Report of the Library Technology Officer
January 2005

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-funded digitizing project progressed at full speed with a full staff. With 8 out of 24 months of the project elapsed, we have digitized 50% of the material defined by the scope of the project, so we are ahead of schedule.

Subscriptions

In January 2004 Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York became subscribers to the Archive.

Library Technology Officer Activities

Marshall met with the staff of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound division of the Library of Congress in their offices in the Madison Building in Washington, DC. The main topic of this meeting was to work through details of the business relationship between LC and the TV News Archive. Key issues involved the level of financial stipend LC is able to pay versus what services it receives from us. It was a productive meeting that ensured the same level of financial contribution with possibilities for increasing the amount given documentation of the value of services provided to the library. Several follow-up action items were agreed upon.

Digial backup recording system

Marshall continued with what has proven to be a large project of creating a continuous multi-channel digital recording system to replace the videotape-based backup system currently in place. This project has been in design for several months, and hardware integration and basic software development complete enough to have a working prototype. We are now at the stage of ordering the equipment needed to build out the system to a full working environment.

The system will consist eight rack-mount computers that will be equipped with the hardware and software to perform continuous recording of one channel each. These servers will be housed in a cabinet in the TV News suite in the baker building, around the corner from the current off-air recording studio. This month, the rack was installed and delivered. The 220V power outlet needed was installed, as were 8 Gigabit Ethernet connections. LITS staff performed the work of installing the cabinet and coordinating the installation of power and Ethernet connections.

The computing hardware and peripherals needed for the project were ordered and received including: 7 Additional Dell PowerEdge 750 servers; 8 XBOB OSD character generator circuits, 8 Hauppauge PVR-350 television reception cards, 8 Optibase MovieMaker 200S MPEG-2 encoding cards, 8 AudioAdvantage USB sound cards, as well as miscellaneous cables and connectors.

Marshall continued with additional programming needed for the project. He continued the with further enhancements of the custom encoding software to manage specifically requested programs so that they are marked from the outset as non-deletable by the file grooming system and to turn of the network-time-date overlay upon request. This programming task required learning to manipulate the ODBC layer in the C++ programming language which handles the process in a much more complex way than is done in Perl. After a few days of study and trial-and-error programming, this function is now operational on the prototype system. Other features added included periodic registering of the encoder into a status queue so that the it will be possible build a monitoring system that issues alerts anytime an encoding operation halts.

Meetings and Committee work

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

Professional Activities

Marshall attended the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Boston, MA. At the conference he taught a full-day LITA Regional Institute on Wireless Technology in Libraries, was a panelist on the LITA Top Technology Trends session, he convened the meeting of the SIRSI Large Sites Interest Group, as well as other conference sessions and individual meetings with library automation company executives.

Marshall's regular Systems Librarian column was published in Computers in Libraries and he also contributed to the January 2005 issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSource.