Continuing partners

When Carole Ann Fabian (director of the Univ. of Buffalo's Educational Technology Center) talks about digitization projects, she talks about the need for "continuing partners." Interestingly, this also came up -- in a sense -- at the Statewide Digitization Planners Conference in October. Projects (and programs) that are collaborative in nature are more successful than those that are solo efforts. Why? Here are reasons that come to my mind:

• When you collaborate, you bring in additional resources and skills to compliment those you already have.
• Two or more partners are less likely to let a project fail.
• There are more people to pick up a dropped "ball."
• The additional resources can help to create a better end-product.
• Responsiblities are distributed, so no one group feels overwhelmed.

The challenge is finding the right collaborators. It seems, though, that going through the trouble of finding the right collaborators is more than worth it if you realize that the project itself will be stronger and better because of it.