Just released today, a new report by Robert Buckley and published by the Digital Preservation Coalition is titled, JPEG 2000 - a Practical Digital Preservation Standard? and addresses archival and preservation issues with the JPEG2000 format.
Aren't sure what JPEG2000 is all about? The report also does a good job of concisely explaining the attributes and advantages of the format:
A single architecture for lossless and visually lossless image compression
• A single JPEG 2000 master image can supply multiple derivative images
• Progressive display, multi-resolution imaging and scalable image quality
• The ability to handle large and high-dynamic range images
• Generous metadata supportWith JPEG 2000, an application can access and decode only as much of the compressed image as needed to perform the task at hand.
JPEG 2000 also improves a user’s ability to interact with an image. The zoom, pan, and rotate operations that users increasingly expect in networked image systems are performed dynamically by accessing and decompressing just those parts of the JPEG2000 codestream containing the compressed image data for the region of interest.
Using a single JPEG 2000 master to satisfy user requests for dynamic viewing reduces storage costs and management overhead by eliminating the need to maintain multiple derivatives in a repository.
To see JPEG2000 files in action, try examining one of the maps in the Southern Nevada History in Maps collection. After selecting an image of interest, click on Zoom and Pan in the record and compare what is viewable by zooming in from the default size to 100% to see the amazing detail available.