Case Study 6.3: IUScholarWorks—An Institutional Repository Audit
As Jenny Hoops and Margaret McLaughlin described in their NASIG 2020 presentation, a university-wide accessibility audit prompted Indiana University Libraries to assess their institutional repository platform, IUScholarWorks. Further details about this audit follow below.
- Goals: Apart from identifying accessibility issues in the institutional repository, this project sought to align accessibility practices with IUScholarWorks’ open access mission. An additional goal was creation of sustainable policies and procedures for future upkeep of the repository.
- Project Scope: Included in this audit were two open access repositories—including the documents and materials retained in the repositories.
- Evaluation Criteria: Assessment criteria were drawn from WCAG guidelines. The libraries developed a simple “Audit Accessibility Template ” to track alerts and concerns identified by automated checkers. These concerns were subsequently addressed through a combination of policy change, author training, and requests for institutional branding changes.
- Tools: The project made use of the WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool, the Functional Accessibility Evaluator (FAE), and Google Lighthouse.
The IUScholarWorks example is especially helpful for seeing how libraries have used audits as a basis for deriving particular accessibility policies. To find out more about the project, see the full discussion in the Serials Librarian article, “Web Accessibility in the Institutional Repository.”
