Article looks at the history of the NBC5 news collection maintained by the Special Collections Department of the University of North Texas Libraries. It examines the workflows required to prepare film and video for digitisation, perform quality control on digital files, and apply metadata keywords and content description to make footage easier for filmmakers to discover online. The paper will also discuss the licensing workflows in place at UNTL and how footage has been licensed for use in a variety of projects.

This article examines how archives were forced to rethink their modes of providing access to physical collections because of the coronavirus of 2019 (COVID-19). Whereas difficult copyright questions raised by reproducing items could previously be skirted by requiring researchers to work with materials in person, the long-term closure of reading rooms and decrease in long-distance travel mean that archives need a workflow for handling user digitization requests that is scalable and requires consulting only easily identifiable information and, assuming full reproduction is off the table, reproducing items in a collection under 17 U.S.C. § 108 or through a strategy of rapid risk assessment. There is a challenge in creating a policy that will work across different formats and genres of archival materials, so this article offers some suggestions for how to think about these parameters according to US copyright law and calls for a committee of experts to work out a model policy that could serve remote users of archival collections even after the COVID-19 crisis has passed.