Report of the Library Technology Officer

November 2002

Vanderbilt Television News Archive

Overall, the Archive experienced a slow month in November. Income was down significantly from fees charged for videotape loans. Activities related to off-air recording and abstracting were consistent with normal activity. Website activity as measured by the number of new users, total log entries and searches was lower than previous months. These decreased activity levels seem due largely to the holidays. Archive staff find that November is usually a slow month for requests.

Off-air recording

105 Evening news programs were recorded and added to the collection
24 Special broadcasts were recorded and added to the collection

Web server access

1,356	new customers registered on the website
84,635	total entries in activity log
18,942	views of the home page
6,653	views of the search page
6,581	searches executed
18,516	individual records viewed
14,068	program listings viewed

Abstracting and Database Maintenance

2,051 new records were added to the TV-NewsSearch database bringing it to a total of 705,123 records.
139 programs were cataloged into the database
37,180 records modified in November 2002

Visitors

3 visitors to the archive 2 from Vanderbilt and 1 from Elon College in North Carolina.

Loan Requests filled

22 orders processed in September 2002
Compilation tapes were produced totaling 7.4 hours of content
Duplications of programs were produced totaling 12.5 hours of content
0 hours of content were produced for delivery to the Library of Congress

View the Cumulative Table of Statistics for the Archive's activities.

New Calendar Interface

A new interface for browsing the collection by date was implemented on November 8th. This interface uses a set of dynamically-generaged calendar-like pages for displaying all the programs available in the Archive for a given month. We have been developing and testing the calendars for the last few weeks. The calendars rely on a new set of coding in the records to identify each individual program, which needed some fine-tuning before they could reliably replace the previous date selection interface. John Lynch and the student workers performed the record cleanup related to this project.

John attended the Association of Moving Images Archivists convention in Boston where he preside over the meeting of the News and Documentary Interest group.

Personnel

Fred Bidel worked on projects for the Archive during the month of November. Some of his activities included digitizing presidential speeches, creating records for uncataloged specials, and working with software for segmenting video files.

Steve Davis was hired as for the one-year term library assistant position funded by the grant from the National Science Foundation. Steve will begin work on December 9th.

Library Technology Officer Activities

TV News Activities

Marshall performed a number of programming tasks on the TV News Archive website, primarily related to adding new functionality to gather and report more information on use activity. As part of our marketing effors related to the Archive, we need to gather and organize as much information about the users of the TV News website as possible. Some of the website changes to meet this need include:

a new button on the main page for the Registered Users that generates reports of the number of accounts established per user category. This will help us see which organizations are big users of the archive, and would be likely subscribers.

created two more types of users:

Public Library Staff. These were showing up both under government agencies and non-profit organization. It seems like it would be useful to track them as their own group.
Media/Journalism (TV, Radio, Print). These were showing up in the non-profit and the commercial categories, and government agencies. Again, this group seems worth watching separately.

renamed the group Private Individual to "Personal Research with no organizational affiliation". This category was collecting all kinds of user accounts from the others. With this label, users likely identify themselves more appropriately.

performed cleanup tasks to the Registered Users database. Whenever possible, the spellings of the organizations were made consistent so that they will be counted together. This is an ongoing maintenance task that will be easy if performed daily.

on the Statistics page of the Main Search page a new button was created button called "View Referrers" which will produce a report of the websites that delivered users to our site. There is also a new button called "View User Agents" which shows reports of the web browsers and operating systems used to access our site. This will be helpful to us in knowing what percentage of our users have old or unusual web browsers that need special html coding considerations.

added coding to add counters to each user record to count the number of logins and searches performed each month. This information is needed to produce monthly statistics for subscribing or sponsoring institution. When you look at a Customer Record now, you will see data for "Last Login" and for the searches and logins counted for each month of activity.

Marshall drafted a three-year budget projection for the archive that demonstrates the impact of different income possibilities.

Marshall created a bibliography of resources related to the Archive. This bibliography includes books, articles, book chapters, and conference reports that have made use of the Archive as a research tool as well as articles about the Archive and its work. This bibliography is available at: http://lib14.library.vanderbilt.edu/diglib/tvn-citations.pl.

Image Management Software Committee.

Marshall drafted an Interim Report of the committee's progress to date, which has been reviewed by the Committee, revised accordingly and submitted to Paul Gherman.

Leadership Vanderbilt

Marshall completed this one-year professional development program. Overall Leadership Vanderbilt was a valuable experience, providing information about the people, values, and internal workings of the University. It also provided a chance to develop contacts with other individuals throughout the campus with diverse interests and responsibilities.

Extra-curricular Activities

My regular Systems Librarian column was published in the December 2002 issue of Information Today Volume 19 No. 11: "Monitoring the use of yoru Web Site".

Marshall attended the Internet Librarian 2002 conference in Palm Springs, CA from November 3 - 7. He presented a session on "Toolkits and Technologies" as part of a day-long workshop called "Web Manager's Academy" and gave a talk on "Wireless Strategies as part of the regular conference program.

Marshall Breeding