Report of the Library Technology Officer
August 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 1034 hours of retrospective material was digitized, exceeding last month's output by 231 hours. By the end of August we had completed the digitization of all evening news programs from August 1968 through May 1974.

The storage consumed by the project is immense. This month alone we produced 3.3 Terabytes of digitized video. One of the key problems involves getting this material transferred to the Library of Congress, who are responsible for its permanent archiving. LC had provided 2 250 GB drives that we would fill and ship to them by FedEx for ingestion into their system. This month we purchased four 500GB USB external drives from LaCie Technologies to supplement the existing drives. We continue to work with staff at the Motion Picture Broadcasting and Recorded Sound division of the Library of Congress to work out a routine for transferring the files that can keep up with the very high volume of files produced each month.

Fox News Project

This month we hired Eric Adams who will serve as the primary abstractor for the Fox News collection. For his first month or so, Eric will be working closely with Skip Pfeiffer as he learns our procedures for writing abstracts. We have been recording an hour of Fox News per day since the middle of January 2004. Eric inherits quite a backlog of programs to abstract. He will initially work on some of the earlier programs, but will move soon move to the current material.

The grant that supports our expansion to cover Fox News also included funds to acquire equipment to create an additional two off-air digital recording stations. These two stations are now fully installed, bringing the number of recording stations in our facility to twelve.

Library Technology Officer Activities

This month Marshall continued to investigate technologies relating to automatic video description as it is applied to broadcast news programming. Carnegie Mellon University has long been one of the leaders in this area of research. The Informedia project at CMU has developed a number of technologies that build a search and retrieval system based on automatically created indexes and descriptors. This month Marshall began discussions with this group to investigate whether a collaborative research project between TVNA and CMU might be worthwhile. In addition to an exchange of e-mail, Marshall had a conference call with Alex Hauptman, Senior Systems Scientist at CMU and Howard Wactlar, Vice Provost for Research Computing. They are very interested in working with us. One of the possible collaborations involves using our collection of news programs and abstracts as a benchmark for their automatic video description technologies. It might be possible, for example, to design a study that compares the searchability of our system based on abstracts written by humans versus their search and retrieval system based entirely on computer generated data.

Marshall worked with faculty members in the departments of Art and Art History, History, and Classics to set up access to the image management system for additional courses that will be using this system for classroom use of digital images. Some of the new courses that will use this system include AHST108 and AHST124 taught by Libbie Rowe, HIST 160 taught by Edward Wright-Rios, AHST230 taught by Amy H Kirschke, AHST 305 taught by Barbara Tsakirgis, and AHST 239 taught by Annabeth Headrick. Marshall batch loaded about 2,000 metadata records into the image database that were created from another system.

Meetings and Committee work

Meetings attended included the SFX Implementation Committee, Library Management Council, Strategic Planning Steering Committee, and TV News staff meetings. Marshall participated in the full-day ETANA meeting that was held at Vanderbilt on August 27 and attended the demonstration of the new ArtSTOR system on August 5th. We learned at that meeting that ArtSTOR made some major changes in their system based on having seen our image management system at a recent CNI break-out session.

Professional Activities

Marshall taught two full-day workshops on wireless networking for SOLINET, one at SOLINET's facilities in Atlanta on August 20, and one in Maitland, FL on the 30th.

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