UNT Libraries Catches Up on Metadata Work Amid Pandemic Shutdown

WBAP Anchor Tom whalen (1951), courtesy of unt libraries

The Covid-19 pandemic has created dramatic changes in the lives of university students and the services that the University of North Texas library provides to students. The Special Collections reading room is closed, and the film archives are safely locked away. For over a month their full-time staff and 25 student employees have been required to work from home.

Although their work on physical collections has stopped, the pandemic has provided the perfect opportunity for catching up on descriptive metadata creation for their digital collections. It has also provided a means for UNT’s 25 student employees to continue to earn paychecks while they watch news footage and create detailed keywords, subject headings and other faceted metadata.

Before the pandemic, UNT’s metadata backlog was close to 100,000 items. This material had gone through quality control and was ingested into their digital preservation system, but could not be made publicly available until metadata was applied. Metadata is a time-consuming process and they generally have 10-15 student employees assigned to metadata creation at any given time. Additionally, all of their students are cross trained on metadata, so even if their usual duty is staffing the reading room or processing collections, they are also able to work on metadata when needed. Currently, all of their students are assigned to metadata and working from home.

In the two weeks between April 1-April 14 the Special Collections department published almost 6,000 new metadata records; bringing with it a vast quantity of hidden archival material to public view.  Among the newly available content in the news archive is a variety of fun footage from 1951, including donkey races in Waco, the coronation of the Queen of the Flying Farmers, an escaped monkey from the Fort Worth Zoo, a birthday party for a 106 year old man, coverage of the annual Neiman-Marcus fashion expo and a three year old who can speak three languages.

During the closure of the university UNT is unable to access physical film and video assets, however, they are still able to provide screeners and license footage from our extensive digital collections. Please contact UNT with footage inquires at specialcollections@unt.edu.