AHA Today notes a press release from last week announcing a collaborative effort between Xerox and the Library of Congress to "develop new ways to store, preserve, and access digital images ... The two organizations are studying the potential of using the JPEG 2000 format in large repositories of digital cultural heritage materials such as those contained in the Library and other federal agencies."
As a trial run, Xerox will convert one million already-digitized images from LC's collections into JPEG 2000, a recently-developed format which supports the addition of metadata, "information on the provenance, intellectual property and technical data relating to the image itself."
Following the trial, Xerox will "turn over their findings and recommendations for best practices to the library" for use in future conversion projects.
With the growing reliance on digitization, a stable, useable and flexible format is going to have to be developed (and in fairly short order). Hopefully this project is a step in the right direction.
