 My name is Joy Banks and I am the project coordinator for the Clear Strategies for Advancing Hidden Collections six-part webinar series. Welcome to our first webinar, Where to Begin, Basics of Project Planning for Glam Organizations. This series is offered through the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It is my pleasure to introduce our speaker for today, Angela Kipp. Angela is the collections manager of the Technosium in Mannheim, Germany, and an independent museum consultant with a special focus on science, technology, farming, and history collections. She specializes in logistics, project management, and the adoption of technology for the special needs of museums. She is especially interested in finding affordable ways to improve collections care in smaller institutions. One way she does this is through her blog project, Registrar Trek, aimed at raising awareness for collections care in general and fostering exchange between collection specialists around the world. Another way is her 2016 book, Managing Previously Unmanaged Collections, a practical guide for museums. Please welcome Angela. Well, thank you, Joy, and hello to all. Yeah, I hope you hear me loud and clear, and I want to tell you that I don't want this to be one of these fall asleep at the desk webinars. So what I'm doing during this presentation is that every now and then I will take you to a special room where we can have a discussion about some of the aspects, and I will ask you a question and we will try to figure it out altogether, and we have five minutes for that, and then we go back to the lecture. So I make a suggestion that we just try it out with our first question, which is about project planning. It's what do you think are the key elements that define a project? I think what we really should talk about today is that project planning and project management is really, really important, but on the other hand, it's like we say in German, don't make an elephant out of a flyer, so don't be scared about project planning and project management because you all really did it even if you never called yourself a project manager or a project planner. You already did it a thousand times before when you were organizing your set-abase and you probably did carry out project planning and project management a hundred times before when you were preparing a barbecue or party on Saturday. I'm saying this because I will use this example of a Saturday every now and then to explain how you already know what project planning is all about and then go to the specialities of a cataloging project. So the first thing we really have to think about is that we have to understand that we need to balance our day-to-day operation against the project. As we already said in the chat, a project has a clear defined goal and the beginning and the end. What you have to think about is that if you think about preparing a party on a Saturday, you will do it on a Saturday because you don't have to work there and you are doing most of the day-to-day operations, not today. If you now think about a cataloging project, you first have to look which day-to-day operation you can stop while doing the project and which have to be carried on and have to fit into your project schedule. For example, you might stop all outgoing loans so your staff doesn't have to care about that while making the project but you probably can't stop all research requests and all guided tools without acting against your institution's mission. You have a power to think about how to fit both things together. For example, you might want to announce that research requests take a little longer than usual on your website and you should give researchers an idea about the now estimated timeframe like I did here in the example. And you might want to hire some volunteers for the guided tools and you can also look what of the tasks that are usually done by yourself and be taken over by another staff member. But don't forget that in return this staff member needs to reduce some of his or her tasks while doing the project. More of those staffing questions will be coming up in the webinar that is about making most of people. Next up and probably the most important is the decision of what collection you will choose for your project. I bet there are many collections you've deemed noteworthy for cataloging and you will have to select one for your project. And when you think about them, you should think about some of the things like which has the most value for research. This is probably interesting for more than one group of researchers. This means that the correspondence of a former US president is of course attracting more researchers than the main exchange of a local artist which is suffering the most under the current storage conditions. Paper probably more than metal. And the next one is there a collection that probably won't be usable in the future if you don't process it now. There I'm thinking especially about certain media that is at risk of losing information like for example magnetic tape. The condition might be a big factor in deciding and we will have more of that coming up in the webinar about the red flags. Then there is the question which is easy to process. Is it hard? This might lead into different directions actually when making the decision. It might be wise to choose a collection that is easy to process because you can gain experience and test how effective your tools are and how your workflow works and then with this experience go on and build on it and tackle the more complicated collections in a follow-up project. Or you might say it's now that you have the time and the money to actually process a difficult collection and you won't have these resources in the future so you might decide to choose the hard one. And what you always have to keep in mind that the collection must be manageable with the time, stuff and money you have. We will discuss these aspects later but this might mean that you have to choose parts of a larger collection for this project just parts not the whole collection because the whole collection is not feasible in the time you have. And what I would recommend is that you really discuss this broad in your institution. The more input you get from others the more educated your decision for a certain collection will be. Also if people have the impression that their opinion is valued they are much more