Minutes of the LITA/ALA Interest Group meeting 2007
This is a summary of the discussions of the participants at the interest group meeting during the ALA Annual Conference 2007 in Washington DC.
Much of the discussion revolved around the adoption and use of JPEG2000 as an archival file format. [Note from chair/reporter: this appears to be a departure from previous interest group meetings where the discussion revolved primarily around JPEG2000 as an access format.] Harvard's digital imaging group has moved to JPEG2000 as the recommended file format for internal projects; most digital imaging project managers have accepted that recommendation. Lexis/Nexis is using JPEG2000 for the 26,000 to 28,000 maps that are being digitized as part of the serials set project. Using Luratech's toolkit (recently announced), they batch convert a daily scan of TIFFs to JPEG2000. Although they have not discarded the TIFF files produced as part of the scanning process, they anticipate doing so while keeping the JPEG2000 files as the archival masters. The primary driver for this decision is the amount of space saved by using the losslessly compressed JPEG2000 format.
The participant from the Univ of Connecticut noted that they are facing a divergence of practices between the Open Content Alliance, which uses JPEG2000 exclusively, with the DLF best practices recommendation, which specifies TIFF. They are leaning towards using JPEG2000 as the dark archive preservation format for everything except maps. Maps, too, may follow. The participant from Connecticut also recommended monitoring the "digipres" mailing list for talk about digital preservation standards. JSTOR is considering use of JPEG2000 for color/grayscale capture of a new pamphlet digitization project in order to record the nature of the artifact at the time it was digitized in addition to providing access to the content on the page.
The meeting participants agreed that the time was favorable for preparing a program for the 2008 ALA annual conference. The topic is surrounding the use of JPEG2000 as an archival format. Part of the presentation would be on the use of JPEG2000 as an archival format, timed to follow the release of an in-depth study on this topic by Stephen Abrahams, Stephen Chapman, and John Kuntz for the IS&T conference in the fall. Participants in the meeting would like to see this perspective balanced with a speaker offering considerations on why one should choose not to adopt the standard. Another part of the program would be on the process for considering the adoption of the JPEG2000 file format in practice, perhaps someone from the Library of Congress related to the NDNP project. A third component of the program would be from a vendor and/or open source tool user on the available toolsets and what to consider when adopting the new file format. Meeting participants from UConn and JSTOR agreed to help with program logistics.
