Report of the Library Technology Officer
October 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

This month, the pace of the NEH project to digitize the retrospective news collection was down just a bit from previous levels due to increased off-air recording related to the U.S. Presidential and Vice-presidential debates. In October the team digitized 1,193 hours programming, just 30 hours below the previous month. By the end of the month the evening news collection from 1968 through February 1980 had been digitized.

This project has been operating with only 4 of the 5 personnel that the grant was budgeted to support. We still have not been able to hire the fifth staff position. Several individuals were interviewed, but ended up not accepting the position.

We processed several shipments of MPEG files to the Library of Congress, totaling 3,641 files--a record number. While this mitigates the crisis that we were facing as our storage servers approached capacity, we still have a considerable backlog. If we continue transferring files at this pace, that backlog will diminish over the next few months.

Subscriptions

In October, Baylor University, Brooklyn College, Florida Atlantic University, and the University School of Nashville each requested trial subscriptions.

Library Technology Officer Activities

Marshall continued the development of the new digital backup recording system for the TV News Archive. Previously, we had obtained a Dell PowerEdge 750 to serve as the prototype for the hardware platform for the recording system. Earlier attempts to integrate all the components into this computer had been unsuccessful. While both the Hauppauge PVR-350 and the Optibase MovieMaker 200S and their respective drivers were successfully installed, the WinTV-2000 software that controls the Hauppauge card would not initialize. Further investigation shows that the Hauppauge software has not yet been adopted to operate under Windows 2003 server. To address this issue, Marshall converted the server to Windows XP. Even after this change, the software continued not to work. Further research indicated that the Hauppauge software requires the presence of a sound card and the associated DirectX filters. Given that the PowerEdge 750 does not include sound capabilities internally and that no PCI slots were available, this requirement presented a problem. The problem was solved by obtaining a USB sound card (Turtle Beach Audio Advantage Micro USB). With this device and its corresponding drivers installed, the Hauppauge software was functional.

With all the hardware components installed and functional in the prototype, Marshall installed the custom version of the Optibase encoding software that he had previously created using the Optibase Software Development Kit and the Microsoft Visual C++ Studio programming environment. This also worked fine on the PowerEdge 750 server.

With these hardware and software components in place, the prototype has most of the basic functionality needed.

The next phase of development involves further software development to manage the files produced by the system and some fine-tuning of the MPEG-2 encoding parameters.

Meetings and Committee work

Meetings attended included Library Management Council, Strategic Planning Steering Committee, Library Staff Service Awards, Space planning meetings for Baker Building, and TV News staff meetings.

Professional Activities

On October 1, Marshall gave the keynote address for the Annual Conference of the Michigan Library Consortium on "Current Trends in Library Automation."

Marshall taught a workshop on "Wireless Networks in Libraries" as an adjunct trainer for SOLINET for several libraries during the month. Marshall's regular Systems Librarian column was published in Computers in Libraries and he also contributed to the November 2004 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSource.