done, are doing, or plan to do, to develop tools for collaborative scholarly editing over the Web. Presenters will be asked to focus on three problem areas: intellectual property/scholarly authority; sustainability and interoperability.
This day will be open to all (pre-registration required).
Friday 25 September: ‘Problems and Futures’
Short papers on the two themes ‘Problems’ and ‘Futures’ will be followed by discussions among invited participants.
- The ‘Problems’ section will centre on the three problem areas identified above: intellectual property/scholarly authority; sustainability and interoperability.
- The ‘Futures’ section will seek to map where we might go: as the world becomes ever more linked, and the texts we read and the scholars we work with ever more interconnected, what will scholarly editing be like?
Participation in this day will be by invitation only.
Attendance at the first day will be open to all. Prior registration is essential,by email to Richard Goode r.goode@bham.ac.uk.
The second day is by invitation only, with numbers restricted. If you believe you, your project or your centre, should have a voice in this day, please email Peter Robinson, p.m.robinson@bham.ac.uk.
For more information on attending, accomodation and funding visit the workshop website and find out how you and your project can be involved.
Workshop: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for the mass digitisation of textual materials: Improving Access to Text
24 September 2009 - UKOLN, University of Bath
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/ocr-2009/
FREE one-day workshop for
* Collection holders in HE and Cultural Heritage organisations
* Users of digitised content for teaching, learning and research
This workshop is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as
part of a series of workshops & seminars on Achievements & Challenges in
Digitisation & e-Content.
The workshop will provide an opportunity for participants to learn about the
current state-of-the-art in the digitisation of historical texts, to look at
improvements in digitisation techniques currently being explored in research
projects such as the EU-funded IMPACT project, and to explore how Optical
Character Recognition (OCR) is used in practical digitisation contexts and
workflows.
There will also be an opportunity for participants to investigate
the opportunities and challenges of the scholarly use of what is an
ever-increasing range of digitised content, supporting new interdisciplinary
ways of exploring cultural and social history, philology, and the history of
ideas.
Virtual Manuscript Room Workshops
The Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE), University of Birmingham are running a series of workshops as part of the JISC funded Virtual Manuscript Room project.
The workshops will be taking place on Tuesday and Wednesday 22-23 September, 2009
The first of the workshops, on Tuesday 22nd Sept will present a hands-on introduction to SDPublisher, the new XML publishing system developed by people associated with ITSEE and S
cholarly Digital Editions.
The second of the two worshops is entitled: ‘The Virtual Manuscript Room: linking resources and scholarship on the web’
This workshop will introduce the concepts behind the Virtual Manuscript Room project, and their implementation in the project.
Topics covered will include:
- The deployment of SDPublisher as the base technology of the VMR
- Reducing the costs: how to put lots of manuscripts online on a modest budget
- Integrating the VMR with Institutional repositories
- Using our image viewer
- Unified identifiers: the way forward for textual scholarship on the web?
Further information can be found on the Workshops webpage.
To register, or find out more: email Richard Goode (r.goode@bham.ac.uk.) or Peter Robinson (p.m.robinson@bham.ac.uk).
Winners of Islamic Studies funding for digitisation
JISC is happy to announce the two winners of its call for Islamic Studies Catalogue and Manuscript Digitisation, who are the Wellcome Library and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
The Wellcome Library will be digitising and cataloguing 500 Arabic-language manuscripts from their collection. They will be doing with assistance with the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, in Egypt.
This project will also be creating software for managing descriptive metadata for non-European manuscripts - a much-needed tool for those working in this field
The second project is a joint venture between the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and will be digitising around 10,000 records from their card catalogues of Islamic Studies manuscripts and making them available via a searchable interface.
These projects will be starting in September 2009, and due to finish in February 2011.
After Work, Guinness
Iconic British Poster Design Launched Online
From the ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ campaign to advertisements for Gillette and Guinness, the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) is pleased to announce that a further 100 images from the archives of designer Tom Eckersley have now been made publically available online.
The collection was formed by Eckersley and is held at the University of the Arts London Archives and Special Collections Centre. The collection is available online at:
http://www.vads.ac.uk/collections/TEC
A guide to Second Life for Lecturers
JISC has today realised its guide to using Second Life for lecturers and teachers.
The guide has been written by lecturers, for lecturers and aims to assist lecturers in their use of virtual worlds for teaching and learning.
The aim of the guide is to present the basics in order to help lecturers experiment, rather than them getting lost in mastering the detail of the virtual environment.
The Enriching Digital Resources strand of the JISC Digitisation Programme includes the Resurrecting the Past project.
This project uses the immersive virtual environment of Second Life as a way to recreate the Pompeii exhibition from the Crystal Palace exhibition, and uses the space to engage school children in a museum exhibition.
More details about the Ressurecting the Past project can be found on their website.
The new JISC guide to Second Life can be downloaded from the JISC website.