SPEC Projects

Overview

A project is an activity or group of related activities that addresses a defined body of objects (or targets) during a specified time period and that produces quantifiable outputs. Project goal(s) describe the desired outcomes and/or motivation for the project. Projects can be grouped explicitly through association of an initiative, or implicitly through grants, activities, targets, time period, repository, outputs, or any project characteristic.

The scope of a project can be determined by any number of factors, but must have a defined start date and completion date time, must be assigned to only one supervisor or program head, and address objects owned by a single repository or division. Projects and project targets should be defined so that each activity addresses all of the targeted objects.

Managing projects serves three purposes:

  1. Create and share prioritized queues for (all) present and future work on special collections.
  2. Tracking the progress of projects as they move through their major phases.
  3. Generating statistics that reflect what has been worked on and the resulting output of that work.

Project tracking does not aim to track all of the tasks and milestones associated with smaller processes associated with any activity or group of activities.

This document will define each field used to manage projects, describe its specific implementation in SPEC, and specify the content of queues and reports based on the model. The document can be broken up, simplified, and extracted for specific purposes.

Fields

SPEC ID

Required. Auto-generated by SPEC.

Status

Required. Auto-generated by SPEC. Displays project status. To be added: Link out to project status list/definitions.

Project Title

Free text. Required. Should be as descriptive as possible and differentiate project from other work on same collection.

Department

Controlled value. Required; Auto-generated by SPEC. Department of staff member assigned to project.

Repository

Controlled value. Required; Auto-generated by SPEC. Owning department of targeted objects. Lists repository abbreviations based on associated objects.

Type

Required. Single value. Controlled list. The type of project. To be added: Link out to project type list/definitions. Selecting a project type will auto-populate certain fields.

Notes

Free text. Optional.

Documentation

Optional. File object. May be used to upload documentation files associated with the project.

Targets

The list of object(s) to be worked on through the course of a single project. Project targets are characterized in five dimensions: 1. object count and list; 2. objects on shelf; 3. object formats; 4. linear feet and 5. acquisition.