Agility in the Archives: Translating Agile Methods to Archival Project Management

Abstract

“Agility in the Archives” affirms the importance of project management in special collections and archives, demonstrating how agile project management methods can augment success in archival processing projects. Shein, Robinson, and Gutierrez present criteria commonly used to measure project success and examine agile project management factors that have been correlated with project success in other disciplines. The authors introduce agile principles and provide practical insight on how agile factors can be adopted to support project success in archives. Drawing examples from a grant-funded project completed by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) University Libraries, the authors establish parallels between efficient iterative archival processing and agile project management methods. The study calls archivists to look beyond the details of archival processing techniques and to approach archival processing projects holistically.