Information that Come as Images: Overview of Issues

IASSIST Quarterly Abstract Increasingly information is available as images: colour, black and white from satellites, photography, scanning in the biomedical sciences or scanning of printed sources, like codebooks accompanying numeric data and historic records. These images have very specific computer formats but need to be easily embedded, identified, searched, transferred and browsed or reproduced to paper to make them useful as information carriers. Principal media for distribution and access are CDROM and Internet. Briefly formats, standards and applications are discussed to indicate how much actual progress is being made in putting image information into the hands of researchers and interested users.