This will be my shortest blog post ever. Following up on my previous blog post on a prototype JP2 validator and properties extractor (jpylyzer), there is now a comprehensive User Manual of the tool. Just follow the link below:
A few months ago I wrote a blog post on a simple JP2 file structure checker. This led to some interesting online discussions on JP2 validation. Some people asked me about the feasibility of expanding the tool to a full-fledged JP2 validator. Despite some initial reservations, I eventually decided to dedicate a couple of weeks to writing a rough prototype.
As I already briefly mentioned in a previous blog post, one of the objectives of the SCAPE project is to develop an architecture that will enable large scale characterisation of digital file objects. As a first step, we are evaluating existing characterisation tools. The overall aim of this work is twofold.
Over the last few weeks I've been working on the design of a workflow that the KB is planning to use for the migration of a collection of (mostly old) TIFF images to JP2. One major risk of such a migration is that hardware failures during the migration process may result in corrupted images. For instance, one could imagine a brief network or power interruption that occurs while an image is being written to disk. In that case data may be missing from the written file.
As a part of the SCAPE project, I'm currently heavily involved in the evaluation of various file format identification tools. The overall aim of this work is to determine which tools are suitable candidates for inclusion in the SCAPE architecture. In addition, we're also trying to get a better idea of each tool's specific strengths and weaknesses, which will hopefully serve as useful input to the developers community.
The JPEG 2000 compression standard is steadily becoming more and more popular in the archival community. Several large (national) libraries are now using the JP2 format (which corresponds to Part 1 of the standard) as the master format in mass digitisation projects. However, some aspects of the JP2 file format are defined in ways that are open to multiple interpretations.