[djatoka-devel] djatoka now in production at Biodiversity Heritage Library
Status: Beta
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rchute
From: Chris F. <Chr...@mo...> - 2009-01-27 18:17:48
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[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 |