Report of the Library Technology Officer
March 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 receives 2-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities

In March, the NEH notified the Library of its $281,154 award for a two-year project to digitize the retrospective collection of evening news broadcasts of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. The material currently resides on ¾-inch U-Matic videotape and will be converted to MPEG-2 digital video program streams. This grant will fund 5 technicians for two years and support the costs related to storing the digitized files on DVD. In addition to the DVD-R copies that will be held locally, digital master copies will be transferred to the Library of Congress for long-term preservation. The collection of evening news targeted in the grant for conversion totals about 300,000 hours.

The Press Release issued by Vanderbilt News Service provides additional information about the grant.

TV News Awarded grant to record and abstract Fox News

A local foundation fully funded a 5-year project totaling $181,177.50 to add Fox News to the slate of national news programming collected by the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. This grant will support one new staff position whose primary responsibility will involve producing abstracts of Fox News programming as well as the computer equipment needed to expand the off-air recording studio and a computer workstation for use by the new abstractor.

Other TV News Activities

New subscribers to the Archive in February include:

Trial subscription periods were initiated for

Library Technology Officer Activities

This month Marshall developed a set of programs to provide statistical reports to the subscribers of the TV News service. With an assigned username and password, the designated administrator at each site will be able to log in and view the statistics and other information relevant to their subscription. The statistics available include the aggregate number of logins, searches, and video requests performed by users from each institution.

Marshall has begun working with a group of researchers that are developing technologies and ontologies related to the description of news broadcasts. The project is working on a project titled "A large Scale Concept Ontology for Multimedia Understanding" and includes participants from IBM Research, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University and UCSD, and other research organizations. Our database of abstracts is of interests to this research community for the purpose of tracking trends and themes in news that can serve as a benchmark for automated descriptive technologies. Marshall prepared a sample of the abstracts exported as a set of XML documents for use by this research project.

Meetings and Committee work

Meetings attended included the SFX Implementation Committee, Strategic Planning Steering Committee, 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. Marshall authored the Automated System Marketplace 2003 feature which was published in the April 1, 2004 issue of Library Journal This is the third consecutive year that Marshall authored this report. Marshall also contributed to the April 2004 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSourece.