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Many cultural heritage institutions such as Museums and Art Galleries have very extensive collections which are not visible to the public because of display capacity and other reasons.  Projects, such as  'NOF-Digitise' in the UK with a budget in excess of $80M, are being created to try and provide on-line learning resources and other solutions for global access.  Natural disasters such as fire, earthquake and flooding, as well as the problems created by war, vandalism and terrorism show the need to preserve this information in as accurate a form as possible lest the heritage be lost forever.  In addition, it is critically important to use widely adopted standards that have some chance of longevity in the face of technological change.  The UK 'Domesday' project, for example, in which the BBC helped many schools and individuals put together a comprehensive record of the UK (in November 1986) to celebrate the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book was created using a BBC Master computer with a proprietary interface to an analogue videodisc.  The problems less than 20 years later are self-evident, and the large expenditure on the project stands to be lost, unless emulators for the material can be created. 

The original JPEG standard has been existence almost as long as the Domesday project videodiscs described above.  Whilst there are only one or two working Domesday players, and some attempts to rescue the situation, there are hundreds of millions of devices which can image JPEG files.  The JPEG 2000 standard has been designed from the ground up to try and address many of the areas which concern the users in the Cultural heritage sector.  These include:

• high quality lossless compression with full colour management
• extensions to moving and 3D images with the same advantages
• a royalty and license fee free baseline for widescale deployment
• protection of moral and copyrights through a well defined security mechanism which can (for example) offer undistorted thumbnail viewing and encrypted high resolution viewing from the same image file
• a comprehensive client / server architecture for users to be able to zoom in and out on images, or to request regions of interest to be served ahead of background material
• extensive metadata possibilities, including the incorporation of digital camera information (such as is held in EXIF files), as well as the Dublin Core metadata used as a basis for many cultural heritage projects
• adherence to well accepted and defined standards, including the use of XML, HTTP and others within the defined architecture
• a track record of accuracy and ecceptance by the industry

For more information, please contact:

Richard Clark, Elysium Ltd
JPEG Historical Archive Group and Webmaster