Colleagues, (Please
excuse any cross-posting to the CONTENTdm, ImageLib, DigLib, DigiPres, OCA,
PADG, and PIG lists.) First,
thanks very much to those who responded this past fall to our survey of digital
project staff regarding JPEG 2000 implementation at your institutions. We
have made the results available via our institutional repository at: http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/libr_pubs/16/ You
may choose to download the survey results as a standalone .xls spreadsheet file
or, if you prefer a somewhat smoother viewing experience, download and extract
the .html version contained in the zip file at the same URL. From
our abstract: The
survey results reveal several key areas that JPEG 2000’s user community will
need to have addressed in order to further enhance adoption of the standard,
including perspectives from cultural institutions that have adopted it already,
as well as insights from institutions that do not currently have it in their
workflows. Current users are concerned about limited compatible software
capabilities with an eye toward needed enhancements. They realize also that
there is much room for improvement in the area of educating and informing the
cultural heritage community about the advantages of JPEG 2000. A small set of
users, in addition, alerts us to serious problems of cross-codec consistency
and they relate file validation issues that would likely be easily resolved
given a modicum of collaborative attention toward standardization.
Responses from non-users disclose that there are lingering questions
surrounding the format and its stability and permanence, stoked largely by a
dearth of currently available software functionality, from the point of initial
capture and manipulation on through to delivery to online users. Thanks
again, --David
Lowe and Michael J. Bennett, UConn Libraries |