A home for our digitization standards

Large Format Digitization

Although Rutgers University Libraries has had digitization standards in place since 2006  for the RUcore object types we currently handle, the documents were often hidden deep in places where they weren’t easily found.  This made it hard for members of the public, and other people interested in finding a resource for how best to digitize to find out what we’re doing.

Additionally, the documentation was getting a bit long in the tooth; some of the proposals hadn’t been looked over in years, some still had “Draft” markings even though committees have reviewed them and we’ve already been carrying these procedures out, and in a couple of cases the documentation has been superseded by technology advances, and doesn’t match current practice at all.

For this reason, we’ve been engaged in a review of these standards and are revising where needed to make them reflect current best practices within RUcore and the Digital Curation Research Center. Additionally, I’ve created a “home” for the complete set of documents here:

The link to these standards are also available on the upper-left corner of this blog, in the navigation bar.

We hope that keeping these standards in one place will greatly benefit other curators and those who need a place to get started digitizing and preserving works.

About Isaiah Beard

Isaiah's role at Rutgers University Libraries is to establish standards and workflow practices for the digitization and encoding of a wide array of digital assets. His background in digital preservation begins with his avid interest in photography, and in the issues facing the field as it shifts from analog film formats into an increasingly digital landscape. He has researched and developed standards for the preservation of digital assets that have been adopted by a number of prominent agencies, including the Library of Congress, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and members of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA). An advocate of free and open source software and standards, he volunteers time to projects assisting aspiring artists, photographers, videographers and musicians in using these open technologies to their advantage. Isaiah's current active projects in addition to NJVid include the Rutgers Community Repository (RUcore); and advising developers of the Ubuntu Linux project in matters relating to media format compatibility.
This entry was posted in Best Practices and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.