Digital project planning and management

Digital projects synthesize, analyze, and visualize digital assets, which include anything created and stored digitally. Whether it’s a 3D model, digital archive, or interactive map, planning a digital project is a rewarding way to explore digital tools and research methods.

Plan your digital project

Here are best practices for planning and managing a digital project. Each step can be revisited at different stages of your project.

Planning: Create a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for how your team will collaborate, communicate, and fill roles. See this MOU template and workbook (PDF) for guidance. Make a work plan that describes the basic idea of your digital project with a timeline and project outcomes. Establish documentation that will track the entire lifecycle of your project.
Content creation: Decide if you'll need to digitize physical materials, process digital assets, or both. Remember to assign metadata to your assets.
Technical development: Evaluate all the software and hardware tools you'll need and choose a platform for your content as early as possible. Set aside time and funding for technical support staff to help with prototyping or to develop the skills yourself. While we don’t offer complete support or subscription access for these tools, you can explore this list of digital projects tools and tutorials to help plan your project.
Storage: Make a plan to store your digital files and assets through a cloud hosting service, local servers, or backup hard drives. Focus on stable and secure storage of your content.
Project management: Plan for ongoing management of your digital project. Clarify who owns the project, who's accountable for its upkeep, and who will steward the project at each point of the project’s lifecycle.
Technical upkeep: While each digital project has a unique scope and outcomes, every project needs technical maintenance. Identify who will be responsible for fixing broken links, updating platforms, or managing migration. Consider making a digital sustainability plan.
Preservation: Set up the long term accessibility of your project. Whether you need to store assets in a digital archive, deal with bit rot, or figure out how to run obsolete software in the future, planning for preservation can affect how long your digital project exists.
Promotion and outreach: Launch an outreach plan to get your project out into the public. Strategize how you can promote your work in our campus repository, at conferences, in articles, or through social media.

Work with data

Find help with data for your digital scholarship project, including corpora building or analysis, text encoding, quantitative data analysis, managing humanities data, and more. Also consider submitting data from your digital project to our data repository.

Host your digital project

Host and publish your project on a platform that makes your project easy to find, use, and access. When you're deciding which platform to use, explore their searching, browsing, and visualization tools and their user interfaces. It's helpful to explore platforms early in your project.

Hosting platforms

The library can't host or publish your digital project on our servers, but we can offer support for using these platforms:

ArcGIS Story Map
ArcGIS Story Map is a web-based application that lets you create a simple website that incorporates text, media, and maps.

Omeka
Omeka.net is a web-publishing platform that allows anyone to create or collaborate on a website to display collections and build digital exhibitions.

Scalar
Scalar is an open source, web-based publishing software from the University of Southern California's Alliance for Networking Visual Culture that allows you to create networked, multi-media online publications.

CollectionBuilder
CollectionBuilder is an open source framework for creating digital collection and exhibit websites that are driven by metadata and powered by modern static web technology.

WordPress
A very easy way to make a website with good navigation. Optimized for blogs. You can install WordPress on a site you host yourself, or you can have WordPress host your site for free.