This month the Cheryl Carpenter, a student in the distance education program of the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville began working with the Archive. Cheryl's practicum at the Archive will involve a wide range of duties, including working with the database, assisting Archive users, and assisting with the digital conversion process. We're delighted to have Cheryl work with us this semester.

Donation of Equipment

Joel Covington, owner of a local video distribution company called Sifford Video Service, has offered to donate a significant amount of used videotape equipment to the Archive. This equipment includes 13 Sony U-Matic videotape recorders that will be valuable for the project of digitizing the videotape collection, as well as digital scopes and other equipment that will be of use to the archive.

NSF Grant Report

Steve Davis began with the archive this month beginning on December 9th. His position is funded entirely through the grant from the National Science Foundation and his activities will be related to working out methodologies that will be used for digitizing the Archive's collection.

One of the primary goals of the NSF-funded project involves designing the optimal approach for digitizing the Archive's existing videotape collection. We plan to evaluate a number of MPEG compression and encoding cards and empirically test a wide range of compression options. The initial card that we have been testing is the ExpertArchiver card from DV Studio. We have been putting this card through its paces, digitizing the same segment of video with a wide range of MPEG-2 compression options, including the bit rate, capture resolution, and audio sampling rate. In conducting these tests, we aim to determine the best settings that achieve the highest visual quality of digitized video with the smallest possible file size. With the ExpertArchiver card, we have encoded the video at bit rates ranging from 2000-12,000, video resolution ranging from 320 to 720 pixels, and with differing audio bit rates and sampling frequencies. We have also just acquired two more MPEG-2 encoding cards, the MVR-1000 and the Amber MPEG2 Mastering and Archiving products from Canopus Corporation. We will be running these two cards through the same iterations of MPEG settings and tabulating those results in comparison to the ExpertArchiver card.

The part of the collection that has the fewest complications regarding copyright restrictions involves presidential speeches. We are in the process of digitizing a number of presidential speeches, starting with the annual State of the Union Address. We plan to make streaming video version of these speeches available on the Archive's website in the near future. The video will include only the speech itself, without any commentary or introductions from the networks. Making this video available with both give us more experience with streaming video hardware and software as well as add content to the site that may attract additional interest.

In addition to the preservation-quality MPEG-2 digital files, we also need to create lightweight versions of the files suitable for streaming over the Internet. Marshall has been working with the Helix Producer Plus product from RealNetworks, transcoding MPEG-2 files into Realmedia 9 format. The final format of that we will use for steaming video is not yet established, but Realmedia is one of the candidates. In our initial transcoding efforts, the Realmedia files are about 5 percent of the size of the MEPG-2 originals from which they are derived.

Library Technology Officer Activities

TV News Activities

Programming done for the TV News website this month included improvements in the program that ingests the abstracts written by Archive staff and creates records in the database. The previous version of the program could not accommodate some records where a long string of reporters was provided at the beginning of the record. The new version does more advanced parsing of the reporters, allowing it to handle these records without manual intervention. This version also performs additional error checking, making sure that the day of the week is correct for any given day of the month. It also performs error checking relating to the beginning and ending times of new segments. Changes were made regarding the display of records to the public: all times now show in twelve hour form with AM and PM rather in 24-hour format; some problems relating to record sorting were resolved, and other minor problems relating to time display were resolved. Features were added for staff to provide a more convenient way to go back and forth between the calendar display and the calendar editing system. The record editor for the main database was enhanced to provide a convenient way to edit the records representing multiple networks. This feature was necessary to allow us to work with records for some of the older specials.

Marshall created an interface to the Art and Architecture Thesaurus from the J. Paul Getty Trust. We acquired the AAT for use with the Art & Art History image database, but it should have other uses as well. The AAT provides the controlled vocabulary for the Visual Resources Core (VRA) and other metadata schemas related to the arts. The AAT database was made available to other library staff that might benefit from this tool, and can be made available to others on campus if they express an interest.

Marshall attended the Coalition for Networked Information Fall Task Force Meeting in San Antonio, TX on December 5-6.

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".

For the last two years Marshall had been writing a monthly column called "Systems Librarian" for Information Today. Beginning with January 2003, the column will be published in Computers in Libraries, a magazine from the same publisher.

Marshall Breeding

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