Looking for ways to make your research — and your life — a bit easier as the semester comes to a close? Emory Libraries and the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) are here to help with two initiatives that make resources more available and accessible.
ECDS has established a website of digital courses where the Emory community can learn different skills on their own, such as digital mapping, video editing, 3D modeling and more. The Emory Preservation Department has completed a captioning and transcription project that makes audiovisual collections more accessible.
Emory student employees worked on both initiatives and were integral to their successes.
“We are thrilled to provide opportunities for student employees to gain skills that help them flourish,” says Lisa Macklin, associate vice provost and university librarian. “The students contribute to our collections being accessible to a broader audience, so they also make a positive impact.”
These are just two of the many initiatives Emory Libraries staff members and student employees have been working on to make resources more broadly available and accessible.
ECDS digital training courses
Want to learn new digital skills? ECDS is launching a new digital training website that offers free access to self-guided learning in mapping and spatial analysis, digital publishing and exhibitions, data analysis, video production and editing, website design, 3D modeling, artificial intelligence and many other topics.
The digital training site is open to students, faculty and staff and gathers all the training resources in one place for easy access. Users can choose from three types of resources: ECDS’s catalog of recorded online workshops; LinkedIn Learning, which provides a wide library of video tutorials and courses free to Emory users; and ECDS-created open-source tools, such as Open Tour, with step-by-step instructions. The training website also directs users to relevant content from other academic units, like Emory Libraries’ LibGuides or materials selected by the Center for AI Learning.
“It's asynchronous and it's self-paced, so you can either start learning from zero and do the whole course or jump in at whatever point you want to start learning from and go from there,” says Alexander Cors, ECDS digital scholarship specialist and manager of the Digital Scholarship Training Program.
ECDS created its digital training website for two main reasons, Cors says. First, graduate students are frequently hired with little experience in specialized tools like web design, video editing, digital mapping, or data analysis, which prompted ECDS to develop a structured training program. As student employees and the wider Emory community grew more knowledgeable and eager to learn other skills, ECDS expanded its resources, ultimately building a comprehensive training library for a broader audience.
Additionally, the website enables ECDS to respond to the growing demand from faculty and student researchers for digital project support. Now, ECDS staff members can easily share specific lessons or guidelines with patrons before or after a consultation.
“This way, we can give students and faculty the resources to easily learn and understand tools like digital mapping or video editing, and we can spend more time working directly on the projects,” says Cors.
Undergraduate and graduate student employees were an integral part of developing the training website, Cors adds. They helped select learning materials, wrote some of the lessons (such as the Podcasting 101 and Video Essay lessons), formatted and updated the website, created the graphics and designs, and ran the user interface testing.
The training site is geared toward Emory undergraduate and graduate students, faculty and staff, but members of the public can also use it. (There are a few areas that require an Emory login, such as the ECDS workshops.) For the LinkedIn Learning tutorials, Emory users with an active ID can login for free, and the public can access tutorials for free through their public library.
Making archived videos more accessible with captioning
The Emory Preservation Department, housed in the Robert W. Woodruff Library, has been tackling a project to make some of the Libraries’ historical and relevant audiovisual material more accessible.
The department won a Lyrasis Catalyst Fund grant to caption several collections of archived videos using Whisper captioning software and to evaluate the effectiveness of the software. Five collections were selected for the project, including surgical grand rounds lectures from the Emory School of Medicine records at the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library and interviews from the Underrepresented Voices oral history collection from the Emory Oral History Program. In addition, selections from the Rose Library were captioned, including press conferences and episodes of “A Dialogue with Sam Nunn” from the collection of former Georgia state congressman and U.S. senator Sam Nunn; episodes of the Atlanta-based variety program “American Music Show”; and radio programs from the “Martin Luther King Speaks” series from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference collection.
Over the past year and a half, a team of students captioned 361 audio and video recordings — more than 200 hours of content. With the Whisper software creating the initial caption text, the students reviewed the text for accuracy, made any necessary corrections and adjusted formatting and timestamps to ensure proper caption displays. The students’ corrected captions were then compared to the original Whisper text to determine Whisper’s accuracy and understand its strengths and weaknesses.
Through this project, Whisper was determined to be a useful tool in creating captions and transcripts for audiovisual materials in the Libraries, and the team is beginning to work on additional collections.
“This is going to create greater accessibility for the content and expand options for searchability as well,” says Nina Rao, head of media preservation and project lead. “Even if you don’t necessarily rely on captions, this will make it easier for people to find material that’s relevant to what they’re looking for.
“It’s also important for web content accessibility. As web content accessibility guidelines become more widely adopted, captioning is something that users are going to expect more and more, and this will allow us to keep up with that changing expectation.”
Students have enjoyed working on the project. “They felt like it made it more interesting to do the work, because Whisper does the part that's really labor intensive, which is transcribing from scratch,” Rao says. “That allowed the students to focus on editorial decisions and ensuring that the captions are readable and accurate, so it let them focus on the more creative decisions involved.”
For more information on these projects, please contact Alexander Cors regarding the ECDS Digital Training website or Nina Rao regarding the captioning project.