Practicum in a Pandemic

The UMSL OA Practicum in a Pandemic Project began in April of 2020 at thebeginning of the Covid-19 crisis. The pandemic made it impossible for manygraduate students to finish or find an in-person library practicum opportunity.Helena Marvin, the Institutional Repository Librarian at the University ofMissouri-St. Louis devised and supervised a remote practicum for 14 SISTLstudents, with 90 or 130 hours of work each, over the course of 2020. Thestudents collaborated to develop, document, enact, and update a workflow forreviewing faculty works and discovering and harvesting Open Access articles. Thesummer students were so successful that after completing UMSL faculty thepracticum focus expanded to include the other three UM System campuses'faculty. Microsoft Teams and Zoom were used for communication and filecollaboration, in conjunction with a WordPress blog for showcasing the workflowdocumentation and student activity logs. The blog is hosted by the UMSL DigitalHumanities Lab at http://umsldigitalhumanities.org/openaccess/. Thispresentation will be about how that practicum went and advice for hosting apracticum student virtually at your library.