Like many public institutions, the University of Mississippi is committed to making all of its programs, services, and activities accessible to all students, staff, faculty, and community users. This applies especially to public-facing electronic resources, which include culturally significant digital collections in the university’s institutional repository, eGrove. For audio and video (A/V) collections, the captioning process is time consuming and labor-intensive. From 2020-2021, librarians at the University of Mississippi ran a grant-funded project by the LYRASIS Catalyst Fund to develop a workflow to streamline this process. The grant “Caption This: Creating Efficiency in Audiovisual Accessibility Using Artificial Intelligence” researched ways cultural heritage institutions could increase both efficiency and accuracy in captioning A/V content, with the intention of creating a toolkit that integrates artificial intelligence with library needs to hone this process.
The toolkit is intended for anyone working in a cultural heritage institution who is looking for a low-cost solution to transcribe their A/V content. At the same time, the toolkit aims to guide users with limited technological and/or digital skills through the process and help them gain confidence in their abilities. It guides users step-by-step in an effort to make it accessible to all librarians and archivists, regardless of digital training.