Session 2E | Metadata Works From Home: How Student Workers Continued to Work While Increasing Collection Accessibility

To keep our on-site student staff gainfully employed in early 2020, as the realities of the coronavirus pandemic came into sharp focus, a University of Houston Libraries team hatched a plan for student employees to create high quality closed captions for hundreds of digitized archival films and videos. The project team developed training materials and began working with twenty-six students from six units across the libraries within two weeks of the campus closure. This presentation will discuss the project design, unique challenges of training and communicating with student employees, and the outcomes of the effort.