In the past year, we have developed our production workflow by
articulating necessary tasks and procedures, preparing training
materials, and identifying bottlenecks. With our staff, students and
partners working in different physical areas and requiring ongoing
training and access to production data and instructional materials, we
have turned to a departmental wiki and Google Docs in our work
environment. Using these Web-based tools has alleviated IT
networking burdens, facilitated group collaboration, and minimized
workstation bottlenecks, especially with spreadsheet data entry. Both
tools feature extensive history versioning, which adds an extra layer of
security when working with groups; if any mistakes have been made,
an earlier iteration of a document can be retrieved with ease.
Our departmental Wiki pages have been easy to update, and have
simplified training by minimizing the need to re-explain complex
instructions. Thus far, we have placed approximately 100 instructional
documents in our wiki, covering topics that include: unit tasks,
student scheduling, best practices guidelines, workflow models,
training instructions for image capture, metadata entry, and
uploading collections into CONTENTdm. We have shared our Webbased
documents (training materials, equipment specifications,
metadata guidelines, etc.) with our immediate colleagues, and
portions of this content with wider networks of digital library
professionals at conferences. As of yet, the low cost and accessibility of
these tools has outweighed other options. However, we have begun to
outgrow this arrangement, and are currently in the process of
evaluating more comprehensive project management systems that will
help facilitate more sophisticated workflow planning.