This update comes to us from Micah Vandegrift, Florida State University’s Director of Digital Scholarship. Micah heads up the Office of Digital Research and Scholarship (DRS), which provides consultations, infrastructure, and project development in the areas of: academic publishing, research data management, digital pedagogy and digital humanities. Micah also serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication and the DLF Project Managers Group Steering Committee.
As we’re rounding the bend to the Forum, the Project Managers Group (PMG) would like to update the broader DLF community on some of our recent activities.
Early in 2016 the PMG added a few new members to the steering committee. I (Micah) am the Director of Digital Scholarship at Florida State University, where I oversee the development of projects, initiatives, and people in digital/data-leaning research. Eric Stedfeld is a Project Manager/Systems Analyst at NYU, where he has been engaged in Digital Library work for over twenty years. Eric holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from NYU, as well as the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute. Eric and I joined Cristela Garcia-Spitz and Cynthia York and have been busily managing projects for the PMG as well as everything else we do.
One of the primary goals we had this year was to find a more stable home for the Project Manager’s Toolkit, which is perhaps the keystone of the PMG and, I’ll admit, one of the first reasons I started to pay attention to DLF at all. In keeping with other DLF waves of change, and following the lead of other organizations that are thinking interestingly about open documentation, we proposed moving the toolkit over to Github. Github, commonly thought of as site for sharing code, is popping up in all sorts of fun places with creative uses. The feature we thought might most benefit the toolkit is the automated versioning and forkability (making an exact copy on which new changes can be made). For example, here is the version that my colleague Sarah Stanley forked and adapted for us here at Florida State. We’re working on a plan for maintaining the Ur-version of the Toolkit, including regular check-ins on the old google doc, updating the Github version, and providing some basic how-to’s for folks new to git.
We’re looking forward to meeting you at the Forum and developing a plan for the PMG over the next year. We hope you’ll join us at the Project Managers Working Lunch (Tue, Nov. 8th 12-1:30), where we want to hear your needs, and work to identify some ways to equip and support you. We are also proud to support the Ally Skills Workshop, which will “teach simple, everyday ways to support women in their workplaces and communities.”
Please feel free to make use of the PMG listserv in the weeks leading up to the Forum for sharing topics you might like to discuss at the luncheon!