likely willing to do their part in the process. If you do have all possible collections in mind you might want to develop a form where your staffers can give up to three points to all mentioned aspects. I included in the download section both a blank collections form as well as a already filled out collection form so that you get the idea of what I have in mind with this. As you see we have three collections and staffers have the possibility to give certain points to varying the aspects. The idea is that staff members often because they have different job titles and responsibilities have a different view on the same collection and they might have better knowledge about certain aspects that you as a project planner have. By the point system you avoid that people just choose their favorite collection for the project and then go on with it. And if you say they have to think about giving one to three points there is much more weighing in about the aspects you ask about. And then very important that there is a free text field because you will learn something you might not have already known and that you haven't thought about when developing your form. You see it as I filled it out because you might not have thought about that there is a Christmas exhibition in the toys collection for example. When you get the forms back you will likely have a clear vote for one collection. More likely to be honest is that you still have to do a decision because the results vary. And when you do define a decision then it's very important to make it transparent. Why have you decided on one collection in favor of the other? Because people tend to get crumby when their favorite isn't chosen which is just natural and to maintain a good working climate it's very important that you understand the reasoning. If you are a single professional without a staff you might wonder if this still makes sense and I tell you it makes a whole lot of sense you might just choose a collection out of your gut feeling but if you seriously think about all collections and weigh the aspects against each other it's a great tool to help. So next up what we also had in this first chat which is really really important it's the project goal. If we go back to our Saturday where we were having a barbecue at the end of the day we will certainly keep clearing out the garage on the same day because we just know this doesn't work out. We will have dwell into memories. We will have a struggle what to throw away and so on so this is definitely not something you will do on a Saturday where you are planning a barbecue. If you think about why you don't do it it is because you have an experience and you have the ability to think about all the steps involved in the process and it's exactly this ability to think ahead and think about the steps it will take that will tell you what goal is achievable. When you go to a cataloging project you need a similar goal like we have this fixed barbecue we are not cleaning the garage so this is important you are saying we are doing this collection but we only cover this and that information and not all the information. So a cataloging project can have all kinds of project goals. It can be things like a fully processed and rehoused collection that may be digitized and accessible through a database or catalog. It can just be a set of finding age or indices that will give researchers an overview of what's there so they can dig deeper themselves. It can even be just a minimal level database or spreadsheet with some pretty generic entries just designed to be filled out with more detailed information as the work continues after the project. You have to define your goal in a way that is feasible for your institution given the available time, stuff and money. Now let's take a deeper look on how to do that. Good project planning and management is also all about keeping your sources and expectations in balance. In a cataloging process what are your resources? Your resources are time, people, money and your expectations are the number of objects you will possess and the depth of information you will cover in this cataloging process. So most cataloging projects really start off like this. You have nearly no resources but you have huge expectations. You are already seeing that this won't work out so what do you do to get it into balance? There's one thing you can do. You can do it on the resources side. There's so much resources on the one side that you can meet your high expectations. Or on the other hand, you can lower your expectations so that it meets your current resources. The most likely, you will do both until everything is in balance. Next up, you will look at how we can establish this balance in what is a manageable project goal. I think we will go now to the next discussion because my next question is actually a crucial one we often hear in our institution. It's the question, how long does it really take to do a catalog, Andrew? I think that those of you who have answered the question had a specific collection in mind and if it's the one you are also used for your project, that's a good thing. But if you just use your experience from former cataloging projects then I'll beg you to be very, very careful. As long as you haven't taken a closer look at your selected collection I shy away from giving exact numbers. So my answer is the same you already said. It depends. And it is defined by the nature of the collection. A collection of tea services that are from one manufacturer and where you have a whole range of product lists or catalogs from different production gears. As a reference, it will be, of course, quicker to catalog as a collection of undefined tools from a farm where you have to start off with researching what the single tools were used for and what they are called. The numbers you can achieve will of course develop apart. It's what I try to depict in this picture we have here. If it's a toy collection of forklifts with a component material of course it will be easy and fast probably. I'm from the museum setting but I guess for libraries it's the same if you think about mass-produced paperbacks and on the one hand original manuscripts on the other. So I think we can translate this from the museum setting to the archives and the libraries. And then of course it will depend on the number of required fields. If I assume that you use a database and you will define what fields