Editorial teamwork in a digital environment: the edition of the correspondence of Giacomo Puccini

The digital and print edition of the correspondence of Giacomo Puccini, a research project hosted in Lucca (Italy), gives the opportunity to discuss more general issues of project management, workflow and teamwork. The project is intended to run for the next ten years, a time-scale that also raises issues of long-term sustainability and controllable editorial practices. The project team consists of members who are mostly voluntary and who are based in five countries on two continents. These two factors further compound existing difficulties in dealing with unfamiliar frameworks, while the limited budget leads to unsystematic technical development. The need for user-friendly editorial tools and the budget-driven technical limitations combine to demand creative solutions in project management. The choice of a hybrid publication (print and digital) aroused much controversy with the publishing house, probably due on the one hand to the novelty of the form, and on the other hand to the unclear theoretical and practical understanding of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two formats and of the advantages of having the two side by side.