Marshall Breeding
Report of the Library Technology Officer
May 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 Projects
This month marked the beginning of the two-year project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities to convert the retrospective collection of evening news on videotape to digital MPEG-2 files. This month key activities involved recruiting and training staff for the project, working to refine the flow of material through the digitizing process, and improving the technical infrastructure and automation.
The grant includes funding for five staff. John Lynch, the Director of the Archive, will coordinate the daily work of the project. Steve Davis, originally hired for a 1-year term position for the NSF-funded project, will continue on with the Archive, as one of the NEH-funded positions. Steve's main responsibilities will focus on encoding MPEG-2 files from videotape. Relying the experience gained from the NSF project, Steve will be the one to deal with problems and non-routine issues. Honor Gherman has been hired to participate in the project. Her responsibilities will focus on checking the digital MPEG-2 files for errors and visual quality. Rachael Gostowski was recently hired for the second MPEG encoding position. She will work an evening shift, taking advantage of the time that the digital encoding workstations are not being used for off-air recording and digitizing activities that occur during the normal workday. We are still working on filling the two remaining positions.
This month, Marshall developed and implemented a new more automated approach for checking the integrity of the DVD discs produced in the process. The Archive's working copy of each MPEG-2 file produced is stored on a DVD-R optical disc. Given the possibility that errors might occur when burning these discs, we must verify the integrity of each one by copying the files off of it to ensure that they are retrievable in the future. Until recently, we were manually copying the files to the local drive of one of the workstations. To automate this process, Marshall constructed a DVD-R tower of seven SCSI DVD and wrote a set of perl programs to sequentially copy each of the files to a temporary space and confirm that the file is the same as the original. Although it takes about an hour to test a full set of seven discs, it requires no manual intervention and can run unattended, saving a great deal of operator time.
Another part of the process involves printing each DVD-R disc with a label that consists of the file names (parsed into segments to be more readable) and the number of the corresponding records in the database so that the program listing can be easily retrieved for the disc contents if needed. Marshall wrote a program that automatically parses the directory of the disc and transfers the appropriate information to the disc printing software, saving the operator from having to manually type any information. This new procedure both ensures accuracy of the disc labels and yields considerable time savings.
Other TV News Activities
New subscribers to the Archive in February include:
- Emerson College
- Florida International University
- Huntingdon College
- Lipscomb University
- University of California, Berkeley
- University of California, California Digital Library
- University of California, Santa Barbara
- University of Durham
- University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Trial subscription periods were initiated for
- Florida State University
- Library of Michigan
- Muskegonc Community College
- State University of West Georgia
- University of Detroit Mercy
Current Subscription Totals:
| Paid accounts | 74 |
| Sponsor/Comp accounts | 32 |
| Trial subscriptions | 16 |
| Total active subscription accounts | 122 |
Library Technology Officer Activities
This month Marshall worked on various activities related to preparing for the upcoming TV News projects. In addition to various server configuration details, Marshall developed applications related to DVD disc checking and label printing described above.
Marshall attended the TVNA Advisory Board meeting in Washington, DC (May 26); gave a demonstration of the TV News subscription service at the SOLINET Annual Meeting in Atlanta (May 6) and discussed the project at one of the "Table Talk" morning sessions.
Meetings and Committee work
Meetings attended included the SFX Implementation Committee, Library Management Council, Strategic Planning Steering Committee, Intellectual Property Support Committee, and TV News staff meetings.
Extra-curricular Activities
Taught LITA Regional Institute on Wireless Technologies in Libraries for the Long Island Regional Library Consortium on May 17 and taught a day-long SOLINET workshop at Clarksville Public Library.
Marshall also contributed to the June 2004 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSource.