6 Steps to Start Captioning in Aviary for Small Archives

For small archives and historical societies, audiovisual collections are often the most engaging materials you hold—and the hardest to manage. You know that accessibility isn't just a legal mandate; it's a moral imperative to make history open to everyone.

But the thought of captioning hundreds of hours of oral histories, town meetings, or vintage film footage is overwhelming. Limited staff, tight budgets, and technical hurdles often leave AV collections sitting in the "too hard" basket.

If you are using the Aviary platform, that mountain is much more climbable than you think. Aviary is designed to centralize the workflow, taking you from raw media file to fully accessible, searchable content without needing third-party vendors or complex software.

Here is a practical, six-step plan for how an organization can stop worrying about captioning and get started today using Aviary.

1. Stop Trying to Do It All at Once (Prioritize)

The biggest mistake small archives make is paralysis by analysis when facing a massive backlog. You cannot caption 5,000 hours of footage this month.

Start by prioritizing. Do not treat every file equally. In Aviary, create a "pilot project" collection based on one of these criteria:

• High Demand: What are researchers constantly asking for?

• At-Risk Recordings: Material you have just paid to digitize and want to make immediately usable.

• High Impact: A collection that tells an important, inclusive story relevant to your community right now.

By focusing on a small, manageable batch, you can test your workflow, estimate time requirements, and secure a quick win to show stakeholders.

2. Ditch the Separate Transcription Subscription Vendors and Use Integrated AI

Historically, captioning meant downloading a massive video file, uploading it to a separate transcription vendor site, paying a monthly subscription fee regardless of whether you transcribed anything, or paying a high per-minute rate, downloading an SRT or VTT file, and re-uploading it to your media player.

Aviary eliminates this ping-pong game.

Aviary integrates directly with leading Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) providers (like AssemblyAI, Amazon Transcribe, and the highly accurate WhisperX).

How to start: Once your media files are ingested into Aviary, you simply select the resources, choose "Request New Transcript," select your preferred AI service, and hit "Create Transcription Job". The processing happens in the background right within the platform.

3. Embrace the "Good Enough" First Pass

For small archives, perfection is the enemy of done. Modern AI transcription is shockingly good—often 90-95% accurate depending on audio quality.

For many collections, a 95% accurate transcript that makes a video searchable and broadly accessible today is better than waiting three years for funding and time for a 100% human-verified transcript.

Get the AI captions generated. Aviary immediately synchronizes this text with the video. Suddenly, your content is discoverable by keyword search and accessible to users with disabilities, which is a massive immediate upgrade for your users.

4. Utilize the Integrated Editor for the "Human Polish"

AI struggles with proper nouns, local acronyms, poor microphone quality, and heavy accents. To reach true accessibility standards, a human needs to review the output.

This is where Aviary shines for small teams. You don't need expensive captioning software on your desktop or local server.

Aviary has a browser-based Transcript Editor. Staff (or trusted volunteers/interns) can watch the video and edit the text side-by-side in real-time. The editor is intuitive—if you can use a Word processor, you can edit captions in Aviary. You can easily correct spellings, adjust speaker identification, and ensure the text matches timing of the audio perfectly.

5. Leverage Volunteers (Safely)

Because the editing tool is browser-based and user-friendly, it opens the door to crowdsourcing.

Many small archives rely on volunteers who may not be technical experts but care deeply about the subject matter. You can grant user permissions in Aviary that allow volunteers to access specific collections and use the Transcript Editor to refine the AI’s output, without giving them admin rights to your whole repository.

This turns a massive staff burden into an engaging community project.

6. Look into Bulk Purchasing for Budget Certainty

Budget surprises are terrifying for small institutions. "Pay-as-you-go" models can sometimes lead to anxiety if a project runs larger than expected.

If you know you have a significant backlog to tackle, contact Aviary about bulk purchasing transcript credits. Buying buckets of hours upfront often secures better pricing and, more importantly, provides budget certainty for grant applications or annual board approvals. You know exactly what it will cost to process your pilot collection before you begin.

Conclusion

Making AV collections accessible doesn't require a Hollywood budget or an IT department. It requires a strategic approach and the right tools. By centralizing your ordering, processing, and editing within Aviary, you can move your archive’s audiovisual history out of the dark and onto the screens of the community you serve.