Marshall Breeding
Report of the Library Technology Officer
January 2004
Vanderbilt Television News Archive
A statistical summary of the activities of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive is available here.
A cumulative statistical summary of the Archive's activities for fiscal 2003 is available here.
TV News Launches Subscription Service
This month saw the launch of the subscription service to the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. Subscribing institutions have the ability to search the TV-NewsSearch database and immediately view online streaming video for an ever-growing collection of digitized CNN broadcasts. Upon launch, the CNN material ranges from about 1998 to the present. We expect to have our complete collection of regular CNN programs, going back to 1995, by the summer of 2004.
This subscription service is made possible through a wide range of efforts, activities by a number of participants. The design of the technology that makes it possible was accomplished through a grant from the National Science Foundation. A local private foundation that wishes to remain anonymous fully funded two grant proposals in support of the Archive. The first grant paid for the acquisition of the equipment to take the project from the prototype that emerged from the NSF project to a full off-air recording studio of 10 digital video station. The second grant provided an unlimited license for the software that underlies the new streaming video delivery system. The four servers that power this service were purchased though of a fund of seed money established out of donations of 31 ARL libraries that each gave $5,000 or more the work of the Archive and ensure its ongoing viability.
The primary component of the subscription service is the content created by the staff of the Archive. The entire system revolves around the recordings made every day-since 1968-of the national news by the staff of the Archive. In the transition from videotape to digital recording, the staff have adapted to the necessary changes in procedures and worked hard to ensure the highest standards possible in reliability and quality. The catalog records and abstracts that they produce every day populate the TV-NewsSearch database which today totals over a 735,000 records.
Providing access to the CNN video is possible because of a bold agreement that this network with the Archive. While the Copyright Act of 1974 allows archives such as ours to record news programming and lend copies to researchers on physical media, it does not necessarily allow us to provide access to this content via the Web in streaming video. CNN negotiated a contract with the library granting us permission to provide access to their material through online streaming video. This relationship with CNN is especially noteworthy given that the other networks have not yet been willing to engage with the Archive to develop similar agreements.
The subscription service involves a Web-based interface, an underlying search and retrieval engine, database access routines, a user authentication scheme, statistical reports, and a video delivery system. In the absence of a real programmer, Marshall wrote the 250 individual Perl programs that total over 22,000 lines of code that underlie these functions, an effort that has been ongoing over the last two years.
hough we consider ourselves early in the process of procuring subscribers, we are off to a strong start. All of the ARL libraries that contributed to the Archive in 2002 to provide seed money for digitizing activities were also given access to this subscription service for two years. Counting these 31 sponsoring libraries, by the end of January 2004 the archive had 76 active subscriptions to academic institutions. We have activated trial accounts for a number of other institutions, including a consortium of universities in Hong Kong.
NELINET, an library services organization based in Massachusetts works with the Archive to market subscriptions and execute billing and other financial services. The primary approach taken by NELINET involves seeking subscriptions through library consortia. So far, the library consortia of OhioLink and Greater Western Library Alliance have purchased subscriptions on behalf of their member libraries.
During the month of January, Marshall made a number of e-mail contacts with library selectors and directors that had previously expressed interest in subscribing to the Archive. A number of these contacts resulted in subscription orders. Many of the libraries expressed interest in subscribing, but find themselves with constrained budgets and will take some time to identify the funds needed to subscribe.
In the first month of the subscription service, the number of video clips has been quite low-less than a thousand overall. We expect this number to increase dramatically in the coming months.
Library Technology Officer Activities
On the technical front, Marshall identified an MPEG-2 video editor for use in the Archive. One of the common tasks in the processing of off-air recordings involves trimming excessive material from the beginning and end of a program, or combining multiple clips into a single file. The editor that we had previously been using was VideoStudio from Ulead Systems which ultimately failed to meet the needs of the Archive for manipulating video files. Archive staff have now tested the MPEG Video Wizard from Womble Multimedia and it has proven to be much more suitable for our needs. It can deal with MPEG files up to six hours in length, and it creates edited files in a fraction of the time taken by the Ulead editor.
Barbara Tsakirgis from the classics department met with Marshall related to her interest in using the image management system for one of her classes this Spring. She has been working with the Slide Library of the College of Arts & Sciences to have her images digitized. She will use the system for one class this semester, and will add additional classes in the Fall.
Meetings and Committee work
Marshall Attended the ALA Midwinter Meeting in San Diego California. Marshall participated in the LITA Top Technology Trends panel, is a member of the LITA/Endeavor Student Writing Award committee, attended various other LITA meetings, convened the Sirsi Large Sites meeting, and met with all the major library automation companies during the conference.
Meetings attended included the Digital Collections subcommittee on the African Music Project, a focus group for the new StaffWeb, the SFX Implementation Committee, the quarterly New Employee Welcome Session for new library staff, Strategic Planning Steering Committee, and the Heard Web Task Force.
Extra-curricular Activities
Marshall's regular "Systems Librarian" was published in Computers in Libraries. Marshall also contributed to the current issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSource. The current issue of Library Technology Reports published by ALA TechSource on "Integrated library software: a guide to multiuser, multifunction systems" was authored by Marshall.