Projects and Publications are a major part of CDS’ portfolio; this document describes how we start, manage, and end projects and their products.

As is the case with all parts of the Handbook, this is a living document in which changes are encouraged as our practices mature and develop. This is version 2024.1

Content

• Project guidelines
  • Project types
  • Project selection
  • Project prioritization
  • Staff capacity
  • Consultations
  • Grants
• Project planning and management
  • Intake and review process
  • Project charter
  • Closeout reports
  • Project leads
  • Reproducibility / regularization
  • Project life cycle
• Brown University Digital Publications (BUDP)
  • BUDP selection process

Project Guidelines

Types

CDS develops a wide range of project types. See below for specific information regarding Brown University Digital Publications.

• Major projects: these are projects that make significant contributions to digital scholarship theory and practice and to an academic field, requiring significant CDS staff time. CDS hopes to have between one and three major projects at any given time.
• Small projects: These are projects that require CDS support for about six months, or, for less-intensive projects, a longer time frame. CDS accepts proposals for this category of projects on a rolling basis.
• Rapid Response projects: CDS will respond to special needs with calls for projects on particular themes, for example, the pandemic, or equity and justice. These are projects that require CDS support for up to six months. This category of projects requires a quick intake process that enables CDS to form a team and start the project within a month of receiving a proposal. CDS accepts proposals for this category of projects at specific times of the year.
• Interlibrary and cross-campus projects: Ongoing or short-term projects that are part of ongoing relationships with other units in the library or with other centers on campus
• Archival projects: Continuing projects that serve to build digital archives, provide materials for courses and student learning, Some of these projects may continue for an extended period without significant CDS support except as needed for sustainability.
• Maintenance mode projects. Some projects may continue for an extended period without significant CDS support except as needed for sustainability. 

Projects may move between categories, for example a Rapid Response project may evolve into a long-term project, or a project in maintenance mode may become more active if the PI decides to add new features. The projects would be expected to undergo the usual project intake process when they expand or re-activate.

Project Selection

CDS will establish clear selection criteria for all projects, and a well-defined process that takes into account not only the value of the project itself, including:

• Scholarly importance, impact, and/or relevance. We will ask faculty to make the case for their project.
• Technical feasibility, and the potential for innovative digital scholarship
• Faculty support 
• Learning opportunities for students

The value and fit of the project to the Library and CDS is important. We consider:

• Alignment with Library strategy, Library core values, and Library goals
• Increasing the number of projects that contribute toward Brown’s goal to be a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive institution and projects that work closely with underrepresented communities
• The availability of appropriate CDS staff with the skills needed, but with a consideration of the value of training in new skills 
• The balance of projects (project types, disciplines, methodologies) underway. CDS will balance old and new, building on strengths but putting emphasis on new kinds of projects reflecting the cutting edge of digital scholarship
• The benefits of potential projects for CDS staff, including professional development and publication/presentation opportunities, as well as eventual project credit
• Support of sponsored research projects; we will work with faculty as they write grants to define CDS contributions

All projects except consultations require a preliminary project management charter outlining the work and staff time and resources required. 

All other projects, except consultations, will be discussed in the weekly meeting; the CDS faculty director and CDS director will decide whether to accept the project.  Major projects will require approval by the CDS faculty advisory committee, if and when one is established.

Project Prioritization 

At the beginning of each year, every project will undergo review and be assigned a project type and prioritization level to ensure that priority projects are highlighted as such. While CDS will make every effort to plan out the full year and not have the same person working on multiple projects concurrently that might exceed the amount of hours the person has for the work week,  if there is a time during the year in which a staff member is needed on multiple projects that exceed 37.5 hours/week, the staff member will focus on the higher-level priority project first. New projects will also be assigned a project prioritization category at the time of acceptance. The categories of prioritization include:

Active development	High touch
	Medium touch
	Low touch
Maintenance mode	Low touch
Sustainability mode	Low touch
Archived	Very low touch	CDS Director and the Head of Technology Services to assess preservation needs every five years

Staff Capacity

During the review period each year, staff will be assigned to different projects. In order to determine capacity for each staff member, Project Leads will work with the CDS Director and Faculty Director to define the approximate number of hours a week for each task, which might include time spent on information design, data interventions, research, intellectual contributions, project planning, development work, and many other contributions.

Consultations

CDS consults with faculty or students on digital scholarship methodologies so that they can take that knowledge and do the work themselves.  

• One time or regular meetings with faculty or students
• Consultations may require some prep work, but not extensive or with multiple staff. 

Grants 

While many projects do not require grant funding, CDS will work with faculty on applications for internal and external grant opportunities. We do this as part of the overall Library grant-making effort, working with OVPR and OSP. 

CDS will undertake a periodic review of relevant opportunities, looking for ideas for projects and activities that might offer possibilities to expand our work as well as to support projects underway. We will also use grants to our labor resources and make use of outside expertise. We will allocate time and resources to apply for grants.

Project Planning and Management

CDS is committed to project planning and documentation for all accepted projects. Project planning defines and scopes the projects we currently have, meets and manages faculty expectations on those digital scholarship projects, streamlines workflows for staff, and makes work on every project sustainable. 

Intake and Review Process

All new CDS projects undergo an intake process; all existing projects undergo an annual review process. 

New Projects

For a project to become a CDS project, the PI must complete a proposal. The proposal will be discussed at a CDS staff meeting, and then be reviewed by the Faculty Director and CDS director to determine acceptance. The proposal will be reviewed based on established selection criteria. If the project is a major project, the faculty advisory committee will review it as well. 

Review Process 

Each year, the CDS Director and Faculty Director will meet with Faculty Lead and Project Lead to determine the timeline for the project for the year, and assess the category of project the work falls into (e.g. “high touch” to “low touch”). The amount of time allotted for the project is determined by: 

• Alignment with the Library’s strategic plan
• Staff requirements and capacity
• Alignment with CDS mission

If the Faculty Lead and/or Project Lead would like to change the original category of the project later in the year, should a special opportunity arise, new development requests should be submitted to the Faculty Director and CDS Director to determine whether CDS can take on that new work. 

Projects are also reviewed if they fail to meet a key deadline, so that a decision can be made to reschedule, reformulate, or cancel the project. 

Project Charter 

The Project Charter describes the purpose, goals, plan of work, resources needed, terms and conditions, and outcomes of a CDS project. Charters are written by the Project Lead and the CDS Director in collaboration with every member of a project team. The planning process takes place in a series of planning meetings that begins at the project kickoff meeting. The planning process is intensive, collaborative and requires substantial input from everyone on a team. Charters serve as formalized agreements among all team members on such essential questions such as project scope, technical design, infrastructural needs, testing, and success criteria.

Each Project in CDS has a Project Charter that specifies:

• A job title for each staff member and a description of their role
• A project plan that includes the work that CDS staff, other Library staff, and any other project team member will do over the course of the year 
• A timeline for the project as a whole that includes the project start date and expected end date and goals throughout the design and development process. 
• Intermediate deadlines that should be met for the project to continue. 
• An outline of the outcome of the work including specifications for usability (speed, responsiveness, etc.) that is sufficiently detailed to know if the project is successful. 
• A Statement of Work that details the work that has been completed in prior years
• Preservation requirements for the project
• A general description of the project planning and management process in CDS that includes language on sunsetting projects. 

In addition, depending on the needs of the project, the Project Charter may include:

• A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that clarifies the roles and responsibilities of different stakeholders across the university so that everyone on the project has a chance to discuss a collaborators’ bill of rights, including how people on the project can present and publish on the project, a communication plan for how people on the team will be referred to, and any other clarifying information that is best understood and discussed up front. 

Project plans for each project will aim towards reproducibility and regularization as much as possible. 

Closeout Reports 

At the end of each year and on completion of a project, CDS will prepare a closeout report to document the work that went into the project that year, with a detailed assessment of the tools and technologies selected or developed for the project. The closeout report offers everyone on the team a chance to explain what went well, what they learned, and what they’d like to do differently next time around. This report is designed for internal purposes, but may be shared with the PI on the project for their records and posted as part of the CDS and/or project website. 

Project Leads 

Each project has a Project Lead. Every Project Lead is expected to work with the CDS Director  to create a project plan and write close out documents for each year CDS has the project. The CDS director will then help assess staff capacity and adjust timelines for projects at the beginning of the year so that staff can focus on each task needed for respective projects. The Project Lead will then update the Project Charter as needed throughout the duration of time that the project is in active development. 

Each Project Lead should consult the year’s project plan each month to make sure it’s up to date. Changes on the project should not increase the time spent on the project, but rather substitute new tasks for already planned tasks. If new tasks require more time, the Project Lead will communicate the need for a change with the Faculty Director and CDS Director, who will then review the need and staff capacity. Keeping the project plan up to date includes regularly:

• Updating the project plan, which is based on the project plan template, for the year by either:
  • Saving a new version of the original plan for the year by including the revision number before the planning document (e.g. “02 2020 DISA Planning Document”)
  • Filling out an “Addendum” based on the Addendum Template to detail the scope change 
• Updating the Smartsheet timeline for the project as needed based on the changes in the project plan
• Communicating with the CDS staff on the project and the CDS Directoron changes that are made and milestones that are reached over the course of the year. 

In addition, the Project Lead is responsible for working with the Faculty Director and CDS Director  to plan an initial kickoff meeting that includes all potential team members who will work on the project, maintain regular communication with team members, partners, and groups engaged in project work, create agendas and take notes during meetings, help design and implement project workflows with PI approval, and other tasks as needed and applicable. 

At the end of the project, the Project Lead will work with the CDS Director to prepare close out documentation on the project. 

