Author Archives: Isaiah Beard

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.

Japan’s Crises, and its ramifications on digital preservation

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Isaiah Beard

The earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear crisis in Japan may have far-reaching cultural and history-recording effects worldwide… possibly exacerbating a digital dark age. Continue reading →

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Dataset sharing and preservation strategies at Rutgers

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Isaiah Beard

The NSF now requires academic researchers to come up with a plan to store and share their digital research data. RUcore is here to help. Continue reading →

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Lessons Learned from Google’s temporary Gmail loss

Posted on March 1, 2011 by Isaiah Beard

This past week offered up a little dose of panic to an estimated tens of thousands of users to Google’s free Gmail service, when they logged in to discover that all of their e-mail was missing. This event should be seen as an opportunity for users of Cloud services to reflect on how important that stored data is to them, and what impact it would have on their lives if that content were lost. Continue reading →

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Preserving Video: Different Solutions for a Growing Problem

Posted on November 15, 2010 by Isaiah Beard

The drumbeat continues to sound for the preservation of obsolete and endangered moving image formats. As older tape formats become unplayable, either through decay or lack of equipment to play them back, the urgency grows to find ways to preserve their content using modern digital formats. But what digital format should be used to preserve this content in the digital space, and help ensure that we aren’t finding ourselves in the same obsolescence predicament right away? Continue reading →

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Using consistent file naming conventions for digital preservation projects

Posted on October 21, 2010 by Isaiah Beard

One of biggest problems we’ve run into has been how people name files after they’ve created or digitized them. In this article, I’ll list some of the basic recommendations that ensure file processing on a digital library project will go smoothly. I’ll also point out some tips and tricks that have worked well for us in projects handled at the Digital Curation Research Center. Continue reading →

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