Weekly Readings - 9 November 2007

HD Photo to become JPEG XR. Stephen Shankland. CNet News. November 2, 2007.

The Joint Photographic Experts Group has approved Microsoft's HD Photo format as a standard called JPEG XR. This is an important step to make the format neutral. It is designed for the next generation of digital cameras and was based on Microsoft’s Windows Media Format. Microsoft is committed to make the patents available without charge. The standardization process typically takes about a year. (See also http://www.jpeg.org/newsrel19.html).

PRONOM and DROID - new versions released. Neil Beagrie. National Archives UK. November 2, 2007.

The National Archives in the UK has released new versions of PRONOM and DROID. PRONOM is an online registry of file formats, software, and other technical information used for digital preservation purposes, available at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pronom. DROID (Digital Record Object Identification) is open source software at http://droid.sourceforge.net/ that is used to identify file formats in batch mode. They are freely available.

LOCKSS: Does a Library Good? An Investigation into the Implementation of LOCKSS. Caitlin Hoffman. Blog. November 8, 2007.

An overview of LOCKSS, how it works, and issues related to it. (LOCKSS, developed at Stanford University, stands for Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe.) One of the main issues surrounding it is the issue of trust. “Trusting a single provider, a single institution, and a single archive represents the real risk”. LOCKSS is built on the principle of building confidence in the archive. LOCKSS was built to archive electronic journals but has been enhanced to also archive blogs on Google’s Blogger.

Looking Ahead. Lee J. Nelson. Advanced Imaging Magazine. November 9, 2007.

The article looks at some of the industry trends. Included is an announcement on an HD Photo Plug-in for Adobe Photoshop. “HD Photo is geared for end-to-end digital photography, offering better image quality, greater preservation of data and advanced features. Its still image codec for continuous-tone images is underpinned by lossy and lossless compression, multiple colorspaces, wide dynamic range and extensive metadata.”

Government Pledges £25m To Preserve Uk's Film Archives. 24 Hour Museum. October 17, 2007.

The British government has taken steps to preserve the country’s film archives. They have given money to the UK Film Council to secure the films in the archives. “It’s absolutely right that they should be safe and accessible for future generations.” The £25million plus £3million are to be used to preserve, restore and increase access to the collections, some of which are deteriorating and in danger of being lost.

Library of Congress Collaborates with Xerox To Test Format for Digitally Preserving, Accessing Treasured Images. News Release. Library of Congress. October 25, 2007.

The Library and Xerox are studying the potential of using the JPEG 2000 format in large repositories of digital materials. The project is designed to help develop guidelines and best practices for digital content. The trial will include up to 1 million tiff images to be converted to JPEG 2000. Xerox will build and test the system, and they look specifically to create profiles for the objects. Xerox already created a profile for using the JPEG 2000 format for newspapers.