Successful JPEG 2000 program at the ALA Annual Conference

The j2kIG successfully concluded its first-ever program at ALA. By my count, there were about 150 attending the presentation with a wide variety of perspectives. About 1/2 of the attendees were from academic libraries with a roughly equal proportion of public, special, and vendor representation. Several attendees are using JPEG 2000 in production now, several are bringing up production environments or actively evaluating software using the standard, and most attendees identified themselves as in the "curious" or "learning" categories. My thanks to Kevin Clarke for his write-up of the meeting for LITA Blog. A very brief overview follows.

Rob Buckley started with an overview of JPEG 2000, how it is different than what came before in imaging standards, and why those differences are important to the needs, desires and practices of libraries. The subsequent speakers presented a wide array of products and projects that caused jaws to drop and imaginations to become engaged. At the conclusion, one respondent told me that prior to the meeting she had been satisfied with the "we support JPEG 2000" response from a vendor; now she wanted have a conversation with the vendor about what parts and profiles of the flexible JPEG 2000 standard are included in the product.