NYPL Labs

We’ve reached a milestone in our list of Basecamp projects. 65 projects!  And, we have more in our queue that have been submitted but not approved.

Over the past few months, we’ve developed a process for managing the flow of projects that we are working on to be submitted, approved and documented.

We start with filling out a project submission form with information on the deadline, project owners and a brief description of the project requirements.  Once the project has been reviewed and approved, we assign an alphanumeric code and it gets promoted to Basecamp.  We have the following codes:

• I for Internal sites and applications  (such as the staff intranet)
• D for sites and applications used by the Digital Experience Group (such as our project submission form built in Ruby on Rails)
• N for public Nypl.org sites and applications
• V for audio/Video projects
• E for Externally hosted sites (such as Flickr)
• S for other Screens (such as information screens in library locations)

As of our last count, we have 41 projects filed under the letter N.  The biggest project is N0004, the nypl.org redesign project.  N0004 has 17 sub-projects.  We divided the redesign work into specific aspects to include content development, theming and configuration, redirects, third party applications, archival collections, blogs, taxonomies, events, locations.  Some of the sub-projects are very small, but didn’t fit anywhere else, like implementing the Qwidget application on the site.  And, some of the sub-projects are quite large in scope, such as Search, which is dependent on the Solr indexing projects and the new library catalog.

To paraphrase one of my colleagues, soon we may have more projects than library locations!