Report of the Library Technology Officer
June 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.

NEH Project

The NEH Grant Project for digitizing the retrospective evening news collection continues to ramp up. This month we hired Michael Ruzicka, who will begin work on July 12. Thus far, we have hired four out of the five positions for the project: Steven Davis, Honor Gherman, Rachael Gostowski, and Michael Ruzicka. Steve and Rachael spend most of their time encoding programs from videotape; Honor, Michael, and the unfilled position perform quality control, label discs, and other tasks that keep material flowing through the system.

The volume of digitizing has increased relative to the increased staff. This month 538.5 hours of retrospective material was digitized. We will be digitizing the retrospective collection working forward from its beginning date of August 5, 1968. So far, we have digitized all of 1968 and 1969.

FoxNews Project

This month we also made preparations for the grant project to record and abstract Fox News. The position for the abstractor for the project has been created and posted. This position will create the abstracts for the one-hour program of Fox that we have been recording since January 15, 2004. One of the challenges that this new position will inherit involves the 6-month backlog as well as keeping up with new programs. We have been recording the Fox programs with existing equipment, which has put a strain on the operation. The grant proposal included equipment for two additional recording stations. This equipment was ordered, including two Dell GX-270 workstations, OptiBase MPEG encoding cards, Hauppauge PVR-350 television reception cards, two XBOB character generators, two Darim M-Filter timebase correctors and all the cabling and connecters needed. Some rearrangement of furniture in the off-air studio was done to accommodate these new recording stations.

Preliminary design for Off-air recording backup system

While the digital recording station has been in operation since mid-2003, we continue to use videotape equipment as a backup in case of equipment failure and to catch news programming that might occur at unexpected times. We have long seen the need for a digital backup system so that we can get away from videotape entirely and to have a higher quality backup copy. Though we have been talking about creating such a system since we put together the production off-air recording system, we have not yet settled on the specific approach we would take. This month Marshall worked on designing the backup system. The key requirements include the ability to record television stations 24 hours a day without manual intervention. The system would need to start and end recording sessions automatically, creating MPEG-2 files of manageable size. The software that controls the OptiBase encoding cards lacks this capability. OptiBase does offer a Software Development Kit that could be used to create a custom application that meets our requirements. One of the components of a project to create the backup system would be the cost to develop this application. Our preliminary estimate of the cost for the hardware and software to support this project is about $50,000.

Other TV News Activities

New subscribers to the Archive in February include:

Trial subscription periods were initiated for

Current Subscription Totals:

Paid accounts79
Sponsor/Comp accounts32
Trial subscriptions15
Total active subscription accounts126

Library Technology Officer Activities

This month Marshall worked on various activities related the TV News Archive. The major activity this month involved the design of the digital off-air recording backup system described above. He also worked on various improvements to the MPEG to RealMedia transcoding system to perform additional error checking and operate more efficiently.

Marshall and John met with Elizabeth Latt (Assistant Vice Chancellor for News and Communications), Emily Pearce (Assistand Director, Vanderbilt News Service) and Brian Smokler regarding the possibility of a joint project with the Vanderbilt News Service that would involve the creation of an off-air recording sytsem that would serve the backup needs of the Archive and the provide the News Service with high quality video copies of television coverage of the University.

Marshall attended the ALA Annual Conference Jun 25 - 29 in Orlando, FL. He was a panelist on LITA Top Technology Trends session; convened the Sirsi Large Sites Interest Group; met with executives from all the library automation system vendors, and attended various technology-oriented presentations.

Meetings and Committee work

Meetings attended included the SFX Implementation Committee, Library Management Council, Strategic Planning Steering Committee, half-day joint retreat of the the Library's Strategic Planning Steering Committee, Center for Teaching, and Office for Innovation through Technology (June 3), Intellectual Property Support Committee, and TV News staff meetings.

Extra-curricular Activities

Gave a presentation on Library Security Issues for the Tech Connections Conference sponsored by the Ohio Valley Association of Libraries conference in Columbus, OH on June 7th.

Marshall's regular Systems Librarian column was published in Computers in Libraries and he also contributed to the July 2004 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSource.