Activating Student Workers for ETD 508 Remediation in a Remote Environment during COVID-19 Pandemic
Channel: USETDA
Date: 2021-02-12

Activating Student Workers for ETD 508 Remediation in a Remote Environment During the COVID-19 Pandemic. 

Elyse Fox, Daina Dickman, Sacramento State University Library.

Our university’s ETD collection faces a common problem, how to achieve 508 compliance and ensure accessibility for all users. We lack adequate staffing and funding to work on current theses and retroactive digitization projects. In Spring 2020, we launched a new initiative to hire and train a student employee focused on 508 remediation for approximately 600 previously digitized theses and projects, prior to their ingest in the institutional repository. When our campus closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March we made the decision to expand this opportunity to more library student employees and provide a project they could work on remotely. As a regional campus serving many non-traditional, first-generation, and parenting students, it was important that our student employees could continue working and be paid. By converting this to a telecommuting project, we were able to keep all student assistants who were interested in teleworking employed from nearly every department in the library. Additionally, we were able to expand the scope of our remediation efforts, with the original project growing from all retrospectively digitized theses (approximately 1,000 in all) to all ETD content in the institutional repository (an additional 3,500).

In this presentation, we will discuss training student workers for remediation tasks, best practices when moving student employees to remote work, and mitigating challenges faced in these unique circumstances during the COVID-19 pandemic. We will also explore ways to continue the work undertaken in these unique experiences in future digitization work and staffing strategies of sharing student workers between departments.

USETDA 2020 Conference Proceedings: 
https://www.ocs.usetda.org/index.php/USETDA/USETDA2020/paper/view/230