Reproducibility/Regularization

For most projects, CDS aims to avoid reinventing the wheel by using standardized platforms, processes, and implementation. For example, many Mellon publication projects are based on a WordPress theme, modified as needed. Other publications will be standardized on the Manifold platform. 

The platforms that CDS supports include WordPress, Scalar, and Omeka. We encourage their use when possible over other unsupported platforms or custom development. We also encourage reuse of existing themes, programming and workflows. We are also interested in developing and adopting new ideas and scholarly practices in information design, user interaction, and other aspects of digital scholarship, and when appropriate, will use other tools 

Project data should be well structured, well documented, open, FAIR if applicable and appropriate to the project and, when possible, stored in the Brown Digital Repository. Data might also be put into other open repos such as Zenodo, especially if there are disciplinary groupings or in Humanities Commons, for example.

Sustainability should be part of design. Projects should be designed so that parts of the software are reusable; data should be well designed and reusable, with well-described and documented metadata. Our chosen project technologies should be stable and well-supported by a large user community, and consistent with our available in-house expertise. Novel technologies should be adopted by CDS only after deliberation, and expertise should exist in more than one team member.

Accessibility should be part of the design of all projects. 

A few examples of reproducible projects are:

• Large database projects can reuse existing back-end and front-end processes created for the Stolen Relations project . 
• Brown Digital Repository (BDR) projects involving large student teams can reuse the infrastructure developed for the Opening the Archives project.
• Two projects that are reproducing and reusing on another’s technology are the two inscriptions projects. 

The CDS Handbook includes guidelines and best practices for processes, implementation, methods, information structures, libraries, etc. with examples from existing projects documenting programming libraries and software that we want to reuse across projects.

Project Life Cycle

All CDS projects have a life cycle. They start with an accepted project proposal, proceed to more intensive development work, might continue with faculty and student use without much CDS support except maintenance and updates, and eventually are finished and archived. It is important to communicate to faculty members information about a project’s lifecycle as part of the intake process. 

While the lifecycle will vary with each project, there are some general groupings: 

• Rapid Response Projects (RRP) and small projects
  • 6 months from acquisition to completion 
• Ongoing data projects
  • After development, these can continue as long as they remain part of a faculty or staff member’s research or are useful to scholarship
  • CDS provides maintenance and updates, or small fixes because something stops working, or a small improvement is needed
  • Larger updates or revision require new project management decision
  • CDS will consider a range of options for preservation to determine what’s most appropriate to the project (preserve data, interface, interface documented, code)?
• Grant-funded projects
  • Unless otherwise agreed, these should end with the end of grant funding 

CDS will review all projects once a year (contacting the faculty member involved) to see if they are still active, and decide if they should be moved into maintenance mode, sustainability mode, or archived. Projects can be rescoped, as needed, based on key priorities, goals, and capacity. 

CDS will work with DT, Hay staff, and our peers to establish Library-wide best practices for project archiving. 

CDS encourages the publication and presentation of projects and process in a variety of forms, including: detailed ‘About’ sections in a project website that describes how we did things, blog posts,  conference presentations and articles,and DH Now reviews.

Brown University Digital Publications (BUDP)

BUDP has its own processes for taking on projects for publication, distinct from other CDS projects.

• BUDP provides faculty in the humanities and humanistic social sciences with expert support for developing enhanced born-digital scholarly works that present research and advance arguments in ways not achievable in a conventional format. These multimodal scholarly works undergo rigorous peer review and are published by some of the most distinguished university presses. 
• BUDP co-publishes, with the MIT Press, the On Seeing book series, which centers the lived experience and knowledge of diverse authors.
• BUDP develops in-house publications (Slavery & Justice Report, 2nd edition; Slavery & Justice Report, First Readings edition; Race &…in America; etc.)

BUDP Selection Process

Every fall, the Dean of the Faculty issues a Call for Expressions of Interest. Interested faculty members are invited to meet with Director Allison Levy to discuss publication projects that demonstrate and include:  

• Scholarly excellence and potential for disciplinary impact; 
• Well-documented, challenging intellectual questions that lend themselves to sustained argumentation and narration; 
• Advancement and/or enhancement of scholarly ideas, arguments, and conclusions through innovative uses of digital tools and/or data to push scholarly contribution beyond the capabilities of print; 
• A clearly conceived and articulated project, with considerable research completed, to fit within a reasonable timeframe for completion.

Written expressions of interest are due mid-October. Formal proposals, due mid-November, are reviewed by members of the Digital Publications Advisory Board in December. Faculty members selected for this opportunity will receive a one-time, one-course reduction to be arranged in consultation with the academic department chair and the Dean of the Faculty. Project development will be supported by Brown University Digital Publications. Faculty authors are strongly encouraged to apply for external funding opportunities, such as the NEH-Mellon Fellowships for Digital Publication. Staff from the Library, Advancement, and OVPR can assist authors with identifying external funding opportunities relevant to their projects.