TCDL 2026

Making Metadata Input Accessible: Training Volunteers & Practicum Students for the Sherwin Carlquist Project
By: Samantha Ekberg

At the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, there is a small team working on the intimidatingly large National Science Foundation grant, ""Collaborative Research: Advancing the Extended Specimen Network: Curating and Digitizing the Sherwin Carlquist Collection""; a collection containing nearly 200,000 archival objects to arrange, rehouse, digitize, upload, and describe.

Without the volunteers and practicum students dedicating their time and energy to describing these digitized items, this project would likely go undescribed and inaccessible for years. However, describing archival objects is often complicated, and this particular project comes with extra quirks (such as lost field documentation, difficult to read handwriting, and linkages to another portal) that required the project team to constantly adapt the training, workflow documentation, and quality checking processes to make the activity accessible to anybody who wanted to try.

This presentation will give an overview of the way we currently train our metadata workers and the quality checking process, as well as describing the adaptations made over time to accommodate and work with both hired practicum students and volunteers. There will also be a detailed look at the current versus the several previous versions of the metadata training and reference documents, used in training and as working guides for the metadata workers.

We will discuss why and how these changes were made in the documentation, training, and quality checking process; the lessons we've learned and their effect on the rest of the project; and the joy in making a complicated activity accessible to anyone.

Practical Approaches for Training Student Library Employees in Metadata Creation
By: Sarah Lynn Fisher

The University of North Texas Libraries Digital Libraries Division employs approximately a dozen students each semester who participate in the description of digital objects for our items in our repositories. Through a thoughtful training approach, our division has been able to rely upon students to consistently create high-quality metadata for our collections. This provides a sustainable solution to scale our operations beyond the capacity of full-time staff, while also creating professional development experiences for students from a variety of disciplines. Many of the students start having little to no experience creating metadata or knowledge of the principles of information organization. After many years of refining the process, we will share our best practices for training novice metadata creators in a manner that emphasizes building knowledge field by field, allows for iterative refinement over time, and cultivates syntactical thinking that translates beyond the library domain. The training workflow is supported by clear, well-documented general metadata input guidelines along with format-specific guidance for common resource types in our digital collections. To support multiple learning types, this material is presented in one-on-one, video, text, and peer-training formats. Editors begin applying these guidelines by adding or modifying specific fields in collections with existing metadata. And to involve all creators in the quality review process, we provide instruction on how reviewers can use in-house tools to understand the impact of metadata quality in our repositories. We hope that sharing these workflows will aid other institutions training staff and students to create metadata for digital collections. (All Audiences)

Co-authors: Hannah Tarver, Head, Digital Projects Unit, University of North Texas and Mark Phillips, Associate University Librarian - Digital Libraries, University of North Texas