This poster presentation discusses how an institutional repository (IR) team at a mid-sized university discovered their best practices. A period of staff changes and shortages caused IR projects to slow-down almost to a halt due to a lack of clearly defined best practices. How and why IR projects faltered is explicitly discussed. This poster includes lessons from IR literature, with notes on adapting best practices from larger institutions to smaller institutions. How the concept of lab notebooks from the biological sciences can be incorporated to an IR workflow is demonstrated. Finally, the poster discusses working with an eclectic IR collection of scholarly works, archival materials, and university ephemera and how the newly implemented best practices have been created to minimize future project slow-downs. Takeaways will include how and why IR staff can use lab notebooks for documenting projects and strategies for minimizing project slow-downs during times of staff change or shortages.