Report of the Library Technology Officer

August 2003

Vanderbilt Television News Archive

Off-air recording

Web server access

514 new customers registered on the website
56,525 total entries in activity log
10,216 views of the home page
3,467 views of the search page
4,867 searches executed
2,421 Calenadars viewed
16,786individual records viewed
5,491 program listings viewed

Abstracting and Database Maintenance

Visitors

The Archive had about 40 individuals who took tours of its facilities.

Loan Requests filled

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

The 35th Anniversary

August 5th marked the 35 anniversary of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. A number of activities took place in recognition of this event. A dinner was held for Archive staff and their families at the University Club on August 4th. Among the guests at the event was Frank Gresham, the Director of the Joint University Libraries who was instrumental to the founding of the Archive.

An open meeting for library staff was held on August 4th in the Frist Building. Marshall gave a presentation introducing Archive staff, a brief overview of the Archive's operations, its use of digital technologies, and a preview of the Digital Video Delivery System.

About 40 library and university staff took advantage of tours of the Archive that were conducted throughout the afternoon of August 5th.

Publicity

Marshall Breeding and John Lynch gave on-camera interviews for Tennessee Crossroads, a program produced by Nashville Public Television. Rob Wilds, a producer for NPT, conducted the interview. The segment on the Archive is expected to be aired in October.

Ann Marie Deer Owens, Senior Public Affairs Officer for Vanderbilt News Service, interviewed John Lynch and Marshall Breeding. A portion of the audio of the interview was aired on the radio program "Teddy Bart's Roundtable" on WAMB. Information was also used for the article "Television News Archive goes digital on 35th anniversary" that appeared in the August 11-24, 2003 issue of the Vanderbilt Register and the August 5th issue of Daily Register.

Digitization Activities

Crossing another significant milestone, the Archive officially switched to digitally recording the news on August 5th. This culminates a long effort of investigation of technologies leading to the installation and testing of a new all-digital off-air recording studio. While Archive staff have been digitizing simultaneously to their videotape operation for the last two months, on this date the primary copy of all new programs is digital. This equipment is also used for digitizing videotapes from the existing collection. To date we have over 1,000 hours of digitized material. Steve Davis, whose position is funded through the Library's grant from the NSF, continues to spend the majority of his time digitizing the retrospective collection.

Library Technology Officer Activities

Marshall met with staff from the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound division of the Library of Congress at their offices in the Madison Building in Washington DC on August 22nd. Attendees of the meeting included Greg Lukow (Division Chief), Carl Fleishhauer (Technical Coordinator, National Digital Library Program), Allan McConnell (Head Engineer), and Ellie Wackerman (Head of the MBRS Moving Image Processing Unit). Topic discussed included the financial contributions that LC will make to the Archive to support its activity of collecting broadcast news programming, options for transferring MPEG-2 digital masters from the Archive to LC, whether to also transfer the RealMedia-9 derivatives, and how LC will handle metadata issues and whether we need to transfer metadata for each broadcast individually. Marshall gave a demonstration of the TV-NewsSearch database and the Streaming Video Delivery System.

Marshall obtained pricing information at the request of Sharon Gray Wiener for a possible project that the Peabody Library has been asked to investigate. The scope of the project involves digitizing the yearbooks of the American Education Finance Association, a set of 21 volumes issued annually totaling about 7,000 pages. This type of work can be done much more efficiently and at lower cost using a professional service rather than performing the work in-house. Marshall requested pricing information from Northern Micrographics, Acme Bookbinding, and the University of Michigan for scanning, performing OCR, and producing PDF files for each volume and created a summary of the costs. Marshall and Jody met with Sharon to review the costs and other issues related to the project.

Access to the Vanderbilt Television News Archive TV-NewsSearch will be limited to subscribers beginning January 2005. Academic libraries will be able to subscribe for fees based on a sliding scale according the FTE of their student population; individuals will obtain personal subscriptions for $20 per year. Marshall worked on various pieces of technical infrastructure to support this change. He developed a form for institutions to fill out to apply for a subscription and a form for personal subscriptions. He also did most of the programming that will be required to limit access to subscribers according to their IP address. This involves maintaining a database of the IP addresses associated with each subscribing institutions and developing programs that will control the features an individual user may see relative to their status as a subscriber.

Marshall installed the new version of the Helix Universal Server software recently purchased onto the Library20 server which functions as the media server for TV News. He installed critical OS patches for the Windows 2000 servers used for TV News, and ETANA. Four Dell PowerEdge servers have been ordered and are expected to be delivered in September, which will be configured to operate as a cluster for streaming video delivery.

Marshall gave a presentation for library staff on Metasearching and Reference Linking on August 19th as part of the Web Task Force's effort to get broad involvement from library staff in reviewing and selecting products to enhance the library user's access to electronic resources. In preparation for this presentation, he worked with the systems librarian at Boston College to get access to their implementation of MetaLib and SFX, including access to live resources through their proxy server. Having full access to a real implementation of these products was very useful in showing staff the capabilities of linking and metasearch applications.

Marshall made a number of changes to the "Find and Article" page (http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/articles.html) as requested by Melinda Brown on behalf of the ISAG Subcommittee on Web-based Instructional Support. He also made some changes to the Electronic Resources database editor to provide controlled vocabulary for standard location messages at the request of David Carpenter on behalf of the Central Library Electronic Resources Committee.

Use of the Image Database system continues for Art and Art History courses. All the courses that used the system last year will continue; Art 256 on Mayan Art was added for the Fall 2003 semester.

Marshall participated in New Employee Welcome Session, Web Task Force, Digital Collections Committee, participated in Customer Service Workshop, Library Management Council, and University Librarian's Advisory Group.

Extra-curricular Activities

Marshall gave the keynote speech for the Virginia SOLINET Users Meeting at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA on August 22nd. He spoke on "Current Trends in Library Automation: the ILS and Beyond." Marshall's regular "Systems Librarian" was published in Computers in Libraries and he authored contributions to the October 2003 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter" published by the American Library Association.