The Library of Congress is collaborating with Xerox Corporation to test another format to digitally preserve important images and make these widely available and accessible.
They are trying out the JPEG 2000 format in large repositories of digital cultural heritage materials such as those contained in the Library and other federal agencies. The eventual outcome may be the creation of leaner, faster systems that institutions around the country can use to store their riches and to make their collections widely accessible.
The project, designed to help develop guidelines and best practices for digital content, is especially relevant to the Libraryâ€™s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), which has been working with several other federal agencies on digitization standards.
The trial will include up to 1 million digitized, public domain prints, photographs, maps and other content from the Libraryâ€™s extraordinary collections. Scientists in the Xerox Innovation Group will work with these materials to create an image repository that they will use to develop and test approaches for the management of large image collections.
The images to be used from the Libraryâ€™s collection are already digitized (primarily in TIFF format), but JPEG 2000, a newer format for representing and compressing images, could make them easier to store, transfer and display.
[Site: Library of Congress NDIIPP]