By Lauren Hanks - Consultant, Internet2 Cloud Services.
How Internet2’s NET+ Enables Institutions to Leverage the Work of Those Who Came Before
What You Need to Know
The NET+ AWS and Cloud Infrastructure Community Program (CICP) created a pathway to share, refine, and ultimately deliver an audio transcription solution to higher ed institutions. This journey traces how Indiana University built the Automated Transcription Service (ATS) to solve a local research need, how NET+ created room for the project to transform through hands-on community events, and how UMBC brought the service into daily operations to support accessible scholarship at scale.
Building Secure, Affordable Transcription at IU
At Indiana University (IU), researchers faced growing pressure to transcribe audio data quickly and securely. Commercial transcription services were costly, difficult to scale, and often misaligned with research data security requirements. As a result, the project that would become the Automated Transcription Service (ATS) emerged.
Beginning as a collaboration between social scientists and IT staff, the ATS began with one practical goal in mind: to create a secure, affordable transcription workflow that would meet real research needs without introducing new compliance risks. It handles sensitive research data at no cost to researchers and returns polished, research-ready transcripts within a single business day.
From the outset, the IU team designed the ATS with reuse in mind.
As Alan Walsh, data engineer for Research Data Services at Indiana University, shared with the NET+ community during an early presentation, “from the beginning, our goal wasn’t just to solve this for Indiana University. We wanted to design something that other institutions could pick up and use without having to start from scratch.”
That intent shaped the technical design, which relies on a serverless architecture in Amazon Web Services to convert audio into researcher-friendly Word documents while maintaining strong data controls.
Local Solution Becomes a Community Resource
Before long, the ATS began circulating within the NET+ AWS community as a promising application institutions could adopt.
Even before the NET+ AWS Barn Raising in May 2025, Tim Champ, associate director for research and enterprise computing at UMBC, was invited to test the service. “I’ve gotten a reputation for trying things and breaking them,” Champ said. “So when they were looking for people to kick the tires on the tool, I jumped in. It was useful to see how it actually behaved before we ever talked about using it in production.”
Within the NET+ AWS program, much of this collaborative work is supported through the Cloud Infrastructure Community Program (CICP), a dynamic community of cloud experts that brings institutions together to share technical projects, reusable code, and implementation experience.
NET+ Barn Raisings are a key part of this effort. These regular hands-on working sessions give institutions the opportunity to build or deploy services together, learning directly from one another in working environments rather than through slide presentations alone.
These events are designed to help participants leave with working implementations and practical knowledge they can take back to campus.
The NET+ AWS Barn Raising in May 2025 became the moment when the ATS moved from an interesting story into something the community could actively deploy together. Institutions worked side by side in AWS sandbox and development environments, configuring the service in real time. When technical constraints emerged, participants adapted quickly.
“We ran into some limits with the AWS CloudShell environment right before the event,” Champ explained. “So everyone had to pivot a bit and run the setup locally. It was very collaborative. People were sharing commands, troubleshooting together, and getting each other unstuck.”
The NET+ Barn Raising model allowed the community to collectively install and test the service, reducing uncertainty for campuses considering adoption. Instead of returning home with a conceptual tool, participants left with a working application and shared operational knowledge.
Bringing ATS into Production at UMBC
Since UMBC is a long-standing participant in the NET+ AWS program and an active member of the NET+ community, translating the barn-raising experience into local action was easy.
After the event, Champ partnered with Michelle Flinchbaugh, digital scholarship services librarian at UMBC, to move ATS into a production-ready configuration for the library.The immediate need was clear. UMBC’s institutional repository hosts a large and growing collection of faculty-produced podcasts, with more than 400 episodes published to date and new content added weekly.
“We have one faculty member who produces two podcasts a week, sometimes more during elections,” Flinchbaugh said. “Creating transcripts for all of those episodes became a real accessibility challenge for us.”
Manual transcription was not sustainable, and previous experimentation with transcription tools could not keep pace with the volume of content being produced. With the ATS, the library could integrate transcription into its regular publishing workflow without adding staff or building a custom system. The service was deployed in a dedicated AWS account to support transparent cost tracking and appropriate access controls.
“We set it up so the library could see exactly what it costs and control who has access,” Champ said. “That way there are no surprises, and it fits into how we already manage cloud services.”
For the library, the shift was immediate and practical.
“It’s been going super well,” Flinchbaugh said. “This isn’t something we could have done on our own, and now we can actually keep up with the volume of content we’re publishing.”
The service now supports the regular addition of transcripts to podcast episodes in UMBC’s repository, improving accessibility while keeping costs low enough to sustain the workflow over time.
A Workforce Multiplier in Practice
UMBC’s experience highlights how participation in NET+ activities can extend the impact of limited local capacity. By engaging with the ATS early and participating in the NET+ Barn Raising, UMBC did more than accelerate its own implementation. It also helped strengthen the service for others in the community.
“When more people start installing and using a tool, they find bugs and edge cases you don’t always see with a small group,” Champ said. “That helps point out improvements and even new directions for how the service could evolve.”
This dynamic changes the return on community engagement. Staff time spent participating in NET+ activities contributes not only to local outcomes, but also to shared services that benefit multiple institutions. For UMBC, that meant avoiding the need to design and maintain a custom transcription platform. For IU, it meant seeing a locally developed service continue to evolve through broader use and feedback.
NET+ made it easier for this exchange to happen through sustained and ongoing collaboration.
For Flinchbaugh, the impact is tangible. “Accessibility is important to us,” she said. “But without this kind of shared work and support, we just wouldn’t have had the capacity to build something like this ourselves.”
Looking Ahead
The journey of the ATS from a local solution to shared application, to production service offers a repeatable model for how institutions can work together to address common challenges within research and education, and through NET+. By building in the open, sharing early, and collaborating through hands-on community events, campuses can reduce duplication of effort and move more quickly from experimentation to impact.
As new needs emerge across research, teaching, and digital scholarship, the NET+ ecosystem continues to create opportunities for institutions to extend the reach of their innovations and learn from one another’s work. NET+ Barn Raisings are one example of how the CICP helps institutions collaborate and build together. Through the NET+ community of practice, campuses can amplify their cloud capabilities and turn shared expertise into a strategic workforce multiplier. To learn more or get involved, contact help@internet2.edu.