Flexible Project Planning for Digital Scholarship Centers: A Framework for Managing Multiple Projects of Varying Technical Complexity

Staff in digital scholarship centers often assist with a variety of digital projects that require different methodologies and skill sets, and so the projects can be hard to organize and manage. This project briefing focuses on a framework that the Center for Digital Scholarship at Brown University has created over the past year to flexibly adapt project planning documents around the experience of the given team and the technical and theoretical skills the project requires. In digital scholarship, planning for a project that involves methods that the specialists are deeply knowledgeable about requires a different approach from a project that involves substantial experimentation and learning along the way. Digital scholarship work more often falls into the latter category. In this briefing, I offer one way for digital scholarship centers to plan projects based on the knowledge their staff have and the knowledge their staff want to have. I also share the project planning templates from Brown University’s Center for Digital Scholarship that we created to organize our projects now and preserve them into the future. One of these templates is our newly released close out report, a template that contains questions and checklists to ensure that all necessary information about a recently completed project is available in a short two-page brief.