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Our presentation will focus on some of the strange problems encountered and creative solutions devised by two digital archivists in the course of preserving, processing, and providing access to collections at their institutions. We'll be placing particular particular emphasis of the pitfalls and crocodiles we've learned to swing over safely, while collecting treasure in the process. We'll address working with CP/M disks in collections of authors' papers, reconstructing a multipart hard drive backup spread across floppy disks, and more.
== Project <s>foobar</s> FUBAR ==
* Becky Yoose, Grinnell College, yoosebec AT grinnell DOT edu
Be it mandated from Those In A Higher Pay Grade Than You or self-inflicted, many of us deal with managing major library-related technology projects [1]. It’s common nowadays to manage multiple technology projects, and generally external and internal issues can be planned for to minimize project timeline shifts and quality of deliverables. Life, however, has other plans for you, and all your major library technology infrastructure projects pile on top of each other at the same time. How do you and your staff survive a train wreck of technology projects and produce deliverables to project stakeholders without having to go into the library IT version of the United States Federal Witness Protection Program?
This session covers my experience with the collision of three major library technology projects - including a new institutional repository and an integrated library system migration - and how we dealt with external and internal factors, implemented damage control, and overall lessening the damage from the epic crash. You might laugh, you might cry, you will probably have flashbacks from previous projects, but you will come out of this session with a set of tools to use when you’re dealing with managing mission-critical projects.
[1] Past code4lib talks have covered specific project management strategies, such as Agile, for application development. I will be focusing on and discussing general project management practices in relation to various library technology projects, many of which these strategies include in their own structures.
[[Category:Code4Lib2013]]