Library Subject Guides
Getting your information from all over the place, to all in one place can be an important part of supporting project work. It's really useful to have one single location where anyone can find all the relevant information: Where are the files? What are the links I need to know about? Who are the people involved? Where do I get help with this? etc...
A project knowledgebase could be something as simple as a Google Doc, but you might want something more structured and more like a website, albeit possibly locked down to just the project team — what we might call an intranet. Here's some tools for doing just that:
Members of the University can use the York Wiki to create a Space and collaboratively document the many aspects of a project. There are many Space templates to help you get started, including project management, knowledgebase, marketing and documentation templates. You can even make blogs, which could be really useful for regular project reporting, or latest project news.
You can use Google Sites as a project management intranet. The main benefit is being able to share with colleagues a single URL, and for the pages of your Google Site to contain all the contextual information you need – so that your intranet isn't just a list of links, or just folders full of more folders.
Useful features include:
Forthcoming sessions on :
There's more training events at:
Live chat tools have a fairly obvious benefit for communication when working on a project, but they can also be used as a sort of knowledgebase in their own right.
If you're a member of staff or a postgrad student at York then Slack will be the main means of real time online chat available to you.
A particularly useful feature of Slack for projects is being able to add links to the top of your channels for members' convenience. In our team channel, for instance, we have links to a collection of spreadsheets for rotas and consultation logging, so they are always handy. Not only are those links convenient, they also act as a reminder to do those things! This is a little like a mini project intranet, or could be the place where you add a link to your project intranet.
While Slack is much more widely used at the University of York, Google Chat (available from the left hand side of Gmail) has the ability to create Spaces, and these spaces can have shared Tasks.
The Drop Off Service is a way to share large files temporarily with external users.
Associate accounts are a way to temporarily give external users access to some University systems. IT Services can create accounts that expire when the project ends.
If you're working in Google Workspace, you can share files and folders with anyone with a Google account, regardless of whether or not that's a York account.
When sharing anything with external users, consider data security by ensuring that you are only sharing what you mean to with the user and that you are abiding by GDPR if you are sharing any personal data.
