Thursday, March 08, 2007

Blog post: JPEG2000 for digital preservation

Peter Murray has written in his blog, Disruptive Library Technology Jester, about the use of JPEG2000 for digital preservation. Murray sees JPEG2000 as a suitable replacement for TIFF and offers up five reasons why he believes this to be so. His fifth reason is:
The JPEG2000 is an open standard with defined and emerging protocols for guaranteeing compliance with the standard.
Later he says:
One of the concerns about JPEG2000 is some language from the JPEG2000 website about how “undeclared and obscure submarine patents may still present a hazard…” to open use of the standard. This seems like lawyer CYA to me as nothing has come up that I’m aware of in the seven years after the standard was ratified...And, if in the end it is found that a patent would cause an embargo ‘unlicensed’ versions of JPEG2000 codecs for some period of years, we can always run a batch conversion back to TIFF until the embargo period is up and/or something else better comes along.
More programs are using JPEG2000, including the Princeton University Library. On their web site, it states:

For the most part, we'll be deriving JPEG2000 images from the master TIFF files. JPEG2000 is a recently-developed imaging standard that is based on wavelet technology. Wavelets allow a great deal of end user functionality (like zooming, panning, etc.), while retaining small file sizes and little loss from a great deal of compression. JPEG2000 has its own security model, and can allow for metadata to be stored internally to the image, both of which may prove very valuable for retaining intellectual property rights over materials in the coming years.

JPEG2000s are still not viewable in most browsers, so we've acquired the Aware JPEG2000 server software for dynamically displaying JPEG2000s as JPEGs, while still retaining the same flexible end user interaction and tools.

In thinking about storing metadata in a JPEG2000 file, Murray says that he would store the authoritative version of the metadata there. This would provide a backup of the metadata with the actual images.


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