Lettertray

I’m finally getting a chance to comment on last week’s DLF Fall Forum.  Since I’m not technically a librarian any more, I probably wouldn’t have gone.  But seeing as it was in Providence, it was a great excuse.

The most compelling new thing that I saw there was the Djatoka (not Djakota, as Birkin Diana pointed out) JPEG 2000 Image server.  Since I’m not really an image person, my simplistic impression of JPEG 2000 is that it is full of potential as a high-quality and scalable image format, but that it has lacked accessible and affordable software support.  The folks at Los Alamos have now released Djatoka, which seems to be … pardon me here … a game changer.

In practice, Djatoka shares some features with Google Maps - images can be delivered as AJAXy tilesets, which can be dynamically loaded in the browser as requested by the user.  But the really cool feature is URI addressibility of any region of an image.  So, you want to study Mona Lisa’s nosehairs? Here is a URL.  Not only that, but the API lets you pass a URI for any image, which the Djatoka server compresses on-the-fly, and then delivers in JPEG2000 format.

One of the controversial (in a nerdy way) features of Djatoka is its heavy use of OpenURL to reference & deliver parts of the image.  There has been some discussion on Code4Lib about whether there is a better way to do it.  I’d say there probably are better ways, but OpenURL is a way to get the server out there quickly and get people using it quickly.  Pretty much any transfer format would get somebody’s hackles up, so you might as well build some momentum early by using a nearly-universal format (nearly universal for academic institutions that is, the rest of you are on your own).  And hey, it is open source, so if you don’t like OpenURL, hack away.