Our Metadata Problem and the Curation Crew Solution: Employing Non-Specialist Undergraduate Students in Data Remediation

Abstract

This case study describes the challenges faced by A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19 ( JOTPY) in achieving metadata consistency despite the project’s success at capturing rich metadata for its nearly 10,000 objects. The problem of inconsistency was amplified by JOTPY’s model of shared authority and its status as a global curatorial consortium with dozens of partners. JOTPY was able to address this issue of metadata consistency by employing, training, and tasking hourly student curators called the Curation Crew. The Curation Crew underwent rigorous curatorial training and was, despite their lack of experience in archival curation, able to achieve an impressive level of curatorial consistency. They are now recognized as JOTPY’s greatest quality control assets and have even begun to, themselves, contribute to the development of best practices. In addition to their data-cleaning tasks, the Curation Crew also directs its labors toward recording their own thoughts and feelings by generating several submissions per week. As metadata consistency improves, the Curation Crew’s labor is being redirected toward a wider range of tasks such as oral history transcription and targeted collecting.