The University of Maryland Libraries received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 2019 to digitize the Dance Exchange collection, a video collection of performances and rehearsals and their corresponding paper programs. The Dance Exchange was founded by Liz Lerman, a well-known choreographer whose ethos of “dance for all” underscores the type of work and community programs created by the company and the performers, including all ages and differently-abled participants. This paper will discuss a brief history of the project and content, why this collection was prioritized by the curator, and the importance to the wider dance community.

We will focus this report on the Libraries’ best practice technical standards implemented and expanded for this project and why implementing the metadata was important as we were moving to new digital preservation technologies. The standards include video technical specifications, metadata XML specifications, and embedded metadata specifications. We will also elaborate on how we scaled up workflows built to handle previous projects of a few hundred items to a project of over 1,100 items, and the challenges of reviewing, modifying, and moving the large amount of metadata and data. A major impediment for this project was that the university and our vendor closed due to the pandemic at a key point when we were receiving files back for review. We will examine how we changed digitization and review workflows due to the need to move the project work remotely. A final challenge we are currently experiencing is a massive repository and digital preservation archive migration. We will share how we are working with repository managers and digital preservationists during the university closure to complete the work necessary for getting the content online. We will conclude by discussing how we will implement the changes we made to future av digitization projects.