Report of the Library Technology Officer
November 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 Archive's off-air recording of the 2004 presidential election resulted in a small reduction in the total volume of material encoded from the retrospective collection. In October the team digitized 1,042 hours programming, about 150 hours below the previous month. By the end of the month the evening news collection from 1968 through February 1982 had been digitized.

Subscriptions

In November 2004, we established a subscription account for the Library of Congress to provide access to the TV-NewsSearch database throughout all its reading rooms. A separate account, with access enabled for the video content was established for the staff of the Motion Picture, Broadcast, and Recorded Sound Division. No separate payment will be involved with these subscription accounts, but will be part of the stipend that LC pays to the Archive. Also this month, the School of Communications at Temple University purchased a subscription and trial accounts were established for Virginia Commonwealth University and Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Library Technology Officer Activities

This month Marshall continued work on the new backup digital recording system for the TV News Archive. The majority of the work centered on design issues relating to the management and retention of the MPEG-2 files recorded by the system. Though the design includes 24-hour a day recording across multiple networks, only selected items will be retained and added to the collection. Other items will be specifically recorded for the Vanderbilt News Service, based on requests that they make before or for a limited time after the broadcast. Marshall is working on software that will automatically register each hour of content as it is recorded, check it against lists of requested programs, and prioritize recordings. Since the overall system will have limited storage capacity, programs will eventually be deleted if they are not specifically moved into the working collection. In order to create this functionality, Marshall has created a set of databases to manage the queues and workflows of the files and is in the process of writing C++ code into the custom MPEG encoding program to interface with these databases.

On November 4th, Marshall met with the lead archivists of NBC and ABC in their offices in New York. Both were productive meetings meant primarily to keep us in touch with the networks. Follow-up conversations are planned.

Marshall also met with Lucal Hilderbrand, a Ph.D. candidate at New York University. Lucas will focus his dissertation on the Vanderbilt Television News Archive and issues related to copyright and intellectual property. He will visit Vanderbilt early in 2004 to gather informaiton in suport of his research.

On November 11, Marshall participated in a panel discussion on "Real World Television Digitizing Projects" at the Association of Moving Image Archivists in Minneapolis, MN; On November 16th he gave a presentation at the Internet Librarian Conference in Monterey, CA focusing on the technology, business, and legal issues involved with the Archive's migration to digital formats. At his same conference Marshall also helped teach a day-long workshop titled Web Manager's Academy.

Marshall was one of the many library staff that met with Paul Manwanzilo, a librarian from Kenya.

Meetings and Committee work

Meetings attended included Library Management Council, Strategic Planning Steering Committee, 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.