Report of the Library Technology Officer

September 2002

Vanderbilt Television News Archive

Off-air recording

The Archive recorded all of the 9/11/02 (ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC) news coverage of the one year memorial of the terrorists attacks.

Web server access

Eight percent activity in Web server activity over previous month

1395 new customers registered on the website
76063 total entries in activity log
14,324 views of the home page
8,642 views of the search page
7,189 searches executed
18,629 individual records viewed
9,881 program listings viewed

Abstracting and Database Maintenance

Visitors

The Archive hosted tours for 6 attendees of the International Coalition of Library Consortia meeting held in Nashville.

Four visitors came to the archive for research: 2 Vanderbilt, 1 Belmont and 1 country musician.

Loan Requests filled

I developed a Cumulative Table of Statistics for the Archive's activities.

Supporters

This month one new organization, University of Ohio, became sponsor to the Archive. New total is 29, for a total of $150,000.

Library Technology Officer Activities

Grant from the National Science Foundation

This month we received the official award letter from the National Science Foundation notifying us that our grant has been approved. We had heard unofficially earlier that the grand had been awarded, but now we can proceed with the project. The project will involve hiring a technician to work with the Library Technology Officer to develop procedures for the digital recording of television news broadcasts and for conversion of the existing collection. A position description has been drafted and submitted to the Library Personnel Office. The grant will support the purchase of a large increase in our digital storage capabilities for the video files that will be created, as well as assorted hardware and software for capturing, editing, and manipulating digital video.

TV News Activities

I continue to be involved with the maintenance of the TV-NewsSearch database. As with any large database, there are a number of areas where attention is needed to make the resource consistent and correct. Some problems were introduced as records were loaded into the system, and others related to manual editing have accumulated over the years. The level of searchability available in the database both makes errors more apparent, though it also makes them easy to correct. While the Archive staff perform database maintenance on a record-by-record basis, I am able to make global changes for them. This month we have been involved in a project related to the reporters. I created a listing of all the reporter names in the index, which showed that there were many variant spellings for many of the reporters and some syntactical problems related to how the names were extracted from the abstract and inserted into a separate reporters field. I was able to fix all the problems identified related to syntactical variations in the names and for corrections that had sufficient numbers to warrant a global change.

This month I also did programming to effect improvements in the ordering system for tape loan requests performed through the website. These improvements included adding breadcrumbs to the interface to show to show the current status in the progression of steps involved in creating an order. Breadcrumbs were also added to the search and retrieval part of the interface. Additional queries were added to the staff interface of the ordering system.

I was interviewed by Paula Hane of Information Today for an article about the TV-NewsSearch database. This article titled Vanderbilt Improves Television News Archive was published in Information Today Volume 19 No 9 (October 2002).

Paul Gherman, Kevin Davis and I participated in a conference call with CNN staff regarding the Archive's plans to digitize and provide access to streaming video of CNN content.

Image Management Software Committee.

This group continued its efforts. In the meeting held this month, we reviewed work done to date and agreed to develop an interim report. I did preliminary research on the TEAMS digital asset management system from Artesia Technologies.

Given the extended timeframe involved in the selection and procurement of a commercial image management system, it was agreed that we would use our locally developed system for work that needs to take place in the short term. The Special Collections Photographic Archive will use this system to begin entering metadata related to slides and photographs they scan. Metadata records can be converted form this system to another as the need arises. I met with Special Collections staff to show them the image management system in its current form as it has been initially drafted for their material. Comments were invited for further development and customization.

Leadership Vanderbilt

As a member of the Leadership Vanderbilt 2002 professional development group, I participated in the month's general session and small group meetings related to our assigned project and presentation.

Web Task Force

My main task related to this committee involved the creation of a new version of the electronic journals resource that displays holdings. Rick has populated this field for the titles of a single aggregator. This preliminary step will help us be ready for a more large-scale approach such as using data from Serials Solutions for electronic journal holdings in the E-Journals resource and Acorn.

Etana

This month I worked with George Anglin and Kay Pothisiri to set up the new server for the Abzu database. Abzu as been running on a shared server along with other library applications since it was put into production. This new server purchased with funds from the Mellon grant, will allow this resource to run on a dedicated server. We methodically went through the steps in configuring the server for Perl, ODBC, and DB/TextWorks so that LITS staff will be well-prepared to provide support for this environment.

One problem reported by Chuck Jones, the editor of Abzu, was resolved. This problem related to the way that records submitted by external users are posted to the provisional database and moved into the primary database by the editor.

Extra-curricular Activities

Taught workshop on wireless technologies for Suburban Library System.

My regular Systems Librarian column was published in the October 2002 issue of Information Today Volume 19 No. 9: "An Update on Open Source ILS".

The September 2002 issue of Current Cites included a favorable review of my article "A Hard Look at Wireless Networks" that was published in the Summer 2002 issue of Library Journal's netConnect.