As an aid to the process of consideration referred to in the ISO Directive 2.14.3, and also because the major impact that the JPEG committee's standards have had on digital image capture and display, there is significant public interest in how these standards came into being.  The JPEG committee therefore plans to set-up and maintain, a "Historical Archive" of material relevant to the JPEG standards.  As part of this, the JPEG committee will be collecting, through its new web site, a repository of old standards documents of the JPEG committee and other relevant standards bodies and projects, as well as links to publicly available documents, such as books, journal articles, conference proceedings, and other items that relate to the JPEG committee's standards.

The distribution of the actual documents will be as appropriate to their copyright restrictions and ISO rules.  In addition, and to further aid researchers, the JPEG committee plans to prepare a public "bibliography" of the historical archive and other material.  This will list documents and objects in the archive, as well as some of the many other items that are known to exist and are felt to be of interest.  The bibliography is expected to be accessible through the Web, and possibly as a Technical Report of the committee.  Access for non-members of JPEG to the actual documents cited in the bibliography may be available through other agencies or third parties that have copies.

During the past months a significant amount of relevant material has already been collected, based on historical collections held by many of its current and past members and associates. The collection of such documentation is still work in progress.  For this reason the JPEG committee further invites and encourages any type of public submission that might be relevant to the committee's bibliography.

These might include pointers to

• a description or definition of a piece of technology that JPEG has incorporated in the standard (e.g. such as a certain type of Huffman or Arithmetic coding),
• a description of, or manuals for an innovative product using JPEG standards,
• contributions to a relevant standards body or documents of such committees
• archival versions of code, such as that produced by the Independent JPEG Group, or researchers and contributors to the committee's work
• meeting reports, attendance lists, and other useful background material relevant to the structure and processes adopted by the JPEG committee and contributors (including National Standards Bodies)
• any other items assessed as relevant by the committee, or its ad hoc group examining this material

The method for achieving this will be announced on the JPEG committee web site .

For those interested in participating in the work of the JPEG committee, membership of the JPEG committee is through National Standards Bodies or liaison organisations as described elsewhere on the web site .