have to be filled to assume it's a completed catalog entries, this will of course mean the more fields you have the longer it takes. And it also depends on the depth of the required information. The full description of the objects and its condition takes longer than just adding keywords and a photo. And the rough estimate of a manufacturing time span is quicker to do than giving an exact year of production. It is of course also dependent if you have the necessary knowledge to really do at least a ballpark figure about the production date. And the other thing is the controlled vocabulary. If you have a controlled vocabulary in your database where the catalogers can just choose from, the catalog is quicker than if you have to add this information yourself. This is true for nomenclature artist names, manufacturer names, everything that is repeated information. And more about this we will have in the webinar about cataloging. And it's also dependent how the cataloging process is embedded in your workflow. So this means does the cataloger have to get the object, bring it to his desk, measure it, photograph it, rehouse it, store it and record the location information or are these steps that will be taken by different people? Like you can imagine, I don't think you have too much forklift work in libraries and archives, but it really depends if you have to carry an archival box across the archives to another room or if you just sit there, someone brings you the archival box and you just do the cataloging. The absolutely safest way to get a good estimate is to choose a good sample for the collection that has to be processed and then run a testing phase. By a good sample, I mean a part of the collection that is somehow representative. If you have a collection of kitchen utilities, you neither choose the box with the knives, forks and spoons, nor the box that only contains one cooking pot. You choose the one with a variety of things or even better, you do your testing phase with several boxes. Your experiment will give you a number of how many objects can be processed a day. Make no mistake, this is the average number of catalog entries that one cataloger can do, given the assumption that this is the only thing this person will do. But to keep the balance, you have to add a buffer and this buffer must contain days away from the office that are predictable like vacation days, national holidays, sick leave days, and days before exhibit openings, for example, where you have all hands on deck scenario. Then it must contain the hours that will be missed because of meetings and other known reasons for not cataloging. And it should contain a percentage of buffer for the time when the database doesn't work. The computer needs an update, there is an emergency call to all colleagues because there is a tornado approaching where you get the picture. What the percentage will be is a big depends as it really depends on the circumstances, but I'd suggest that you work at least with 10%. In general, I'm very, very careful with communicating these numbers. You as the project planner will need these numbers to calculate if processing the collection within the given timeframe is reasonable. But when communicating them, it's very easy to achieve something bad and really hard to achieve something good. Let me tell you why. When you give out a number that has to be achieved by a cataloger each day, you create the impression of a factory. You produce a number of files each day. But as we all know, that's not what cataloging is about. Cataloging is about recording information accurately in a way that is correct both in typing and in truth to the best of our knowledge. It has to do with the will to make it right, not with the will to beat some numbers. If you give out numbers that have to be achieved, some people will try to beat the number because the sense of competition for some reason is very strong with many of us human beings. But in this effort, people tend to become sloppy with the information that is recorded. Other colleagues will become demotivated because they feel a given number of objects to catalog is reducing their work to that of assembly line workers and is disrespecting their knowledge, ability, and creativity. Never underestimate the damaging factor of colleagues feeling not valued and their knowledge not respected. They might deliver a set of numbers that will have lost the will to deliver really good and valuable catalog entries and won't care if they make mistakes. But there's more to it. Everybody who has ever done cataloging knows that there are easy cases and hard cases with a fixed number to achieve each day. People might feel pressed to skip necessary research or reduce it to a minimum, losing the chance to record valuable information for future generations of researchers. When you feel like you have to communicate numbers for a reason, then remember one psychological fact. It's more satisfying to beat a given number and finish a project faster than falling behind a given number time and again. To get the most realistic numbers, please extend the testing phase to all steps involved. To do that, you first have to think about what all steps mean for your project goal. Well, if you think about a project, there are some steps that just need to be done, no matter when you're doing, and there are some steps that have a certain logical sequence that makes sense. If you think about your Saturday, the example we had at the beginning, you can't make the salads and the hamburgers. You want to eat at the party before the ingredients from the supermarket arrive and you probably can't mow the lawn the first thing in the morning when the grass is still wet. And if you look at all the steps you have to do, there is a logical sequence and the task who haven't logical sequence just fall into place naturally. I say naturally, but this is indeed the most crucial part in your project planning process. Thinking about your Saturday, we probably have all those mother's fewer types of friends who are always perfectly organized and when they invite you for a party, their garden is decorated as a selection of games for the kids. You have an international selection of snacks and your friend looks like Ms. Wirt. And we have those friends who invite you over and when you arrive, there's friends activity and your friend is running around, the hair is still wet and something smells