The 2018 Upper Midwest Digital Collections Conference (#UMDCC18) will be held on November 8-9th at St. Catherine University campus, St. Paul, Minnesota. The UMDCC provides opportunities for digital collections creators and curators in the region and beyond to network, share best practices, participate in hands-on workshops, and learn from leaders in digital cultural heritage.
Conceived in 2003 and established in 2004, the Digital Initiatives Program at Iowa State University Library strives to create archives-based and regional history digital resources that support scholarship, teaching, and learning. While present for nearly a decade, 2016 marked a turning point in Digital Initiatives. Digital Initiatives has transformed from a loosely organized unit, to a full program with a dedicated staff of six. As digital projects became a key initiative within the library, significantly growing in scale and complexity, interdepartmental collaboration became crucial and new teamwork strategies needed to be identified. As the Digital Initiatives Program revitalized its efforts, projects become more complex and staff members worked across multiple departments within the University Library.
This session will explore the challenges and opportunities of working collaboratively to create accurate and meaningful content for the web and how to build an effective way of sharing and promoting their use. Lack of workflows, duplication of efforts, outdated documentation, "who does what?" and "who do I talk to?" were some of the roadblocks the unit overcame. The session will highlight critical steps taken to define roles, develop workflows, and implement project planning. The audience will have insight into these developments and the challenges faced while developing a digital initiatives unit in an academic library.
