Recollect Implementation

Every organisation is different, with different collections and different needs and levels of access required for its community. Recollect has been designed so that it can be flexibly configured to give your users and community the best experience. You can visit a range of our customers sites from here and see how Recollect has been configured for their needs.
Project Management
The Recollect team recognises that as the digital world continues to rapidly change, it is important to continually evolve to keep up.  We have designed our own project methodology to provide you with a low risk delivery model, that incorporates the most relevant aspects of Agile, PRINCE2 and PMBOK; it draws on the success of Agile methods of communication and Scrum ceremonies, along with the certainty of scope as defined in PRINCE2 and PMBOK. The Recollect methodology has also been developed based on our experience delivering archival digital solutions to our clients.
When we implement your site, we work through a well proven process to ensure that we deliver to you and your community a site that works well and makes your collections discoverable, accessible and engageable. The four phases of the implementation are explained below:

1.    Discovery

The discovery phase is designed to be flexible enough that it can be adapted to your needs and your projects. This phase consists of three workshops that allow us to get a detailed understanding of you, your team, your community and your collections and lets us design the best configuration for your site.

Persona Workshop

The persona workshop is the opportunity for us to work with you to create a common understanding of the groups of key internal and external users of Recollect. We explore why the groups are important to you and what their priorities are when we think about their needs. We create a common persona for each group describing why they would use Recollect, their experience in research, the types of information they are seeking, their pain points, how they would expect the collections to be organised (from their world view) and what type of questions they would ask of the collections.

We also consider the level of access and type of engagement each persona profile needs from your collections.

Data Workshop

We use the data workshop to gain a detailed understanding of your data that needs to be loaded into Recollect. We plan the content load by analysing how the data is going to be organised, what data is required for each persona group, how will we receive the data, who will be doing any data cleansing or transformation.

We also use the data workshop to explore logical, explicit and implicit connections in the collection metadata. This allows us to create a relationship diagram that shows how best to enhance the content discoverability and the user experience, this may also lead to the creation of some record types that act as discoverability connectors e.g. people, roles, places, events, topics.

User Experience Workshop

Having built a good understanding of the needs of the users and of the data, we then explore how we can configure the home page and discoverability elements within Recollect. This includes how we apply your branding to the site, which finding aids are required on the home page or on additional pages. We also consider how best to connect the site elements and attributes e.g. dates, materials and topics together which will provide a seamless experience.

At the end of the discovery phase we will deliver an overarching report that brings together all of the project teams learnings from the three workshops. Included in this report we will also clarify how your data and related content will be loaded, any additional requirements and the projects acceptance criteria.

2.    Configuration

During the configuration phase we start by setting up your site by applying your organisations branding elements e.g. logo, colour palate and font styles. Followed by setting up user security and creating the item templates that will hold your collections and associated metadata.
In this phase your Administrator and our team work in an agile manner, working together collaboratively refining and making minor amendments to your data and configuration until we achieve the results set out in the acceptance criteria. If the changes sought don’t align with the configuration plan we work through a change request process to update the configuration plan.

3.    Data load

Once the configuration is complete, we load the data and content into your site.

4.    Training and Acceptance Testing

While your Administrators receive a large amount of hands on training during the configuration phase, we bring it all together in a formal training workshop to ensure that your Administrators can continue to manage and evolve the site once the project is completed.
Once your training is completed it is time for you to conduct formal acceptance testing of your site. The configuration plan created at the end of the discovery phase and amended by any subsequent change requests is used as the basis for the acceptance testing. Any issues reported are either fixed by us or result in a change request if the requirements have shifted from the configuration plan.
 

Go Live

You choose when to go live, this can be part way through the project if desired or some time after the project has completed once you are happy that your content is ready for users to view.

Contact us for more information about how the Recollect Implementation process can enhance your Community Engagement and Collection Management activities.

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by nzms-admin