I worked on the digital archiving project at the Library of Congress. In that case, it was mostly wire spool recordings, wax cylinders, and LPs, but many of the same principles apply:

- This media can be fragile. Less so with VHS or Betamax, but it's something to keep in mind.

- It's not usually just a single copy and drop it into an archive. Most of the time, they'll want a super high quality, uncompressed master for long term preservation. This is with the hope that they never have to go back to the physical media.

- Once they have that copy, they create lower quality versions for day to day display, usage, study, etc.

- When you consider the "work" (in the artistic/archival sense, not the effort sense), it's not just the video. Quite often they'll want image scans of the media itself, container, etc. This is because the video itself may have been suffered damage due to physical damage.

- Next, you need to document the whole process down to the brand and settings of every single device. If it's known (or discovered later), that a particular piece of equipment distorts media (plays faster/slower, changes color palettes, etc), you need to know that and potentially correct for it at a later time.

- And finally, don't forget the metadata! A collection isn't useful if someone doesn't capture the who, what, and when. This is often the most painful part because the settings above are often set once and forgotten. This requires manually transcribing information written on the media, watching it, or a variety of other methods. Most libraries farm this out to interns. My new company - Clarify.io - hopes to help with this aspect.

If you're interested more in the mechanics, please feel free to let me know.