Subject: [CODE4LIB] djatoka now in production at Biodiversity Heritage Library

From: Chris Freeland <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:56:10 -0600

[Apologies in advance for crossposting]

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) has integrated djatoka, the new
open source JPEG 2000 image server developed by Ryan Chute and Herbert
Van de Sompel at Los Alamos National Laboratory, into its production
portal at http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org.  BHL is a consortium of
natural history libraries who are partnering with Internet Archive to
digitize public domain scientific literature of use to individual
scholars and large bioinformatics projects like the Encyclopedia of
Life.  To date more than 27,000 volumes have been made available in open
access through Internet Archive and the BHL Portal.  

Here's a representative page image delivered via djatoka, chosen in
honor of yesterday's celebration of the Year of the Ox:
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/9370105

Since last Thursday (Jan 22), djatoka has been serving the images for
the (nearly) 11 million pages available through BHL.  It's scaling &
performing well under our normal load of 1,500 users per day, but we
wanted to give it a more robust test...which we're hoping to see with
this e-mail post to various listservs. We've written a blog post with
more details about our implementation & infrastructure, available here:
http://biodiversitylibrary.blogspot.com/2009/01/now-serving-all-page-ima
ges-via-djatoka.html
or here:
http://tinyurl.com/bjh72x

We also wanted to make this announcement in support of djatoka and JPEG
2000, given the recent survey of JPEG 2000 implementation in libraries,
available at http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/libr_pubs/16/.  In short,
our experience evaluating and implementing djatoka has been extremely
smooth and we were able to drop it into our existing infrastructure and
UI with a minimum of customization (as described in the post).  It
replaces a non-scalable, proprietary JPEG 2000 image server that until
now has been the biggest bottleneck in delivering our content to users.
The lack of open source options for JPEG 2000 delivery is often among
the most frequently cited reasons why cultural heritage organizations
have not embraced the JPEG 2000 format. Hopefully our positive
experience implementing djatoka and its demonstrated use within BHL can
be a stimulus for other projects to evaluate the software and/or put
JPEG 2000 back in consideration as a delivery format.

[And of course this message is sent out with the caveat, stated above,
that we have yet to test djatoka in production under the peak load that
will (hopefully) occur as this message makes its way through Inboxes
around the world.  It's working beautifully under normal production load
and our internal testing suggests that it will perform without incident,
but the only true test is a live one...]

Looking forward to feedback,

**************
Chris Freeland
Technical Director, Biodiversity Heritage Library
Director, Bioinformatics, Missouri Botanical Garden