Innovation During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Activating Student Employees for ETD 508 Remediation in a Remote Environment

Abstract

Sacramento State’s electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) collection faces a common problem: how to achieve 508 compliance, ensure accessibility for all users, and promote principles of universal design. Providing electronic collections and resources that are accessible to all users is an important part of promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion for our students and end users. In Spring 2020 we launched a new initiative to hire and train a single 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 2020 we made the decision to expand this opportunity to more library student employees and provide a project they could work on remotely. By converting this to a remote work project, we were able to keep all student assistants employed who were interested in remote work, from nearly every department in the library. 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).