Session 2E | Pandemic problem solving: creating a transcription workflow process for student employees on the fly

Abstract

I will discuss how we overcame the hurdles of rapidly switching to remote work modalities, and created work-from-home transcription projects from scratch to keep our department’s students employed. In March 2020, UTSA announced all non-essential employees would immediately move to remote work, this included all student employees at UTSA Libraries. Special Collections had 5 student clerks at the time, whose entire job duties had been tied to a physical presence on campus. My supervisor, Julianna Barrera-Gomez, and myself, rapidly addressed this issue through a whirlwind transcript workflow and process creation. We researched best practices, created training modules, and utilized Google Drive to coordinate with all of our students, and to organize their submissions. We took this a step further by creating secondary review processes that the students could complete themselves, and we were able to generate transcripts for dozens of digital videos and text-based documents in our digital library, increasing accessibility.