"Digital Project Staff Survey of JPEG 2000 Implementation in Libraries"

David Lowe and Michael J. Bennett, both of the University of Connecticut Libraries, have made "Digital Project Staff Survey of JPEG 2000 Implementation in Libraries" available in DigitalCommons@UConn.

Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

JPEG 2000 is the product of thorough efforts toward an open standard by experts in the imaging field. With its key components for still images published officially by the ISO/IEC by 2002, it has been solidly stable for several years now, yet its adoption has been considered tenuous enough to cause imaging software developers to question the need for continued support. Digital archiving and preservation professionals must rely on solid standards, so in the fall of 2008 we undertook a survey among implementers (and potential implementers) to capture a snapshot of JPEG 2000’s status, with an eye toward gauging its perception in our community.

The survey results reveal several key areas that JPEG 2000’s user community will need to have addressed in order to further enhance adoption of the standard, including perspectives from cultural institutions that have adopted it already, as well as insights from institutions that do not currently have it in their workflows. Current users are concerned about limited compatible software capabilities with an eye toward needed enhancements. They realize also that there is much room for improvement in the area of educating and informing the cultural heritage community about the advantages of JPEG 2000. A small set of users, in addition, alerts us to serious problems of cross-codec consistency and relate file validation issues that would likely be easily resolved given a modicum of collaborative attention toward standardization.