suspicious from the kitchen. And then they ask, can you drive please to the supermarket because we don't have catch up anymore. So I don't mind how you organize your Saturday barbecue, but I tell you that your cataloging project drives the planet towards the mother's seward end of it. So what you have to do for your cataloging project is to think, okay, what are the steps involved? Then what is the logical sequence and what makes the most effective workflow? I give you an example from a museum setting, but for archived archives at libraries, I think it might vary a little, but not much. The thing about it, you give the object a number, you do the catalog entry, you take the photo. This is usually not necessary in an archive or library. You are doing digitization or something. Then you re-house the object. In an archive, you will probably just put a number of items into the same new archival box or folder and then you store the object. And when you have repeated these tasks each time, you have reached your goal. And if you look sharp, each of these steps or tasks have a logical place. You are signing a number first, so the object is clearly identifiable and distinct from all the other objects. You will need a clear identifier for all following steps. You do a catalog entry, so you have made the object accessible. We have talked about those details already and more is coming up in the webinar about collections access. Then you take a photo, so you can identify the object easily and researchers get an impression without having to access the object physically. In fact, this step can be exchanged with step two if this makes more sense in the workflow. Then you re-house the object, so it is safe to store it. It wouldn't have made too much sense to re-house it before you take a photo and catalog it because you would have to unwrap it again. But then there are always exceptions from this rule. And then finally you store the object and record the location, of course. And then you might assume that we are finished with our project planning phase and this is actually what is assumed by people who greet you with a wet hair on Saturdays. Because if you want your Saturday runs smoothly, you will check certain things beforehand. You will look if your lawnmower still has fuel, you make sure that all family members are available to help you with the task and of course you will have invited people for the party a few days before Saturday and check if they will come. In other words, you made sure that you have all necessary material and stuff and have limited some uncertainties that have to do with reaching your project's goal. The number of people who will come to the party will typically affect your shopping list for the supermarket. To make sure that your cataloging project runs smoothly you have to take a closer look at what you've got so far and find out what you need to make a start. Let's look at the things to consider. What materials will you need? What tools will you need? What is available in terms of stuff? Do you have to recruit additional stuff? If so, can you recruit them yourself if you have to work together with the Human Resources Department or some city office for it? What has to be done before the project officially starts? Think about things we're waiting for a grant being approved, setting up the database, get necessary literature, create sample record entries. The possibilities are endless. More of this will be discussed in the next webinar where you will hear about building resources. Then time has always played a role in your planning process. However, so far we haven't talked about the schedule. For your set in the barbecue field, of course, you've never ever created such a thing because you know how long tasks to take and if things go wrong you can still send someone over to the supermarket to buy some beer. But with your cataloging process that's a really different story. You should set up a schedule so you make sure you are not missing something important and you can manage the project. You start with the fixed dates. You might have something like the board meeting where the project gets approved, the data grant, the residents are announced and the date where you want the project to be completed. And it might look like the one you see in the slides. In this scenario I use here, I assume that the board decides on whether or not the project will take place. They will fund the money for the needed materials and tools. However, if you can hire additional stuff or not they'll depend on whether the grant is a valid or not. Now, in between these fixed dates you can fill out in other dates for bringing this project to a success. So if there is a deadline for the project outline of course before that date you will write this outline and you will probably compile a list of needed materials and tools. Then you have submitted your project outline and there is the board meeting in between where you can do the testing phase we talked about. Then if the decision comes that the project is approved of course you will have to write a grant application and you will probably talk with stuff about the project and you will do a presentation for all the stuff so they get involved and you will buy the tools and materials. If the deadline for the grant is March 15th I really advise that you will bring it on the way a few days earlier because even if you can submit it online I promise you on March 15th your computer will have a breakdown so leave a few days to finish it in your schedule and submit it. So in between this deadline and the moment when the grants are awarded you can do things like setting up the working space you can do test runs and sample catalogue entries you can train the current stuff you can learn how to use new tools you can try to spot issues you haven't thought about and you can write a job announcement to prep your human resource department. This is really important because often if you wait for the grant to be approved and then tell human resources that you need someone the whole process will slow down so prepare this in the meantime. So next up there will be an official start date and sorry I missed my line so note that here when the project starts there are some points with no fixed date where you expect to hit certain milestones like the 500 catalog entries they don't have a date so you should think ahead what you will do to celebrate