Report of the Symposium on the Adoption of JPEG 2000 in Archives and Libraries

For many years, libraries and archives have used the JPEG and TIFF coding standards to store and make available images in an electronic format. Decades of research in image compression techniques as a subfield of signal processing have yielded advancements through the use of wavelet transformation (as opposed to JPEG which uses discrete cosine transformation and various competing standards for TIFF compression), and some have adopted products based on proprietary wavelet compression implementations such as SID. In the 1990s, under the auspices of the International Standards Organization and the standards section of the International Telecommunication Union, the Joint Photographic Experts Group worked to create a new imaging standard using wavelet compression. The work of the committee reached a pinnacle in December 2000 with the ratification of Part 1 of the JPEG 2000 standard.

As JPEG 2000 is embraced by specialized vertical markets (such as medical imaging and national defense intelligence gathering) and appears in the consumer digital camera and scanner markets, it has the potential to revolutionize common practices in libraries and archives. In addition to achieving greater magnitudes of compression with reduced or no loss of image data, JPEG 2000 was designed to imbed the technical and descriptive metadata associated with images that has become crucial to long-term usability of the image file as a digital artifact. With funding from the Gladys Kreible Delmas Foundation and the Connecticut State Library, the University of Connecticut convened the Symposium on the Adoption of JPEG 2000 by Archives and Libraries on November 4-5, 2004 to begin the process of understanding, coordinating and accelerating the implementation of the standard by providing a forum for delegates to outline the efforts required to achieve wide-scale adoption.