Often times a large amount of time is spent in organizing materials and tracking workflow in digital collection projects. Time is a precious resource in most projects since they are constrained by a rigid schedule. This problem is exacerbated in collaborative environments where different people collaborate in various stages of the project. Silvia Southwick and Jane Skoric with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas will present effective and efficient simple tools to manage digital objects and metadata throughout the life cycle of a digital collection project. Using actual work processes, we will describe and demonstrate the tracking of physical and digital items while simultaneously capturing metadata. Our presentation will begin talking about provisional metadata provided by content experts as they select materials for the collection. It progresses through various stages of the project up to quality control of metadata records within a soon to be published collection. Some of the existing tools are based on Access database and Excel spreadsheets. The presentation ends with plans for improving management processes to better integrate with collaborative environments
