The LBNL Image Library provides an image management service to the LBNL community. Its goals are to allow quick, protected and platform independent access and manipulation of collections of large digital images, especially those on the LBNL Mass Storage System (MSS).
To achieve these goals a set of small thumbnail versions of each large image is derived and stored locally. Also a text description of each image called a tag file is associated with each image. These files can be browsed, searched or selected for later reference. Whenever a thumbnail is displayed the larger images and complete text information can be easily retrieved. Access to the images can be restricted by the collection owner to specific users or groups or it may be open to anyone.
All access and manipulation of the derived images and text takes place via a WWW interface. The WWW interface provides platform independence and easy evolution of the system to meet new needs.
An introduction to the use and appearance of the Image Library can be found in the Image Library Introduction. A description of the goals and design in greater depth can be found in the project plan document and project design document for the Image Library.

Once a collection is encountered that contains images, you are given a pull-down menu of the following choices: browse, image_browse and search. The browse option will display a thumbnail (whose size you select with the icon size menu) and various links to different images sizes and text information. It uses a table format to display this information, so if you are not using a browser that understands tables, e.g. Netscape, use the image_browse option instead. Image_browse will just display the thumbnail images (linked to the text/image display page). This option gives a more densely packed but less informative way of viewing a collection. Clicking on an image gives more information about the image.
The search option will give you another form on which to input the
word or words that you want searched for. If a collection includes
sub-collections the text files in all the sub-collections will be searched.
Searching
The Image Library uses the
Glimpse search engine
from the University of Arizona. This program searches a word based index
which contains a entry for most every word in the set of text files that
is being searched. This index contains pointers to each block in which
the word appears. When a match is found in the index each matching file
is searched using agrep. Glimpse supports case sensitive or insensitive
matching, whole or partial word matches, misspellings, boolean and/or searching
and all the wild-card functions of the grep family.
The collection owner must manually trigger the creation the glimpse index for
a collection whenever the tags files are changed. The Create Glimpse Index option on the Add/Edit page (under Curators Interface) does this. Individual sub-collections and/or tree of sub-collections can be indexed. The collection in which a search is initiated determines what index is searched.
Selecting Images
The browse window gives you an option to select images for later
processing.
The selection list is simply a list of images from various
collections which is kept under your userid or machine name for up to 12 hours.
In most cases you are able to
specify the name of the list as either your userid or the name of the machine
you are connecting from. Using your userid is preferable since it will
eliminate confusion that can occur if more than one user accesses the Image
Library from the same remote client.
You can view the current contents of your selection list from the browse
pages and the global edit page by clicking on the scroll icon.
The selection list can be used to create a list of files for global editing, local editing, moving, deleting, and staging on the Mass Storage System, or just for future reference. If the original images reside on the Mass Storage System (MSS), and you know that you are going to want to view a number of them, it will save time to stage them before you try to view them. Staging brings images in from the MSS tape archive to its disk cache. Note that it does not move the file either to the Image Library server machine or to your client machine. Staging files as a group saves both MSS time and your time. The MSS will get all the files that are on one tape off the tape at the same time rather than having to mount the tape each time an individual file is retrieved. Once the staging has been completed, you can view or retrieve an image in just the time it takes to move the image from the MSS to your machine, without encountering the 5-10 minutes wait that it can take for the file to be brought in off tape.

Access Control
The access groups and users are defined by the Image Library software and are independent of Unix users who have accounts on the server machine. Any collection owner can create new users or groups for his collections. There are links to the Add user/group form under the Curators Interface. Users and groups must exist before they can used to control access to a collection. The default group for read access is all (all lower case). This allows anyone to read the images without authentication. The default user to modify the collection is the user who is creating the collection.
If the high-resolution images are kept on the machine on which the Image
Library server is running, it will use the high-resolution access group to
control read access to them. If the images are on the Mass Storage System,
the MSS Server, an HTTP server running on the MSS machine. will control access. There is a link
from the Image Library Curators Interface page to Export file from
Mass Storage which connects you to the MSS Server's interface for setting
and changing access.
Adding a New Collection
Note that the only time the image source directory name is used is when images are added. Each entry contains a pointer back to its original image. This has two implications; one is that if you move the original images this link will be broken. It can be repaired by re-entering the image with its new location specified by the image source directory. If a tag file exists when an image is entered it will not be touched. The second implication is that you can change the image source directory before entering a new batch of images and thus have a collection consist of images whose originals are in a variety of directories.
If something appears to have gone wrong while creating the derived images,
you can open the log file imglog in
/ImgLib/COLLECTIONS/<YOURCOLL>/images/imglog
to see what happened. The most likely problem is that the Image Library
Server does not have access to
read some of your image files or that it cannot handle the image type.
Currently it knows about gif,tiff, jpeg, eps, and some DICOM format files.
It can handle Macintosh binary
versions of all these file types except DICOM.
The server does check that it has read permission
to the image source directory before returning in the first place.
Eporting Images from the Mass Storage System
If your orginal images are stored on the Lab's Mass Storage System (MSS) and you
want to use ImgLib to retrieve these images you must export the MSS directories that the files are in. This additional step is required to help safe-guard
files on the MSS from inadvertly being accessible via the Web. Only a user who
has write access to an MSS directory may export it via ImgLib. This step is
independent of the steps you take to make the images on MSS readable by the
ImgLib server. This tells the ImgLib server that it is ok to pass these images
off to other users whom the collection curator has authorized.
The Exporting file from Mass Storage System choice on the curator's page takes you to a form that allows you to enable a MSS directory for exporting and to specify what ImgLib users will be able to get copies of the files off of the MSS. The name of the directory to be exported is the complete pathname of a MSS directory (eg. /home/mss/icsd/mrt). This is probably totally different from the ImgLib collection name that points to these images. The userid and groupid are Unix ids that have write access to the MSS directory. The Server will run as those ids when it is copying files from the MSS to limit the number of directories it has access to. The userid may be set to "anyuser" if only the groupid is needed to permit write access. Alternatively, you can set groupid to "anygroup" if your ImgLib userid matches a Unix userid that has write permission in the MSS directory.
The second part of this form allows you to specify groups and users who will
have access to the MSS files. The user names and ids should match any that you
have assigned to the ImgLib collection that points to these original files,
otherwise you will confuse the users who is asked to authenticate twice when
fetching MSS files.
The reason for the two identical sets of users and passwords is to protect the
MSS files by having a dedicated Web server that interfaces between Web clients
and the MSS.
Editing Collection information
The Edit the input form choice from the Add/Edit page takes you
to a form that allows the collection description, access permissions and
default tags to be edited. Any changes to the default tags file or to
the image source directory will affect any new images added to the collection
but not existing ones. Changes in access control affect the existing files
as well.
There is a link to the Add user/group form from the Curators Interface page.
The Create a Glimpse index choice on the Add/Edit page
recreates the Glimpse index for the specified collection.
Editing Tag Files
The option Modify a single record ... add, edit, delete record on the
Add/Edit page lets you add or modify individual text files. This individual
edit form can also be reached from the display tag and image page accessed
from the collection browse pages.
Dynamic pages can be distinguished from static ones by the file name given in the URL. Dynamic pages start with the name /cgi-bin where static pages start with /ImgLib and end in .html.
Create a new collection in the LBNL Image Library
Add to or edit a collection in the LBNL Image Library
Add or remove a User or change a password
Export files from Mass Storage System
User Guide to the LBNL Image Library
Policy on usage of retrieved image and text documents
Image Library Homepage
DSD Home page