Participatory Description and Metadata Quality in Rapid Response Archives

Abstract

This article describes the establishment of a participatory, rapid response archive, and an assessment of metadata quality applied by student curators between March and September 2020. A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19 (JOTPY) was founded to document the COVID-19 pandemic, and is titled after Daniel Defoe’s 1722 book of the same name. As a participatory collection, A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19 relies on a team of student curators to tag materials. This article summarizes an analysis of metadata tags, and describes strategies that improved the quantity and quality of metadata tags in the collection.