Still Image Digitization Advisory Board

In recognition of the complexity and breadth of the digital imaging field, an advisory board of experts has been formed to assist the Still Image Working Group in establishing guidelines as well as to help guide the focus of our efforts. These experts come from outside of the walls of federal agencies to provide a different perspective and to foster relationships within the corporate and academic communities.

Stephen Abrams

Stephen Abrams is the Senior Manager for Digital Preservation Technology at the California Digital Library (CDL) of the University of California, with responsibility for strategic planning, design, and operation of the CDL's preservation infrastructure. He was the ISO project leader and document editor for the PDF/A standard, ISO 19005-1; the architect and project manager for the JHOVE characterization framework; and the initiator of the Global Digital Format Registry (GDFR) project. He is now leading the multi-institutional JHOVE2 project to develop a next-generation architecture for digital object characterization. Mr. Abrams holds an undergraduate degree in Mathematics from Boston University and a graduate degree in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University. He is a member of the ACM, ALA, ASIS&T, IEEE Computer Society, and LITA.

Lotfi Belkhir

Lotfi Belkhir is the President of Digital Content Innovation (DCI), a Rochester-based consulting firm specializing in advising, developing and assisting in the creation and management of digital content that meets the perennial requirements of preservation, access, re-purposing and inter-operability. Previously, Dr. Belkhir founded and led Kirtas Technologies, a high-tech company in upstate New York, that developed and brought to market the world’s first automatic book scanner. Under his leadership, Kirtas developed a set of full solutions for the library digitization market, including innovative hardware and software that enable high-quality, rapid and efficient large-scale digitization of library content. Today, Kirtas is a recognized global leader in its industry. Dr. Belkhir is also a frequent speaker on Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship, and a champion of a novel Innovation Model. He is also actively involved in helping local academic institutions develop curriculums that are better tuned to the changing needs of the high-tech industry. He holds a PhD in Physics and a Masters in Management of Technology.

Robert Buckley

Robert Buckley works with clients on the archiving, preservation, distribution and reproduction of digital color images. He currently chairs the CIE Technical Committee on Archival Color Imaging and has worked extensively on the application of JPEG 2000 in the cultural heritage community. He was a project editor for the JPEG 2000 standard and co-authored the chapter on Digital Culture Imaging in The JPEG 2000 Suite. He took early retirement from Xerox as a Xerox Fellow in 2010 after a career that included research, project leadership and research management positions in the areas of color printing, color systems, image processing and standards for color documents and images. He is a Fellow of the Society for Imaging Science & Technology and was founding co-chair of the IS&T Archiving Conference. He is the Executive Vice-President of the IS&T and Past-President of the Inter-Society Color Council. He has a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MA in Psychology and Physiology from the University of Oxford, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar, and a BSc in Electrical Engineering from the University of New Brunswick.

Don Williams

Don Williams has worked as a research imaging scientist at Eastman Kodak in digital imaging since its infancy over 25 years ago. His efforts in the field have concentrated on metrology, image fidelity, quality control, and imaging performance standardization issues especially as they relate to practical workflow adoption. He has published extensively in these areas. He is currently a consultant to the international cultural heritage community and frequently teaches on such matters. Don is the editor for ISO 12233, 2nd edition, Spatial Resolution Measurements, Digital Still Cameras and has acted as co-leader for equivalent performance standards on reflection and film scanners. His influence has also extended into the mobile imaging arena where he is the sector leader for resolution measurement for Camera Phone Image Quality (CPIQ) imaging industry initiative.