On February 19th, I sat in on Part II of a project management webinar series hosted by the American Alliance of Museums and produced by the Coalition to Advance Learning in Archives, Libraries and Museums [which is supported by the Gates Foundation and OCLC (“The world’s libraries. Connected.”)] featuring folks from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
For those keeping count at home, that’s five national museum- & library-related institutions for one webinar series.
Since I missed Part I, I was rather at sea for the whole thing. Fortunately, Mary Ellen Davis from the Association of College & Research Libraries (six!) took notes in the comment section of the webinar interface to help n00bz like me keep track of the big take-aways. And so, I present to you:
Mary Ellen Davis’s Summary of Project Management 101: Evaluating Your Project Plan
- Be specific with tasks
- Look for partners
- Suggestion: distinguish audiences by use-value of collection
- Size of audience is not necessarily relevant to size of funding
- Digitization can benefit from outsourcing or partnering to avoid big investment in overhead, software, and hardware
- Having right partners can lower cost and increase your audience for our work
- Make sure project overview matches audiences
- Funders look for projects with specific outcomes
- Be clear on who the primary audience for your project is and focus on framework for collaboration
- When collaborating, there is an advantage to starting small and learning about each other and building trust and support
- If material is digitized and posted without clear permissions, make sure you have a take-down notice with it to protect yourself and the institution
- Threat of litigation is lower than we think
- Project management is not just outward-facing – you can project-plan to meet the needs of the organization
So, um, not terribly enlightening in summary form. I guess you had to be there…(or here, if you’re itching to experience it yourself.)
The above is not radically changing my approach to project management right now. But it wasn’t time wasted — here are two things I’m filing away for myself:
- This list of project management resources compiled by OCLC is righteous!
- And it may not be news to you, but I learned that librarians are tech nerds. Like, head and shoulders above most museum people I know (besides the Code | Words crew and Center for the Future of Museums folk, natch). It’s a brave new world out there…
mindful museums 