with the team or reward yourself for meeting them also what you are seeing that there are also points where you look at the process in the starting phase it's always very chaotic so don't expect too much of the first four weeks it's where you get comfortable with the equipment where you train new stuff where you spot issues and maybe streamline the workflow but then you will have always a time when everything gets smoothly but anyway you will always have these dates where you just look how much wanted you to achieve and how much did you really achieve. I missed one point that I did tell you when I talked about human resources it's always you should try to do things in between the fixed dates that's very important and it's sometimes not easy to balance between not investing too much time into a project that might not come to pass but you should still be prepared enough to act when it gets approved and I just want to tell you that this is a real art so you shouldn't worry too much if you do too much or do too little you will gain experience and you will get better the next time the essential is this looking back at what have we achieved and how can we streamline the process and this is essential for project management till now we talked about project management and now we will jump to the real project management which takes place during the process so I have my next question and this is what does a project manager have to do in a cataloging project and we will go to the next discussion I want to go back to our slide we had at the beginning and one of the big mistakes in project planning is that someone assumes that once the scale is balanced out it will stay that way but we all know that reality and mother nature really don't care much about our plans in your project planning process you will try to eliminate the most uncertainties and have a contingency plan for some things that might go wrong if we go back to our Saturday barbecue if it never rains in August in your area but it starts to pour in the afternoon of course you will switch to indoors and use your oven or something and not your outdoor grill and that's what we call contingency planning and this will keep the project in balance but someone has to do the decision that now we have to switch to this contingency plan and that's the project manager a big part of project management is making sure that the project stays on track for your Saturday barbecue you create a shopping list before you send your partner and the children to the supermarket because you know that otherwise you have heaps of chips but not the necessary ingredients for the salads and that's project planning and then when they come home and you check what they bought and if they bought everything that is on this list that's project management and if you discover that they haven't bought everything on the list you can either change the recipe for the salad or you send your partner back to buy the missing ingredients and that's project management and as a project manager you have always to react on the things that no one can foresee like you planned that your son will grill the hamburgers but his boyfriend leaves him and so you have to either grill the hamburgers yourself or assign this task to a friend or your partner and it's the same with the project management in the cataloging process you have to react to the unforeseen occurrences like what do you do when a stuffer calls ill you have like always with us a scale you have two chances the one is that you reestablish the balance by doing it on the resources side so you hire someone new or you shift to the deadline but you can either do it by lowering your expectation you can reduce the number of objects or you can limit down the required fields and it's also important to know that every good project plan works with a certain amount of buffer to react to the unforeseen I made this example but you have a kind of a caution view that is covering your expectation side so this project goal can be reached if you only have the people 90% of the time and if you have a budget of just 80,000 and you can already achieve this in 20 months this is just an example for that you add a buffer what you shouldn't underestimate under no circumstances is the amount of time that project management itself takes on a time and the time the project management actually takes is very dependent on the team size and we will discuss a few options that most of you will fall under I see that nearly 50% of today's attendees will identify with the following scenario which I called the one woman show but is of course also meant to be a one-man show where you are the cataloger, database manager, photographer art handler, human resource officer, administrative officer secretary, press officer and janitor in one and given the many hats you wear this means both it's a huge burden because you have to do everything by yourself without being able to delegate tasks and at the same time it's a great amount of liberty because you are relatively free in deciding what you do and when you do it in this scenario the project manager hat is just one of many you should be aware of the fact that this always takes a big toll on your ability to get actual work done don't expect you can create the same amount of catalog entries as you have determined in your testing phase the cases where you can stay on cataloging the whole day are very few more likely than not you are doing several tasks at parallel you can expect your productivity to be below 50% of what a person can do who is doing just catalog entries and here's maybe a little professional hint for that try to block certain hours or even better days just for cataloging because I know from personal experience because I've done it before you produce a lot of nonsense when you try to do catalog entries along a busy environment and where you are expected and have to do several tasks simultaneously you should reserve certain calm hours of the day for example in the mornings or after all the colleagues and visitors have left or if you know that there are days that are slow days for example the Fridays or something then reserve these hours or days for cataloging and make sure if you are working in a larger institution that you communicate those hours with your colleagues that you make sure that your phone is redirected to another colleague and you don't have email access so you can