For What It's Worth

As I discussed Liz Bishoff's article, I got to thinking about how good teamwork at an institution-level contributes to digitization. Every person at an institution is a stakeholder in digitization, whether s/he is the subject matter expert (SME), the metadata librarian, the digitization coordinator, the student assistant who scans, or the colleague of any of these people. Each person has a role to play.

It is important for each member of a team to recognize his/her role.

I have begun creating workflows for each unit that will be participating in the digitization process. (I got this process started with Dr. Warner, and now I've kind of taken it and run.) These are very basic checklists that give stakeholders a place to say, "I've done this part of the the project."

Here is the digital department workflow:
Workflow Checksheet for TTU SWC/SCL Digitization Projects


1. __________ Select item
a. Name of item ________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________


2. __________ Notify Digitization Staff member and Student Assistant
3. __________ Raw scans done
4. __________ Quality control (Student Assistant)
5. __________ Quality control (Digitization Staff Member)
6. __________ Quality control (Subject Matter Expert)
7. __________ OCR
a. Deskew ______
b. Resize ______
8. __________ Subject Matter Expert and Cataloger notified that metadata needs to be added.
9. __________ Cataloger adds metadata.
10. __________ Item ready to upload.
11. __________ Upload complete


This is very, very basic stuff. Not anything earth-shaking. But I've started creating things like this to assist with project management, to keep the ball rolling, so to speak. This way, any time an object is first scanned, for instance, a checksheet travels with the object at every step.

Another issue in teamwork that is less obvious, but just as critical, is communication. It is important that teams overcome any sort of personality disputes, and in particular that members in teams avoid backstabbing other members to the rest of the team; this can be just as detrimental to the process as not having all members involved. In a way, I'd argue that it's even worse because, once all members are ostensibly working as a team, and then one member starts Stabby McBackstabbersonning another member to the entire team, the whole team risks becoming defunct. This is, in essence, a communication problem, and these types of communication problems can be headed off when someone clearly expresses an intent to work professionally with each member of the group--no matter what--and when the rest of the group can at least recognize that and stifle backstabbing behavior of one or two members of the team.

I think of this example because I remember a conversation with a friend who now teaches out at Central Florida. (Buy her book; she's a famous author http://www.amazon.com/Hilltop-Native-Storiers-American-Narratives/dp/0803226349/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268863629&sr=8-1) We were talking about classroom dynamics and misbehaving students in class. She said that what she tries to do is to be a good enough leader to her students that the other students recognize bad behavior in a rowdy student to the point where they, rather than she, will correct the student's behavior. If a digitization team has a strong enough leader, that person can at least rely on the team to guide squeaky wheels along. In part I think it has to do with a leader recognizing that each person, no matter his/her behavior, has a skillset to contribute to digital projects; in addition to preventing the team leader from becoming overly frustrated or upset, it also gives other team members a sense of purpose and self-worth--to the point of defending the team as a whole when the squeaky wheel makes inaccurate statements about the project, the team, or the leader.

Observations on how people communicate.