Wednesday, August 17, 2005

JPEG2000, Greenstone and more…

The Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) had its own blog during the American Library Association (ALA) conference in June.  The blog produced many posts and I’m just getting around to reading a few that I saved.

Digital Imaging with JPEG2000 gives a simple overview of how JPEG2000 works.  JPEG2000 is a lossless format with lots of features/flexibility built in.  ksclarke wrote:
The take away point about JP2 is that it uses an arrangement of packets to allow much greater flexibility in how images are used. For instance, when a thumbnail is desired, an image processor only needs to select a small group of packets in the jp2 file to create the thumbnail (rather than having to access the whole image to generate a thumbnail).
The same is true for generating images of higher or lower quality (a lower quality version of the image is retrieved by accessing the right combination of packets).

It was interesting to read that libraries are migrating their images (even images in MrSid) to JPEG2000.

For those of you interested in JPEG2000 and its use in libraries, check out JPEG 2000 in Libraries and Archives.  The group maintains a blog and discussion list.

Notes from the session on Greenstone were captured in two postings:

In addition, the handouts from the session are available here.

The Greenstone digital library software has been described as “a comprehensive, multilingual open-source system for constructing, presenting, and maintaining digital collections.”  More than 5,000 copies of the software are downloaded each year.  UNESCO distributes the software and provides training for it. 

In talking to people in my region about digitization, I never hear people talk about Greenstone.  It could be that organizations want a product that has clear product support behind it.  There are people/consultants who support Greenstone, but that’s not the same as having a large organization (e.g., OCLC) providing product support.  However, given that Greenstone is an open source product, what an organization would normally put into licensing fees could be used to customize Greenstone to truly fit its needs as well as training. 

By the way, one of the presenters was Allison Zhang who now works for the Washington Research Library Consortium (WRLC).  Allison used to work at the University of Rochester, and then followed her heart (and love of metadata) to work on Connecticut History Online where she authored their Cataloger’s Manual.  That project used MARC and crosswalks that would translate records into Dublin Core.  Now Allison is at WRLC.  Allison has built up a wealth of knowledge about this area and had written articles on metadata as well as done a number of presentations.  She’s a person to keep on your radar (in your sights) since she is clearly teaching others what she has learned. 


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Mike said...
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