From TIFF to JPEG 2000? Preservation Planning at the Bavarian State Library Using a Collection of Digitized 16th Century Printings

Studies and user reports claim JPEG 2000 to be – or at least will become – the next archiving format for digital images [1]. The format offers new possibilities, such as streaming, and reduces storage consumption through lossless and lossy compression [2]. Another often claimed advantage of JPEG 2000 is that the master image can possibly serve as the access copy as well, and thus replace derived compressed, low resolution access copies. The National Library of the Netherlands (KB-NL) evaluated the suitability of alternative file formats such as JPEG 2000 to their currently used format uncompressed TIFF. The four aspects, required storage capacity, image quality, long-term sustainability and functionality were analysed and JPEG 2000 is recommended as future archive format [3]. The British Library recently moved forward to migrate their 80-terabyte newspaper collection from TIFF to JPEG 2000 [4] and the Wellcome Library announced they will use JPEG 2000 for their upcoming digitization projects [16].