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.

The MetaArchive Cooperative’s “Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation”

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Isaiah Beard

A really good resource for those just getting acquainted with digital preservation is MetaArchive‘s recently-released “A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation,” availble in PDF format, or orderable in paper form through their site.  Per MetaArchive’s announcement: This volume is devoted … Continue reading →

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NY Times Article on the realities and costs of Born Digital preservation

Posted on March 16, 2010 by Isaiah Beard

The New York Times today published an article that reflects some of the challenges of preserving born digital content – that is, documents, data and other content that has been created digitally, on a computer or electronic device, and for … Continue reading →

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Reel2Bytes: Digitizing 1950s-era analog tape

Posted on February 23, 2010 by Isaiah Beard

Of all the work I do, I think dealing with older formats, and just figuring out how they work, is the most interesting aspect. A few weeks ago, a stack of old open real tapes arrived, along with a similar-vintage … Continue reading →

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New Scientist article on “Digital Doomsday”

Posted on February 3, 2010 by Isaiah Beard

One of the topics I like to bring up in the discussion of preserving digital data is the idea of a Digital Dark Age… the notion of a period in our historic knowledge that ends up getting lost due to … Continue reading →

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No more Kodachrome Film? Make your own.

Posted on December 8, 2009 by Isaiah Beard

The announced obsolescence and discontinuation of a number of film formats by their vendors has resulted in an expected outcry from a niche of users who continue to use these older formats for their creative and artistic works. But another, … Continue reading →

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