Report of the Library Technology Officer
February 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 Completes NSF grant project

This month saw the official end of the NSF Grant project (ITR 0213875). Final activities included submitting the project report to the National Science Foundation and closing the project budget center. Steve Davis, whose position was funded by the grant will continue his work related to digitizing the retrospective videotape collection, with the position being funded by other sources.

The NSF grant project was an essential part of the process of transforming the Archive into a sustainable endeavor. This project, made possible through $92,882 awarded by the NSF, focused on developing technologies and methodologies that can be used by the Archive for transforming its off-air recording process from a videotape-based operation to one that produces digital content and to design a process for converting the existing videotape collection to digital format. The success of the project is readily apparent, given that the Archive has been using the technologies and methods developed in NSF project in their current off-air recording facility, which has been in production since August of 2003. To date, the Archive has produced over $2,500 hours of digital content-almost double the 1,000 hour minimum goal set in the grant proposal.

Special thanks goes to Steve Davis who did much of the day-to-day work of the grant. He tested and refined the methodologies related to the digitizing process. His expertise in video equipment proved to be very helpful to the success of the project. Russ Mason, who manages the off-air recording operation, provided helpful input to the design process and has successfully managed the complete transformation from videotape to an all-digital recording. John Lynch participated in the design of the design and requirement for the digital processes. Though not directly part of the NSF project, John did much of the work related to the implementation of the new digital recording facility. All the Archive staff contributed in one way or another to the grant project, and how they do their work has certainly been altered by the changes made possible through the project.

Other TV News Activities

Visitors that came to the archive to perform research onsite included:

  • A Professor from McMaster University in Canada studying the use of music in the presentation of Iraq war coverage.
  • An undergraduate from the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania doing a thesis and research for her advisor.
  • A professor from Michigan State and James Madison University, doing research on coverage of break up of eastern Bloc, focusing especially on Romania.

    • New subscribers to the Archive in February include:

    Trial subscription periods were initiated for

    Transfer of MPEG files to Library of Congress

    The Archive and the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division of Library of Congress have implemented a system for transferring large quantities of MPEG-2 digital video files by using FedEx to ship disk drives. This month, the initial transfer of MPEG-2 files occurred, transferring about 500GB of video files.

    Installation of four new servers for TV News

    This month we received four new Dell PowerEdge 2650 servers. These servers will provide much needed additional storage for MPEG files as they are staged for shipment to the Library of Congress and will provide additional capability for MPEG to RealMedia transcoding, and will ultimately be used as part of the distributed video delivery system. Thanks to George and Mills in LITS for their work with the installation of the servers and Windows 2003 operating system.

    Library Technology Officer Activities

    Marshall implemented an enhancement to the library staff directories, both on the Public Web and StaffWeb, that presents e-mail addresses in a way that makes them much less likely to be susceptible to future spam mailings. Although the e-mail addresses appear as standard mailto links, they are constructed in such a way that encodes and disguises them so that they will not be recognized by the Web robot scripts that scan Web pages for e-mail addresses.

    Marshall implemented substantial programming enhancements to the system used for managing academic requirements. The new features implemented will make it easier for NELINET and Vanderbilt to manage and track the payments and invoices related to subscriptions. New search features, display enhancements, and additional data fields were added to the existing system.

    Meetings and Committee work

    Meetings attended included the SFX Implementation Committee, and training sessions, Information Services Advisory Group, Strategic Planning Steering Committee, Strategic Planning kick-off meeting, Intellectual Property Support Committee, and TV News staff meetings.

    Extra-curricular Activities

    Marshall's regular "Systems Librarian" was published in Computers in Libraries. He taught a series of 3 full-day workshops for the State Library of North Carolina sponsored by SOLINET.