"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.

Book Industry Study Group BookDROP 1.0 Standard Released

The Book Industry Study Group's Digital Standards Committee has released BookDROP 1.0, which is "a standard intended to support the search and discovery of digital book content on the Web."

Here's an excerpt from the standard's description:

It was first published on December 8, 2008 and was developed jointly by the Book Industry Study Group and the Association of American Publishers. BookDROP defines a set of HTTP transactions between a publishers digital book archive and the websites of the publisher's syndication partners. The overall goal of BookDROP is to encourage the discovery, search, browse and distribution of digital book content across the Web while allowing publishers to manage the quality and availability of their content.

Read more about it at "BISG Unveils BookDROP Standard for Digital Book Repositories."

Digital Repository Log Standards: Final Report: JISC Usage Statistics Review

JISC has released Final Report: Usage Statistics Review.

Here's an excerpt:

The JISC Usage Statistics Review Project is aimed at formulating a fundamental scheme for repository log files and at proposing a standard for their aggregation to provide meaningful and comparable item-level usage statistics for electronic documents like e.g. research papers and scientific resources. . . .

The thus described usage events should be exchanged in the form of OpenURL Context Objects using OAI. Automated access (e.g. robots) should be tagged. . . .

With the JISC-funded Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics (PIRUS) and the DFG-funded Open-Access-Statistics there are two projects which will formulate standards for usage statistics and work on their implementation. To reach broad comparability national efforts should be bundled together. A central authority—which could for example be the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (DRIVER)—should aggregate the usage data. . . .

Policies on statistics should be formulated for the repository community as well as the publishing community. Information about statistics policies should be available on services like OpenDOAR and RoMEO.

JPEG 2000—A Practical Digital Preservation Standard?

The Digital Preservation Coalition has published JPEG 2000—A Practical Digital Preservation Standard?.

Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary":

With JPEG 2000, an application can access and decode only as much of the compressed image as needed to perform the task at hand. This means a viewer, for example, can open a gigapixel image almost instantly by retrieving and decompressing a low resolution, display-sized image from the JPEG 2000 codestream.

JPEG 2000 also improves a user’s ability to interact with an image. The zoom, pan, and rotate operations that users increasingly expect in networked image systems are performed dynamically by accessing and decompressing just those parts of the JPEG 2000 codestream containing the compressed image data for the region of interest. The JPEG 2000 data can be either converted to JPEG and delivered for viewing with a standard image browser or delivered to a native JPEG 2000 viewer using the JPIP client-server protocol, developed to support the JPEG 2000 feature set.

Using a single JPEG 2000 master to satisfy user requests for dynamic viewing reduces storage costs and management overhead by eliminating the need to maintain multiple derivatives in a repository.

Beyond image access and distribution, JPEG 2000 is being used increasingly as a repository and archival image format. What is remarkable is that many repositories are storing “visually lossless” JPEG 2000 files: the compression is lossy and irreversible but the artefacts are not noticeable and do not interfere with the performance of applications. Compared to uncompressed TIFF, visually lossless JPEG 2000 compression can reduce the amount of storage by an order of magnitude or more.

NISO Releases SERU: A Shared Electronic Resource Understanding

The National Information Standards Organization has released SERU: A Shared Electronic Resource Understanding. The document "codifies best practices for the sale of e-resources without license agreements."

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

SERU offers publishers and librarians the opportunity to save both the time and the costs associated with a negotiated and signed license agreement by agreeing to operate within a framework of shared understanding and good faith.

Publication of SERU follows a trial-use period of June through December 2007, during which time librarians and publishers reported—all positively—on their experiences using the draft document. . . .

The SERU Working Group was launched in late 2006 following the recommendation of participants in a meeting exploring opportunities to reduce the use of licensing agreements. The 2006 meeting was sponsored by ARL, NISO, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP). More information about the SERU Working Group, including FAQs and an electronic mailing list, can be found at http://www.niso.org/committees/seru/.

Adobe PDF 1.7 Becomes ISO 32000 Standard (DIS)

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has approved Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) 1.7 as the ISO 32000 standard (DIS). Comments about the new standard will be addressed early next year, and they will either be resolved, followed by the publication of a revision of the standard, or the DIS standard will become a Final Draft International Standard (FDIS), subject to a two-month vote.

Read more about it at: "Adobe's PDF Now an ISO Standard" and "PDF Approved as International Standard."