The Devil Is in the Details: Managing the Growth of Streaming Media in Library Collections

With the advent of streaming music and video services, patrons have grown accustomed to accessing media on their computers and mobile devices. This method of consuming media has spread into the realm of libraries and includes less‐than‐mainstream content not available through Netflix, Amazon, or Hulu. Some vendors have addressed this growing demand by making their video content available for streaming through subscription databases or by renting and purchasing individual titles to be hosted on a server. Streaming video content not available through databases or purchasing and renting individual titles, usually involves acquiring the DVD, encoding it and hosting the file on a local server—a very labor‐intensive means to provide access. This paper examines current trends in streaming video, a detailed look at the locally encoded and hosted workflow at Columbia University Libraries, and best practices going forward.