Overcoming Challenges in Scaling Up Digitization Projects During the Pandemic

Abstract

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. This paper will discuss a brief history of the project and content, best practice technical standards implemented by the Libraries and expanded for this project, scaling up workflows built to handle a project of a few hundred items to a project of over 1,100 items, changing digitization workflows due to pandemic closures and the need to move the project work remotely, and a repository and digital preservation archive migration that occurred during the course of the project. The report will share how we overcame challenges and will implement the changes we made to future av digitization projects.