really concentrate on this cataloging thing that's really important because you might even assume you are perfect but you are not, you are not one of them, sadly okay next up let's talk about the team of two I always saw it's quite a few of you who will have this scenario and it's just like every relationship it can be a dream or it can be a nightmare in the best case you have two people who complement each other to a really powerful team and in the worst case you have an ongoing battle between two egos and this takes a huge toll on the productivity to make this one work it's really important that you talk about this relationship and that you set this relationship clear at the beginning is one the boss and the other the assistant is one the content specialist and the other the project manager is one the techie who can fix everything and the other the people's person who gets to handle the outside communications is one good in spell checking while the other is good at seeing the big picture are you both cut from the same blocks so you like the same task and you hate the same things that you need to figure out which one does what make really sure that you talk about issues, likes, dislikes before you start the project get to know each other because success of your project will totally depend on your relationship and I also have a hint here you are probably more powerful if you team up instead of doing separate cataloging when we did practice tests at the technoseum we found that teaming up increases speed in many processes we found out that if one person did just the measuring and reading numbers allowed from labels and the other was typing them into the database both were able to do three to four catalog entries in a time where one person could just create one and I already heard that this experience is known in other institutions too and so finally we come back to the scenario we have a team of many if you have more colleagues you can delegate more tasks and this is awesome but on the other side the more people in a project the more likely the project measure which is you will need to invest most of his or her time to project management in a team of many there will be a lot of catalog entries to check for accuracy there will be technology problems to solve and unfortunately but it always happens interpersonal conflicts to settle and be aware that the project manager has to spend most of his or her time on project management and so it might not be feasible to do cataloging at all if you need the project manager to also do cataloging you have to somehow find ways that he or she can have quite hours really no one disturbs with the question and you really should make sure that these are sacred hours one really can concentrate on cataloging next up we will finish this thing about project management and go to something that was really hoped someone will do something for when there was this evaluation about this webinar series and so we will come to talk about tools now one thing you need to know is that I really love tools you have to believe me I love tools they are wonderful, powerful and it doesn't matter if they are for good working or on my computer and having the right tools for the right job is one of the key to success but I often feel that there is a kind of magical thinking when it comes to tools in cultural institutions there is a strong belief that if you only had the right tools every problem will solve itself if you only had a sophisticated database like the archive in Sample Town you would have all our collections cataloged if you only had a powerful project planning software all our exhibit installations would run smoothly if we only had QR codes you would get the picture and one thing I have to do time and again is that I have to debunk this myth because tools are great but they are what they are they are just tools and nothing more it doesn't make any sense to buy tools and hope they will solve the problem you have to go the other way around the first question has to be what do I want to achieve and your second thought is how can I achieve it and then what tools are available to help me with the task what do they cost and are they worth the investment if you are planning your project you will find that there are some tools that are absolutely necessary and others are more often nice to have things and when you think about it also think that every new tool you use always means that you have to invest not only in the tool itself but also in getting used in handling it and in training your staff to use it using tools you already have almost always means a reduced training effort so seriously for a cataloging project what tools do we need we probably need something to do the catalog entries we need something to keep track of the deadlines we need something to control our budget we need something to keep track of our work and process we might need something to track staff time in a team of many we might need something to organize our image files and we might need something to edit our photos the good news is that while there are great specialized tools for all these tasks you can do all tasks with your standard office suite and free software as well now comes to play that while a cataloging project can be challenging at the same time it isn't very complex when it comes to project management most of the time the number of staff involved is low and the tasks are very clear and done in-house so there are not those complex tasks of fitting different time frames and schedules together you would have when you are organizing a move or an exit installation or a building measure so what's really crucial and what you need most of the time is a software for cataloging it pays really in the long run if you have a good database having defined cataloging project with maybe some extra money is maybe exactly the right time to choose one out of the many out there on the market make sure that you find the one that fits your needs best there is a list of common mistakes to avoid in the resources Wiki we will share before you choose try to contact colleagues from institutions that are roughly your size and who have comparable work flow a database can be great for managing archival material but suck for managing museum objects and vice versa a colleague from a large museum might be totally impressed with the possibilities of a database to manage loans and