Google-izing Projects: Managing Large-Scale Digitization Projects via the Cloud

The Riley Digitization Center at Baylor University manages many projects throughout the year, digitizing thousands of items and hundreds of thousands of pages. To handle high-volume throughput, track project status, manage source materials, and ensure a high level of quality, the Digital Projects Group develops and maintains a distributed project infrastructure that supports extensive and complex workflows. Managing many projects down to the item-level through an infrastructure built to handle quality control, data flow, multi-format processing and preservation, with a wide variety of staff including interns, graduate and undergraduate students, project-specific temps, and a few full-time staff, requires the use of robust project management tools available for reporting and data entry at all digitization and processing workstations. Unable to find a single tool that met all of our needs, we began to utilize a collection of tools, many of them free, such as Google Docs (Spreadsheets and Documents), Linux utilities, Evernote, and DropBox. This presentation will address Baylor's implementation of the variety of tools used to manage digitization projects at the Riley Digitization Center - lessons learned and opportunities for growth. We hope that the tools and procedures will help others build a framework of inexpensive tools to organize and manage digitization projects large and small.