| Wrapping Up a Digital Project |
| Share What You Learned |
| For Recollection Wisconsin Content Partners: Digital Readiness Community of Practice |
| Resources and Tools |
Wrapping Up a Digital Project
As you approach the end of a project, think ahead to how you will wrap it up. Tying up loose ends, gathering documentation, and taking time to reflect will help make your next project even more successful!
Steps in wrapping up a digital project:
- Connect with partners. Make sure you’re on the same page regarding any ongoing commitments. Consider establishing an MoU or other written agreement if you don’t already have one in place.
- Help transition your team members. If you hired short-term staff, offer to help them with references or a resume and cover letter review, if appropriate.
- Wrap up the financial and administrative end. Close out any contracts, confirm all invoices are paid, submit required grant reports, etc.
- Preserve project documentation. Assemble any workflows and training materials, meeting minutes, reports, partnership agreements, donor agreements, and logins and passwords for hosting platforms, cloud storage, software tools, or shared workspaces such as Dropbox or Google Suite
- Evaluate and reflect. Arrange a project “debrief” with your team shortly after your project ends. Invite project staff, volunteers, leaders, or other key stakeholders to join you. Discuss the successes, challenges, and lessons learned, and invite honest feedback about their experiences.
Recollection Wisconsin has created a Toolkit for Wrapping Up a Digital Project with more information.
Share What You Learned
You don’t have to be a large, well-funded organization to share your project findings and outcomes with others in your field. Small and rural libraries, archives, historical societies, and museums are always interested in hearing “how we did it” stories from organizations similar to their own.
Opportunities for sharing what you’ve learned with other practitioners:
- Present a session or a poster at a regional or state-level conference
- Write a blog post or newsletter article for your state library association, regional archives forum, or other similar organization
- Post any workflows you created to the Library Workflow Exchange
- Host a virtual or in-person brown-bag lunch
- Share on email lists or online communities for local historians, genealogists, or archivists
For Recollection Wisconsin Content Partners: Digital Readiness Community of Practice
The Digital Readiness Community of Practice brings together digital practitioners from all over Wisconsin. Beginning in 2019 with a series of community conversations and surveys, Recollection Wisconsin has been asking people engaged in digital cultural heritage work what would be most helpful to them. Practitioners responded that they need simple, straightforward digital projects tools and that they wanted to form networks and relationships with each other to support their digital work.
The Digital Readiness Community of Practice exists in the hundreds of informal and formal conversations, events, emails, phone calls, and listservs practitioners use to keep in touch with each other. We’re helping provide opportunities for that community to continue to flourish and expand.
Join the Community of Practice to get and give digital projects advice, tools, and resources.
Resources and Tools
- Kiesewetter, Kim. “‘Should we do (or keep doing) this?’ Assessment and evaluation for strategic decision-making.” WiLSWorld Shorts, 2021.
- Tillman, Ruth Kitchin and Sandy Rodriguez. “Collective Equity: A Handbook for Designing and Evaluating Grant-Funded Positions.” Penn State University Libraries, 2020
The Digital Readiness Toolkit and related resources were made possible in part by grants from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.
