Minutes of the ALA/LITA JPEG2000 for Libraries and Archives interest group meeting

Attending: M. Anderson, U of Iowa; A. Laas, LexisNexis; Y. Han, U of Arizona; P. Howell, Western Michigan University; Y. Kaganovia, Princeton U; P. Murray, OhioLINK; K. Thompson, Smithsonian Libraries

Participants talked about their interest in JPEG2000 and their institution's use of the standard: Western Michgan University is digitizing manuscripts and other special collections materials and using JPEG2000 for access; LexisNexis is using JPEG2000 in the maps portion of the U.S. Serials Set digitization program; the Smithsonian Libraries has started converting archival TIFFs to JPEG2000 and is considering use of the standard in the Biodiversity Heritage Library project (including a capability to cross-link taxonomic names in digitized text to oneline databases).

There was discussion of the state of JPEG2000 in library systems. Companies such as Luna ("Insight"), DiMeMa ("ContentDM"), Ex Libris ("Digitool") now use JPEG2000 in their back-end systems and use some sort of server-side transformation to deliver an image to the user. Peter spoke of the Google Summer of Code project to build a JPIP applet in Java that could be embedded in web pages to do the panning and zooming on the client side rather than the server side.

Ideas for Programming

Meeting participants appreciated the "Introduction to JPEG2000" presentation last year and would like to see an update on how the standard is being used in practice. Possible topics included bringing in representatives from the medical imaging and motion picture industry to talk about the use of JPEG2000 in DICOM and the Digital Cinema Initiative to get a sense of how the standard is used outside of libraries and archives. Other suggested topics included updates on the standardization of the various parts through the ISO process, presentations by vendors on their use of the standard in their products, and demonstrations by practitioners of the standard.