Report of the Library Technology Officer
December 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 we were finally able to fill the fifth and final position for the NEH funded digitizing project. Nick Purvis was hired to assist in the quality control part of the project. With this position filled, the quality assurance process will be more able to keep up with the encoding operation.

Subscriptions

In December 2004 Emory University and Western Kentucky University became subscribers to the Archive. Trial accounts were established for Middlebury College and Troy University.

Videotape Loan Order Processing

With the resignation of Susan Smith, Pat Johnson has taken over primary responsibility for processing the credit card authorizations and deposits related to the income received for videotape loan orders. Kurt Eger was trained to serve as Pat's backup for this operation.

Library Technology Officer Activities

Marshall continued the development of the new back-up digital off-air digital recording system for TV News Archive. Once implemented, this system will replace the current U-Matic and VHS videotape equipment used as to back-up the current digital off-air recording system and to provide 24-hour monitoring and recording capabilities for special news broadcasts that occur outside of the regularly scheduled evening news programs.

In the previous few months, Marshall had devised a hardware platform for the system, based on the Dell PowerEdge 750 rack-mount server, an Optibase Moviemaker 200S Xpress MPEG-2 encoding card, a Hauppauge PVR-350 TV card, and the Decade Engineering XBOB onscreen display character generator. He developed a custom MPEG-2 encoding application for the Optibase card in C++ using the software development kit for the card and the Microsoft Visual C++ development environment. One of the key features of the custom encoding software is to allow continuous recording by starting a new MPEG-2 file at specified intervals, assigning file names according to prescribed naming conventions, and to register the file in a database.

The focus this month was on creating a system to manage the files created by the custom encoder. This system, written in Perl, monitors the accumulation of files within a cluster of encoding systems, deleting files based on a priority scheme so that the system will never run out of storage space for newly recorded files. This system monitors the queue of recorded files as they are registered by the custom encoder and evaluates each file to determine its probability of containing news content. A Web interface was developed that allows an operator to mark files to be kept manually, or to delete files that are known to be expendable. Files not manually flagged are analyzed by a Perl script that assigns a keepability score based on values associated with network, day of week, and time of day. The analysis routine also performs a look-up into a database of requested programs; any matches are flagged as non-deleteable.

Marshall also worked to resolve some problems related to the hardware configuration of the new system. During testing of the equipment, the Hauppauge Win-TV software would lock up after a few hours of operation-not a good situation for a system intended to run continuously. After considerable effort, Marshall was able to identify a set of drivers that allowed this card to operate indefinitely without performance degradation or lock-up.

The complete backup recording system is now working as a prototype. Some additional programming is still needed to implement a few additional features required for support of the Vanderbilt News Service. We have begun the process of ordering the hardware to expand beyond the initial prototype to a complete system of 8 parallel encoders.

Meetings and Committee work

Meetings attended included Library Management Council, Strategic Planning Steering Committee, Space planning meetings for Baker Building, Cooperative Virtual Reference Task Force, and TV News staff meetings.

Professional Activities

Marshall attended the Coalition for Networked Information fall task force meeting in Portland, OR and gave a break-out session on the recent accomplishments of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive.

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