Project guidelines and best practice for digital humanities projects

New Zealand universities are starting to invest more in digital humanities projects and eResearch infrastructure, but staff have difficulty implementing their ideas. VUW, Otago, and Canterbury are all developing digital strategies and guidelines for developing digital projects in the arts and humanities, and it would be good to share ideas and approaches at THATCamp Canterbury. The interesting thing about digital humanities projects, of course, is their sometimes radically interdisciplinary nature. Librarians, curators, IT departments, and academics and students from a range of university departments, need frameworks that can help them collaborate and deliver high quality digital outputs. Projects range in size from very small to very large, involve a variety of technologies (historical databases, websites, text analysis algorithms etc), and can be funded either internally, externally, or not at all. Sometimes a lightweight DIY approach is required, sometimes we have significant issues around sustainability, backup, and maintenance to consider. While there’s no reason for us to develop identical project development guidelines, the more alignment we have the more we’ll be able to collaborate across institutions and share knowledge and experience gathered along the way.