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.

YouTube as a de facto cultural archive for past videos

Posted on November 30, 2009 by Isaiah Beard

YouTube is definitely the wild-west for video content, and if you look hard enough, you’ll find a lot of vintage video content.  Quite a few of it is uploaded by people whose rights to publish the stuff is questionable, but … Continue reading →

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Designing and Implementing a Center for Digital Curation Research

Posted on November 17, 2009 by Isaiah Beard

The facility I work in at Rutgers, known as the Scholarly Communication Center (SCC), has a fairly short history in the grand scheme of academia, and yet a fairly long one when it comes to the rapid changes in technology it … Continue reading →

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DVDs to last for millennia? Perhaps, but at a cost.

Posted on November 13, 2009 by Isaiah Beard

As I’ve mentioned in some of my previous articles, I’m incredibly skeptical of the long-term success of any digital storage attempt that relies on a single medium as its container. In particular, I find CDs and DVDs to be extremely … Continue reading →

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The case for improved large file support in digital repositories

Posted on November 2, 2009 by Isaiah Beard

As the person responsible for handling the various file formats in RUcore, the digital library repository for Rutgers University Libraries, I’ve been looking with trepidation at the increasing sizes of the digital assets people are starting to create.  In 2004 when … Continue reading →

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Google’s Neglected Archive

Posted on October 8, 2009 by Isaiah Beard

Controversial as it may be to archivists of both the digital and analog realms, Google is often seen as the ubiquitous oracle of record by the general online population.  Websites (including libraries) strive to be listed on its search engines; … Continue reading →

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