Monday, November 29, 2010

Wellcome Library releases an ITT for a Workflow Tracking System

If you’ve been reading our blog regularly you’ll know about how the Library plans to transform itself into a groundbreaking digital resource, allowing access to much of the Library’s material in digital form.

As part of this program we’ve just released an ITT for a Workflow Tracking System (WTS). We’re looking for a system that will track and manage the processes around creating digital content – whether that content is digitised by us, digitised externally or born digital archival material- and automating that activity as much as possible.

Within the Library, staff who want to add content to our Digital Library will do so using the Workflow Tracking System. This means using the WTS to record that all digital content, e.g. digitised books or archival collections, has been created correctly, has had its descriptive metadata attached, is converted to JPEG2000 (or some other appropriate format) and is ingested into our digital object repository. The WTS will also create metadata encoding and transmission standard (METS) files. These will be used by the front end system to deliver digital content to our users.

Expressed simply, the WTS will play a critical central role in ensuring that all digital content that is destined for our Digital Library is created, quality controlled and ingested accurately and efficiently into the Library’s repository.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Wellcome Trust hosts JPEG 2000 seminar

The JPEG 2000 for the Practitioner seminar was hosted by the Wellcome Trust on 16 November, 2010. This was organised by the Wellcome Library, and achieved a sell-out crowd of over 80 people.

The aim of the seminar was to look at specific case studies of JPEG 2000 use, to explain technical issues that have an impact on practical implementation of the format, and explore the context of how and why organisations might choose to use JPEG 2000. The Wellcome Library started investigating JPEG 2000 as a strategy for storing its archival master images in 2009, and has recently started converting its backlog of images into JPEG 2000.

The programme for the event was posted to our JPEG 2000 blog, and further blogs provide edited highlights of the varied and informative talks given on the day. All the presentations are available online, hosted by the Digital Preservation Coalition. The twitter stream from the day can be seen by searching the hashtag #jp2k10.