Report of the Library Technology Officer
April 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.

Preperations for NEH and Fox News Projects

With the notification last month of the award of the grant from the NEH to digitize the retrospective videotape collection of evening news, much effort this month was devoted to prepare the physical space and technical infrastructure needed for that project.

John Lynch organized and carried out a plan to reorganize the physical facilities of the archive to make way for both the NEH grant and the upcoming expansion of the Archive to record and abstract Fox News. Two rooms in the TV News suite in the Baker building were used for the storage of videotape and equipment. A third was used for both equipment storage and for use by Archive visitors for viewing videotapes. In order to make room for the new personnel to be hired for these projects, all three of these rooms needed to be cleared out. A new space was created in the large middle room as a public viewing area with two stations. Almost all the videotape collections that were previously housed in the suite on the seventh floor were transferred to the basement. In order to make room in the basement for these collections, equipment and furniture stored there needed to be removed. John made arrangements to transfer the he 1-inch Ampex tape equipment to National Television Preservation Foundation. All other unused equipment has been identified for transferring to University Surplus or discarding. As a result of this project, two rooms were cleared out for use in the NEH digitizing project and one was cleared out for use by the new position anticipated for abstracting Fox News.

The NEH digitizing project will involve the need for very large amounts of digital storage. We will need storage to stage the MPEG files produced by the digitizing process before they are shipped to the Library of Congress and the RealMedia files derived from the MPEGs will need to be stored for access by the streaming media servers. In March we ordered six Dell PowerVault storage arrays that will be used to extend the capacity of the existing 8 Dell PowerEdge servers. With the 410GB capacity of the 8 PowerEdge servers and the 1.7TB capacity of each PowerVault, the Archive now has 13.7 TB of storage available for the project.

Much thanks goes to LITS for their assistance in installing and configuring this new hardware. George Anglin and Mills Bell did most of the work related to the installation of the hardware and setting up the RAID containers and formatting the drives. Once their work was complete, Marshall configured the network shares and began moving the MPEG files onto them. Some addition work remains on acquiring additional UPS equipment for the arrays. The existing UPS in the cabinet lacks the capacity to power all the devices. In the interim, we are using freestanding UPS that were available to power the new storage arrays.

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 worked on various activities related to preparing for the upcoming TV News projects. One project involved planning and organizing how the new storage arrays will be used for the MPEG and RealMedia files. He inventoried and organized the files produced to date. Marshall work with Norman to get a budget center established for the NEH grant and with Lisa to get the positions defined and opened.

Marshall attended the Spring Task Force Meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information in Arlington, VA. (April 14 - 15). He convened the meeting of the Sirsi Large Sites Special Interest Group at the Sirsi SuperConference in St. Louis (April 19th).

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 taught three full-day SOLINET workshops sponsored by the North Carolina State Library in Ashville, NC. Marshall's regular "Systems Librarian" was published in Computers in Libraries. Marshall also contributed to the May 2004 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSource.