Here Be Dragons: Navigating the Uncharted Waters of Legacy Thesis and Dissertation Digitization

Digitizing 19,000 print theses and dissertations for ingest into an institutional repository is a daunting task fraught with pitfalls and peril. In the Fall of 2018, the Theses and Dissertations Digitization (TDD) Task Force at the University of Houston (UH) Libraries fearlessly set out to accomplish just that. We have learned many lessons about the legal and technical environment surrounding the retrospective digitization of scholarly works. This poster, presented at the 2021 Texas Conference on Digital Libraries, provides an overview of the project and highlights the many challenges the team faced as it assessed the project scope, developed workflows, and bootstrapped production activities.Librarie