The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified conversations about widespread open access to scholarly literature. Institutional repositories such as the Carolina Digital Repository (CDR) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) can play a key part in the dissemination of scholarly research. Access to coronavirus research was particularly important for the CDR, as UNC-CH is one of the leading institutions in the world for coronavirus research. The pandemic also had local impacts to our work. In March 2020, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) moved to online learning in response to rising coronavirus cases. Due to this change, many UNC-CH Libraries staff members and student workers needed work that could be done remotely. In this presentation, I will describe several projects which we undertook this year to increase access and dissemination of research, and to provide UNC Libraries staff with work which could be completed remotely and asynchronously. For each project, I will share the team’s successes, failures, lessons learned and plans for the future. I will also describe enhancements the team made to our Hyrax-based repository to facilitate the success of these projects
