Marshall Breeding
Report of the Library Technology Officer
July 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 2004 is available here.
NEH Project
The NEH project is well underway and digitizing is proceeding at a rapid pace. This month 802.5 hours of retrospective material was digitized, exceeding last month's output by 264 hours.
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. By the end of July, project staff had digitized all the evening news programs between August 1968 and July 1971.
Transition of Administrative Support
This month saw the transition of videotape order processing from Jennie McClendon in the Division of Public Affairs to the Library. Administrative assistants in OUL will now handle the various financial details involved with the income taken in from videotape orders. Specific tasks include the authorization of credit card transactions, producing and mailing invoices for each order, and depositing checks. During the time that the Archive was under the administration of Public Affairs, a separate accounting system was used to handle the videotape loan income. Now that this work is being done by the library, we will use the accounting features built into the Web-based ordering system. This new approach will eliminate all re-keying of data and will significantly reduce the time involve for administrative support. In order to bypass the need for a separate accounting system, Marshall implemented a number of enhancements and new features to the TVNA ordering system. New features created include:
- The ability to view a list of transactions requiring processing with a single click;
- a user-friendly interface for approving credit card transactions. All information needed to process a transaction is presented including the credit card number, the number to call for authorization, our merchant number;
- error checking routines were added to the system to ensure correct credit cards when entered by the customer;
- the ability to produce invoices from the order record with a single click from the order record;
- separation of order price approval and financial processing;
- A monthly financial report of income by category and sub-category;
- listing of American Express transactions for transmittal.
TV News Subscription Service
| Current Subscription Totals | |
|---|---|
| Paid accounts | 79 |
| Complimentary accounts | 7 |
| Sponsors | 26 |
| Trial subscriptions | 16 |
| Total active subscription accounts | 128 |
Library Technology Officer Activities
This month Marshall worked on various activities related the TV News Archive. The major activity this month involved the enhancements to the videotape ordering and accounting sytsem described above.
Marshall also worked on enhancements to the Religious Image Iconography Database as requested by Anne Womack of the Divinity Library. We are working to develop a improvements to the interface for the general public to use for searching for and viewing the images. A number of fields can now be searched by picking from lists of valid terms which relieves the searcher from knowing what kind of information is available in each field. The search and record display pages were reorganized and clarified. Some additional work remains to be done to provide effective searching by date and scripture reference.
Greg Wilsbacher, the director of the Newsfilm Library at the University of South Carolina visited with Marshall and John Lynch to discuss options related to collaboration between the USC Newsfilm collection and the Archive. USC owns a great deal of news content that would compliment the Archive's colleciton. We agreed to investigate various options, such as adding records from parts of the USC Newsfilm colleciton to the TVNA database.
Meetings and Committee work
Meetings attended included the SFX Implementation Committee, Library Management Council, Strategic Planning Steering Committee, Retirement Learning (taught session on searching the web) and TV News staff meetings.
Professional Activities
Marshall gave the keynote presentation for the South Carolina SOLINET Annual User's Group on "Current Trends in Library Automation" and gave a presentation on the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. While in Columbia, he was given a tour of USC NewsPlex.
Marshall's regular Systems Librarian column was published in Computers in Libraries and he also contributed to the August 2004 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSource.