{"id":30,"date":"2007-07-11T09:03:11","date_gmt":"2007-07-11T15:03:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/dls\/2007\/07\/11\/jpeg-the-next-generation\/"},"modified":"2017-02-22T14:33:02","modified_gmt":"2017-02-22T20:33:02","slug":"jpeg-the-next-generation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/2007\/07\/11\/jpeg-the-next-generation\/","title":{"rendered":"JPEG: The Next Generation"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s early July, which in the library world means post-ALA.\u00a0 <\/span>I was one of over 21,000 attendees to descend on Washington D.C. and the American Library Association annual conference.\u00a0 <\/span>For a Digital Initiatives Librarian, the selection of sessions and meetings at the conference is not as broad as for public librarians, school librarians and other academic librarians, but one group I have enjoyed meeting with for the last two years is the JPEG2000 Interest Group.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>What is JPEG2000? \u00a0<\/span>JPEG2000<\/a> (aka JP2 or J2K) is a digital image format developed to be the next generation image format.\u00a0 <\/span>Slow to be generally adopted, JP2 may not fully replace JPEG as the standard compressed image format or TIFF as the standard archival image format, but rather be a third option.\u00a0 <\/span>JP2’s strength is in its flexibility: it can be uncompressed like a TIFF or compressed like a JPEG, although when compressed, its quality is much higher than a JPEG due to the wavelet compression technology on which JP2 is based.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>OK, enough techno-speak.\u00a0 <\/span>The main topic of discussion at the interest group meeting was whether JPEG2000 should actually replace TIFF as the preferred archival image format for digital library initiatives.\u00a0 <\/span>Far from being a settled issue, some leading institutions such as the California Digital Library have made the switch completely, while the Digital Library Federation still recommends TIFF as the archival format.\u00a0 <\/span>Some attendees of the interest group such as Harvard weren’t even at liberty to discuss the decisions they’ve made due to their mass digitization program agreements with Google.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>A sub-issue was whether switching to JPEG2000 and its smaller file size would allow more full-color scanning of textual materials, which is central to the debate between the importance of the content vs. the artifact.\u00a0 <\/span>I.e., is it enough to scan a diary in grayscale to capture just the content, or should full-color scanning be employed to capture the color of the page, the color of the ink, and therefore a truer representation of the artifact.\u00a0 <\/span>There are those that feel strongly on both sides, but the adoption of JPEG2000 may allow content and artifact to live together in harmony.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>An interesting side note to the discussion of digital images is that a motion<\/em> JPEG2000 format has also been developed motion pictures, and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) has already selected the format for direct transmission to cinemas<\/a>. (No indication yet as to when we’ll say goodbye to film reels and hello to 1’s and 0’s).<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Like many other digital libraries, here at Iowa, we have been using JPEG2000 primarily for map images<\/a>, where we want to display a high resolution image\u00a0at a smaller file size.\u00a0 We may however be a long way off from adopting JPEG2000 as the archival format for all of our digitization activities and throwing away the TIFFs.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

All in all, meeting with this small group of a dozen people and discussing how the slow adoption of JPEG2000 will impact our work was rewarding in ways that the huge lecture sessions at
\nALA were not.\u00a0 <\/span>I hope future ALA conferences will include more of these interest groups for digital initiatives librarians, but I’ll always make room on my schedule for this one.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>–Mark F. Anderson
\n<\/span>Digital Initiatives Librarian<\/span><\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s early July, which in the library world means post-ALA.\u00a0 I was one of over 21,000 attendees to descend on Washington D.C. and the American Library Association annual conference.\u00a0 For a Digital Initiatives Librarian, the selection of sessions and meetings at the conference is not as broad as for public librarians, school librarians and otherContinue reading “JPEG: The Next Generation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":150,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"syndication":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/150"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4955,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions\/4955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"syndication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/syndication?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}