Harvesting in Revit is just the act of going back through a completed project and saving families, details, materials, annotations, legends, schedules, etc that were created for that specific project and driving those elements into the Revit Library and Templates.  Harvesting expands your library content, reduces time to recreate these elements and optimizes your templates for increased efficiency on future projects.

At GLHN I was approached by one of the Revit Techs on how he could help in the Revit optimization process.  This gentlemen has a depth of knowledge of previous projects and content location that is invaluable.  As such I suggested he create a spreadsheet that indentified the subject content and its location on the server. 

I didn't want to drive this content directly into the new Revit library we were creating without vetting it for appropriate attributes.  Specifically we want to:

> make sure it had the proper shared parameters so the new schedules could read its data and populate the
   schedule appropriately.
> categorize it based on the Masterformat spec number which drives the structure of our Library so we could 
   properly locate it within the Revit Library for future retrieval.
> review it for additional informational content.

This filtering and alignment of content going into the Revit Library is an essential quality control process that must continually occur.
                                                                                                                                                    c. kilgore

Two keys to improved productivity can be found in the Revit Library and setting up project Templates. 

Templates are essentially bare bone projects that have the basic sheet organization and commonly used annotations, notes, schedules, families, line types, details, detail components, etc.  The template gets you off to a quick start and helps standardize the format and appearance of your construction documents.

An essential element of the Template is the titleblock.  The titleblock is a separate family that is loaded into the template or project (if a custom titleblock is required)  It contains instance parameters that allow you to input unique attributes for each specific sheet and type parameters that act as global controls for changes to the titleblock through-out the project.

I use various visibility controls to turn on and off attributes of the GLHN titleblock.  Type visibility parameters like the seal registration points, the disclaimer (that is applied to the record drawings set), Volumes I & II (given our 300 plus sheet sets), and our standard GLHN Logo (which sometimes is replace by a collaboration logo).  Instance visibility parameters control a segmented boundary line that defines our notes portion of the sheet.  It can be turned on/off in segments depending on the length of the notes field and defined independently for each sheet.

The above are all recent upgrades to the GLHN titleblock including the addition of a revision schedule that automatically reads the revision clouds on that sheet and reports the revision ASI number, date and description. Since it was determined that we would be using the 'by sheet' method of scheduling our revisions I did not include the revision sequence number in the revision schedule parameter fields. I just typed in the revision sequence 1 thru 8 in the titleblock.  When you use the 'by sheet' method the revisions are automatically numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, ...etc as they are issued to the individual sheet so the sequence number becomes irrelavent.  When you use the 'by project' setting the sequence number is essential to your revision schedule and replaces the "typed in" numbers I used with the 'by sheet' method. 
                                                                                                                                            c. kilgore