Fall 2004 Project Briefings

Adoption of JPEG 2000 by Libraries and Archives: The Future of Digital Imaging

Peter Murray
Assistant to the Director for Technology Initiatives
University of Connecticut

As scholars and researchers demand greater electronic access to cultural heritage and geospatial resources, the need for an efficient open standard that presents digital objects electronically has become critical in making the rich resources of libraries and archives available. JPEG 2000 is such a standard in that it can bundle metadata with images in the same physical file, provide greater efficiency in image compression, support region-of-interest encoding, and store multiple resolutions of the same image in one file. On November 4th and 5th, the University of Connecticut hosted a symposium on the adoption of JPEG 2000 in libraries and archives, inviting policy makers and practitioners, digital imaging specialists and software engineers, image/signal processing scientists and adopters of the standards, and vendors as well as users of products. This session is a brief introduction to the JPEG 2000 standard and a report on the outcomes of the symposium.

Report on the Symposium for the Adoption of JPEG 2000 in Archives and Libraries
(PDF file)

http://j2kArcLib.info/

Almagest Open Source Software: A Teaching Tool for the Scholarly Community

Janet Temos
Director, Education Technologies Center
OIT Academic Services
Princeton University

Serge J. Goldstein
Director of Academic Services
Princeton University

Almagest is a relational database for the storage, cataloging and display of images, text, video, sound, and many other file types. The database is the result of more than a decade of development and has been used as a tool for teaching and scholarship at Princeton University for the past nine years. Lecture Builder is an editing tool within Almagest that can be used to organize and display data stored in the database. It is most commonly used as a display tool for images and multimedia objects (film clips or sound files), and as such, creates both online and offline virtual slide presentations that can be viewed in the classroom with a digital projector, or seen from any computer in the campus network. Lecture Builder has various display options that are suited for lectures, quizzes, and self-directed study. Viewers can thus have customized access to information within the database, and explore any of the other items that are related to the data contained in the lecture. Lectures are saved in the database, and can be reused, edited, or updated, by the project’s editor(s) at any time.

We currently are working to offer the Almagest and Lecture Builder software as an open source product to other educational institutions. Additionally, we propose to open part of the database to scholars and researchers, as an open exchange for images, learning objects, and other media where copyright resides with an individual willing to share his or her files with the larger scholarly community.

This session will provide an overview of Almagest, and the opportunity for CNI members to provide input towards its further development.

http://almagest.princeton.edu/

Archiving the Political Web: Prospects and Challenges

Bernard F. Reilly
President
Center for Research Libraries

In the past decade the Web has emerged as a vital medium of political communication, serving political activists, parties, popular fronts, and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as a global message board through which to communicate with constituents and the world community.

The Political Communications Web Archiving investigation (PCWA), funded by the Mellon Foundation, analyzed the behaviors of those who use political Web content as primary sources for research, and the effectiveness of the existing Web archiving efforts to meet those users’ needs. The investigation also specified a service model and the curatorial methodologies that are most likely to support sustainable preservation of the fugitive contents of the Political Web. Participating in the PCWA project were NYU, Cornell, UT Austin, Stanford, and the Internet Archive.

Political Communications Web Archiving Investigation Executive Summary (Word document)

http://www.crl.edu/content/PolitWebReport.htm

ARL Endorses Digitization as an Acceptable Preservation Reformatting Option

William A. Gosling
ARL Preservation Committee
University Librarian
University of Michigan

Sherry Byrne
Preservation Librarian
University of Chicago

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has endorsed digitization as an accepted preservation reformatting option for a range of materials. This endorsement is a result of the work of the ARL Preservation Committee. William Gosling, University Librarian at the University of Michigan and Chair of the ARL Preservation Committee will lead an interactive discussion about the Committee’s work. Staff at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan developed a position paper entitled, “Recognizing Digitization as Preservation Reformatting Method” <http://www.arl.org/preserv/digit_final.html>. This paper invites us, as a community, to revisit our practices, compare our viewpoints, assess impacts, and develop a consensus regarding the use of digitization as one of several reformatting options to preserve and provide access to library resources. It is the goal of this session to further this discussion and continue building consensus around this important issue.

Handout (Word document)

http://www.arl.org/preserv/digit_final.html

Automatic Exposure – Capturing Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images

Günter Waibel
Program Officer
RLG, Inc.

This RLG-led initiative seeks to minimize the cost of technical metadata acquisition and maximize the cultural heritage community’s capability of ensuring long-term access to digital assets. The goal of the initiative is to lower the barrier for institutions to capture the data elements specified in NISO Z39.87: Technical Metadata for Digital Still Images (currently a Draft Standard for Trial Use). NISO Z39.87 defines a standard, comprehensive set of data elements key to an institution’s ability to manage and preserve its digital images.

The project has engaged device manufacturers to determine what technical metadata their products currently capture and to encourage greater capture of Z39.87-defined technical metadata. It also engages cultural heritage professionals to determine how digital repositories and asset management systems can ingest technical metadata that is automatically captured by high-end scanners and digital cameras.

This session will discuss the work of the project, including: identified tools for harvesting technical metadata; upcoming “Automatic Exposure Scorecards” which profile and review the available technologies for capturing technical metadata; progress in influencing technical metadata changes in technology standards followed by device manufacturers; and the development of a Z39.87-Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) panel to allow the extension of the metadata handling capabilities of Adobe Photoshop, a commonly used tool in the cultural heritage digitization process.

Handout (Word document)

http://www.rlg.org/en/page.php?Page_ID=2681

Project Briefings Presented at the CNI Fall 2004 Membership Meeting December 6-7, 2004 Portland, OR

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Project Briefings Presented at the
CNI Fall 2004 Membership Meeting
December 6-7, 2004
Portland, OR