Project Management: Coordinating Progress

Our project is moving forward along two basic tracks. The first is team accomplishments, and progress here depends heavily on synchronization. For example, the Design Team needed to complete its designs and specifications for logo and home page before the Development Team could begin working on implementing them. The second track is individual accomplishments. Each individual has chosen an historic Morninigside site, and is required to create three exhibit pages, each of which explores some aspect of it. Each of us is also charged with uploading twenty documentary items, some of which should be integrated into the exhibits, while others can simply enrich the scope of the site as a whole. Within the overall deadline of December 2014, when our project is slated to have its initial launch, the timing of individual accomplishments is quite flexible.

Nevertheless, various group members have expressed the idea that further individual progress on items and/or exhibits would actually be helpful to give us all a greater sense of where the project is going. With this in mind, two open labs have been scheduled for this coming week in which individuals can work on any aspect of the project they choose. Bob Scott and Alex Gil will be on hand at the open labs to provide expert guidance as needed for matters such as the creation of bibliographies in Zotero and the uploading of documentary items to the project site. Near the beginning of the project, we all had training in both and we already have for each Morningside site an initial body of work to return to and expand upon. There is a lot of energy in the group right now, in these last weeks of summer; and we are all looking forward to the open labs.

John L. Tofanelli

Author: John L. Tofanelli

John is Columbia’s Librarian for British and American History and Literature. His research interests include literature and religion in 18th- and 19th- century Great Britain, textual criticism, and book history. He has enjoyed the chance to explore the early architectural history of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine.