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.

June 25, 2005, 8:30 - noon. Chicago, IL (Hotel Intercontinental room: Empire Ballroom)

The newly-formed j2k Interest Group within the Library and Information Technology Association of the American Library Association will be conducting a program at the 2005 Annual Conference with the title "Access, Preservation, and Interchange: Digital Imaging with JPEG 2000". Through this program, attendees will:

• Understand the goals of this new imaging standard, the effect of those goals on other segments of society, and the impact the standard can have on digital imagery in libraries
• Learn about the technology underpinings of JPEG 2000 (e.g., wavelet compression offering better efficiency and bitwise lossless compression, decoding with different output resolutions, progressive delivery, ROI encoding, flexible file format)
• Contribute to a process for bringing JPEG 2000 into common practice in libraries and archives

This is the text of an announcement that was posted to the IMAGELIB, IFLA DIGLIB, DIGISTATES, DLTIG, ACRLNEC-L, and WEB4LIB mailing lists. If there are others that you think would be interested in hearing about this site, feel free to copy and adapt this text.

At the CNI Fall Task Force meeting I gave a briefing on the outcomes of the Symposium in November and an overview of JPEG 2000. Slides from the presentation are attached to this posting.