Digitizing criminals: web delivery of a century on the cheap

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present the process, challenges and lessons learned from carrying out a small digital project to create a web resource of unique historic materials related to crime in New York City. All aspects of digital project management are discussed, including selection, infrastructure, budgeting, workflow and delivery.Design/methodology/approach – Experiences from project administration, including management of a combination in‐house and outsourced digitization and metadata are discussed. Formation and management of the resulting web resource is explained, which is the product of a creative amalgamation of commercial and open source software. Challenges encountered are presented with suggestions for practical solutions and considerations for future projects.Findings – This grant‐funded pilot project presented foreseen and unforeseen problems. Lessons learned and solutions suggesting best approaches for a small‐scale digitization project are presented here.Practical implicat...