Report of the Library Technology Officer
September 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 continues to digitize the retrospective collection of programs at a fast pace. The number of hours digitized has grown significantly each month the grant project. In September the team digitized 1,223 hours programming, producing 3.9 Terabytes of MPEG-2 video files. By the end of September, all evening news programs from August 1968 through May 1977 had been digitized.

All files and discs produced by the project are checked and verified for quality control. There is currently a backlog of material to be checked. We expect the pace of checking to keep up with the digitizing once the fifth staff position of the grant project has been filled.

Moving this high volume of files to the Library of Congress for permanent preservation continues to be one of the major logistical challenges of the project. This month some of the technical issues were solved on thier end, making it possible to begin ingesting files at a much higher volume. The new system allows them to process up to 250GB of digital video files each day. In September we shipped 2007 MPEG-2 Files to LC, almost double the 1007 shipped in July. Since January we have shipped a total of 4,215 files to the Library of Congress.

Fox News Project

Eric Adams continues his training in producing the abstracts for the one hour of Fox News that we record daily. To date, there are about two months worth of abstracts of this network now available in the database.

Subscriptions

In September, James Madison University requested a trial subscription to the Archive.

Library Technology Officer Activities

The major technology project that Marshall worked on this month involved the design of an all-digital backup recording system for the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. In June, he did a rough layout of the system in order to put together a budget proposal for the project. Now that some of the funding for the project is in place, work can commence on creating a prototype of the system.

We envision the hardware platform to be a set of rack-mounted computers that each record a single television station 24 hours a day. Requirements include recording some programs without the network/date/time overlay for use by the Division of Public Affairs News Service. All programs destined for the Archive's own collection, however, must have the overlay. The system must automatically deal with breaking the programs down into individual files, and must have a way to manage them. The system must keep files long enough so that items of interest can be culled out of the backup system and moved into the active collection.

A Dell PowerEdge 750 rack-mount server was procured for the project. A Hauppauge Win-TV PVR 350 television card and an Optibase MovieMaker 200S MPEG-2 encoding card were installed in the unit. We obtained a copy of the Software Development Kit (SDK) from Optibase so that we can write our own custom software to control the MovieMaker card. The SDK is written in C++. A copy of the Microsoft C++ Visual Studio was obtained for developing and compiling the software. Marshall had to re-learn the C++ programming language for this project.

Marshall has begun the process of developing the software for this system. So far, he has produced encoding software that will produce MPEG-2 files at approximately the same settings as that use on our production system and that will rotate files each hour. A module was added to the software to automatically control the XBOB-3 device that produces the network/date/time overlay. In our production system, a separate Perl script controls the XBOB. Having this controlled by the encoder will result in a simpler and more problem-free operation. While the Perl script required the serial port to be initialized manually, the C++ module performs this chore automatically. While quite a bit of additional programming will be required for the finished product, what we have so far demonstrates the proof-off-concept.

Meetings and Committee work

Meetings attended included Library Management Council, Strategic Planning Steering Committee, Meeting with Prof. Robert Barsky (Sept 3), New Employee Welcome Session (Sept 8), an update meeting on the African Music Archive, an update meeting on the Special Collections Photo Archive, and the SFX Implementation Task Force (Sept 10).

Professional Activities

On September 17th Marshall gave the keynote address for the TENN-SHARE Fall Conference on "Library Technology 2004: The Current State of Library Automation and Future Trends " and on October 1, he gave the keynote address for the Annual Conference of the Michigan Library Consortium on "Current Trends in Library Automation."

Marshall wrote an article " ISACSOFT Acquires Library Automation Vendor BiblioMondo" which was published as part of the Information Today NewsBreak service. Marshall's regular Systems Librarian column was published in Computers in Libraries and he also contributed to the October 2004 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSource.