“Making Your Repository (More) Accessible”

Introduction: As colleges and universities make increasing and overdue efforts under the auspices of access, equity, and inclusion to make their resources accessible to all users, these efforts must extend to the institution’s online presence, including its institutional repository. IR managers must first ask what “accessible” means for compliance with university policies as well as the Americans with Disability Act (ADA), immediately followed by plans for both remediating existing content and imposing best practices on new content, amid current workflows and budgetary restraints.

Literature Review: Literature on the topic of accessibility in IRs has mostly focused on the need to make collections accessible and the challenges for doing so. Advice on how to navigate the actual process is harder to come by.

Description of Service: The University of Mississippi established a goal that everything going into its IR would use OCR software to convert images of text into searchable text and create a process by which patrons could request remediation of older content from the IR, whether documents or recordings. A combination of shared tools (including Equidox and SensusAccess) and interdepartmental partnerships has made a significant difference in making these digital collections proactively accessible.

Next Steps: We continue to maintain partnerships with units around campus, made challenging by frequent turnover as in demand specialists take positions at other institutions. Despite our efforts to provide searchable text as a minimum level of service, OCR correction provides tags but not necessarily headings or alt-text. Hopefully future versions of OCR editors will include such features.

https://doi.org/10.31274/jlsc.18308

| Artificial Intelligence |
| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
| Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |