Report of the Library Technology Officer
March 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. At the end of February, the collection had been digitized from 1968 - April 1992.

Subscriptions

In March 2005 The University of Texas at Dallas and Colby College requested trial subscriptions to the Archive..

Library Technology Officer Activities

Marshall and Paul met with Nancy Cole, director of archives for NBC at their offices in Rockefeller Center in New York. NY to explore interest by that network for entering into an agreement with Vanderbilt to provided further access to their content. While there was not any specific conclusion reached, we agreed to provide some follow-up information that Nancy would need to pursue the discussion internally at NBC.

Marshall with a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to discuss opportunities for collaborative projects. The Informedia research group at CMU has been involved with developing research methods and software related to automatically describing video content since the mid-1990's. Members of the Informedia group include Howard Waclar, Alexander Hauptman, and Mike Christel. They have primarily focused their research on broadcast news. Given the mutual involvement in this type of content, we believe that there will be opportunities for collaborative projects that will benefit both organizations. While at CMU, Marshall was given a demonstration of the sophisticated search and retrieval systems that they have developed. Marshall gave them an overview of the history and mission of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive and the progress that we are making in converting the collection to digital technologies. We agreed that we should remain in contact and work toward obtaining funding for projects that would enhance our content using components of their technology.

Some of the technical work that Marshall worked on involved beginning to develop custom software to control the Hauppauge PVR-350 television card so that we can further automate the process of recording the news. This software will be developed using the DirectX software development kit and the Microsoft Visual Studio .Net C++ environment. The main features of the custom software will be to control the PVR-350 card and to interact with the backup system so that we can monitor and control what programs are fed into the recording system.

Marshall also continued the technical tasks needed in preparation for the migration of TV News Web server to new hardware. Last month most of the scripts were installed on the new server and modified as needed for the new version of the Web server environment. This month, Marshall implemented several new features that improve the performance and error handling of the system. Marshall also investigated upgrading the version of the DB/TextWorks database to the current version to take advantage of improved ability to manage and maintain large databases.

Meetings and Committee work

Marshall participated in a meeting of library staff with Berit Nelson and other Sirsi staff to discuss the company's development work on an electronic resources management module for Unicorn.

Marshall and Jody met with ITS staff to discuss services that they might be developing for high capacity storage and to let them know about our future needs in this area.

Marshall participated in meetings to discuss Baker renovations. He also attended the regular TV News staff meeting, and a meeting to discuss whether we should investigate using LOCKSS as a component of our digital preservation strategy for electronic theses and dissertations.

Other Meetings attended included Library Management Council and Strategic Planning Steering Committee.

Professional Activities

At the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries Annual Membership Meeting in Coconut Grove, Marshall gave a presentation on the "Future of Library Automation."

Marshall gave several presentations at the 20th Annual Computers in Libraries conference in Washington, DC, including: "Current Trends in Library Automation," "Academic Libraries and Technology: Future Directions", and "Workstation and Server Security in Academic Libraries." He also taught a section of the full day Web Manager's Academy on "Web Services and Database Driven Applications."

Marshall's publications this month include Gradual Evolution--Automated System Marketplace 2005; his monthly Systems Librarian column in Computers in Libraries, and contributions to ALA's Smart Libraries Newsletter.