Scaling Up Video Digitization at the University of Maryland Libraries: A Case Study

In 2015, a team at the University of Maryland Libraries collaborated on a pilot project to digitize 100 VHS tapes from the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange collection and, in doing so, established organizational workflows for video digitization and access. After completing the pilot phase of the project, staff who worked on the project published a case study in this journal that articulated a question echoed throughout that process: “Is this enough?” Enough descriptive metadata? Enough technical metadata? Enough storage space? This article will reflect on the pilot project, detail how the digitization specifications and workflows established during the pilot project have changed over the intervening years, and how they were scaled-up to digitize and make accessible the remaining videos 1,125 videos in the collection under the auspices of a 2018 National Endowment for the Humanities grant