condition reports which won't help you anything in your small town library also keep in mind that not all institutions that are roughly your size have the same profile in their work the archive in town A might be closely attached to the university and have a lot of research requests from students while the archive in town B might not have so much research requests but work closely with the town museum for exhibits therefore the archive in town A might choose the database system used by the university library while the archive in town B might prefer to use the same database as the town museum if you don't want to invest into a database now and I really recommend to invest in this you can also use a spreadsheet software like Microsoft Excel what you should make sure that it provides the possibility to export data as comma separated values this is the ending CSV and extended markup language this is XML it will help you usually when switching to a commercial database system later so let's look at the tools we have for project management for planning and controlling your budget any old spreadsheet software will really do if you have an office suite it will contain the Microsoft Excel for that if you are looking for free alternative I can recommend Apache Open Office Suite there's the Kalk software this will provide all the functionality you know from Microsoft Excel and if you know Excel it's a very easy transition you can also save your document in the XLS format so you can interchange your documents with colleagues who use the Microsoft version to keep track of deadlines so honestly I never needed any more functionality than my email software gave me the Microsoft Outlook Suite as well as the free Mozilla Thunderbird as well as any other email software I have ever encountered allowed to define dates and tasks with a reminder function you might prefer to use a separate calendar software if you like that better but what I like about doing in the email software is that you can just copy important messages from mails into the calendar and then to reminders out of the calendar to other colleagues as long as you are consistent in entering in the dates and tasks with suitable reminders here you don't have much to worry about indeed I tell you that most deadlines I know are missed not because you didn't have this sophisticated project management software but because people had forgotten to place a note of the due date in the calendar or had forgotten to place enough reminders for pushing their weaker self to work on the submission now keeping track of staff time again I found that any old spreadsheet software works just fine when it comes to scheduling people you might use the calendar function of the email software but you can also do this in the calendar software if you prefer or even in the spreadsheet software what software you use for photo editing and storage of photos and to organize your files well it seems to be a question of personal beliefs and I had huge discussion going on of this I don't want to dig into this too deep because most of this is just applicable to museum collections and not for the libraries and archives people I found that for management of image files it helps to have a clear structure and if you have the possibility to name the photos to the ID of the document or object immediately you have a quick reverence and easy search tool otherwise it helps to store the images into folders with the date of creation and maybe an accompanying telling name like box one of heights collection or something you might want a more sophisticated management tool if you create a whole lot of photos and then I would seriously research image databases with just as much effort as you research the cataloging database to keep track of the work process well I needed anything more dependent paper to be honest you will check the database or spreadsheet every now and then and to see how your estimated cataloging numbers match up with the real cataloging numbers if they don't fit it's usually a sign that something is wrong it can be that your estimate is established which is more often the case than I wish it but it can be that something is wrong in the workflow that's why I find that the most important tool for every project manager is that you observe your workflow with open eyes and your brain switched on I have a short example for this when we were doing a large cataloging project in the technoseum and collections exhibition somewhere half time in working I found out that we really lost time and no one realized I'll show you this setting we had two teams packaging and cataloging a bay here in a neighboring hall my desk was upstairs there and the printer was here at the most inaccessible point so every time someone from the cataloging and packing team finished packing a box and printed the packing list he will hit the print button walk upstairs walk to the printer fetch it and walk back again and we did this for quite a long time until we realized that this is totally nonsense and obviously the project manager which was me slept halfway in the project so as soon as we realized we just put the printer into the next hall so the two teams could actually fetch their packing list there because this were always three to five minutes and it happened 20 times a day so actually we lost for the team one and a half hour in each working day so this is just to show that often it is the workflow that is goofed up and one last finishing note before we go to the questions and answers you should really create a document at the beginning of your project where you write down your decisions and observations time and again you will ask yourself what exactly you thought when you choose to do things that way or you will not remember what the exact problem with cataloging this or that item was they have a time and the end of each day to take down notes what happened what you decided and why and what thoughts and ideas you had it doesn't matter if this is not written in full sentences it doesn't matter if it is chromatically correct but it's something like an enhancement of your brain and you can turn to it as a reference and you find this helps tremendously in project management and especially if you have to write a report about your processes and hurdles to upper management or to a grant institution so you made it the last thing I want to say is already standing on this last slide