What I learned about submitting to NOAA Library

[brianlangseth-NOAA]

This is for reference in case it can be useful in the future. If we can't automate our docs sufficiently, then we can have our NOAA librarian work the manual steps to have our documents satisfy the necessary elements.

Stock assessments submitted in RPTS can (should?) be sent to the NOAA Library's Institutional Repository (IR) via RPTS. This is the end point for journals and apparently stock assessment documents.

I recently tried to do this for my 2021 quillback rockfish assessments. However, there were a number of issues that the IR found that would need to resolved before submitting. To avoid a back and forth, I met with the NOAA librarian tasked with my document to determine what it is they look for.

They look for 5 elements, their "Big 5". These include

1. Bookmarks (any doc over 20 pages needs these)
2. Document properties (title and language are the only required ones)
3. Alt text
4. Logical reading order
5. Proper tags

My quillback documents had problems with tagging. A way to check tags is by using the "accessibility" tool on the right side toolbar in Adobe, and clicking "reading order". It gives something like that below. Although parts of the paragraph are not tagged as text, the reader will read those sections.

The librarian noted I need to tag figures and other items based on the full text, so in the above "figure 5" instead of figure "5".

Tables should also be tagged as tables. The below shows an example of a table tagged (greyed out) and not tagged (nothing). The librarian said the text should be tagged as text with the table as a table, but I did not get the impression they would be a problem if the whole thing is tagged as a table, as it is in the below.

To resolve this all, the best solution would be automating within sa4ss. However, it can manually be done as well. The easiest way I learned from this call is to select the tables that aren't tagged (mouse over and create a box around the table) and define it as a table (see the pop out window in the above images). This didn't work for me, so alternatively I could use the "autotag document" option within the accessibility tool. Doing this fixed my issue with selecting and tagging items using the pop up window from the "reading order" option. This tagged everything pretty well, and I think it would satisfy the IR's big 5, but it did remove my figure alt texts, which I would have to re-enter manually before submitting.