Geneva, 24 May 2019
On the invitation of the DLM Forum (http://www.dlmforum.eu/) Ecma International Secretary General Dr. Istvan Sebestyen gave a presentation in the Session on “Paths to sustainability” on “Long-term preservation of JPEG images in the “Valley of the clueless” – need for standards”.
The PDF version of the presentation can be downloaded here.
The event was organized by the Swiss Federal Archives in the “Kursaal” of Bern. During the conference, the DLM Forum discussed a wide variety of recent developments and experiences with focus on topics related to the “sustainability and innovation”.
In the talk Dr. Sebestyen explained: “JPEG (ITU-T T.81 ¦ ISO/IEC 10918-1) is one of the most used ICT standards today. Only in Mobile Phones (especially Smart Phones) there are about 5.5 billions digital cameras in use, producing each year about 1.25 Trillions of still pictures. Since the JPEG standard is a standard that one can call “Human Heritage” standard (it means that images produced and stored in that standard will be needed “forever”) the long-term preservation (“forever”) is a requirement. However, the public at large – who is the “generator” of those huge amount of photos – is not aware that if no measures are taken those photos may not be accessible anymore even after a couple of years. The long-term preservation and presentation of JPEG images is not solved yet, and appropriate set of standards are needed to satisfy that most important human requirement, which is the scope of such standardization proposal.”