Report of the Library Technology Officer
April 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 - May 1995.

Subscriptions

In April 2005 The University of Texas at Dallas converted their trial subscription to a paid subscription and Providence College and Colby College requested trial subscriptions.

Other Activities

All TV News staff participated in the annual performance review process. Thanks to all the staff for another great year of service!

Library Technology Officer Activities

Initial activities have begun for the TV News Archive to collaborate with the Informedia Project in the Computer Science department of Carnegie Mellon University. Vanderbilt is a participant on a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation. Professor Michael Christel, a Senior Systems Scientist at CMU, has submitted a grant proposal to investigate the use of the automatic video indexing technologies developed by the Informedia Project with selected portions of our collection of news programming. The grant proposal was submitted to NSF in early May. For this initial grant opportunity, Vanderbilt will be named as a collaborator and will be reimbursed for any costs associated with our participation.

Much of Marshall's technical work this month involved further software development related to the backup digital recording system. Using the Microsoft DirectX software development kit, he was able to produce software to control the Hauppauge PVR-350 television card. The software that comes with the card is subject to failure after several days of continuous operation. We need software that either does not fail or that interacts with our monitoring system so that failures can be detected and acted upon. After a month of working with the SDK, Marshall was finally able to create a C++ program that controls the card to produce a television signal that can be fed into the MPEG-2 encoding card and use ODBC (open database connectivity) to issue status updates for the purpose of monitoring the card. The interface of the monitoring system was enhanced to include a section that visually presents the status of each of the TV cards in the cluster of servers.

Meetings and Committee work

Paul and Marshall met with Kevin Davis to review the business agreement with NELINET for their role as exclusive marketing agent for the Vanderbilt Television News Archive.

Marshall participated in the training session for MetaLib given by Ex Libris on April 29th.

Other Meetings attended included one to review the TV News Budget with Paul and Flo, TV News Staff meeting, Library Management Council and Strategic Planning Steering Committee.

Professional Activities

Marshall attended the Coalation for Networked Information spring taskforce meeting in Washington, DC on April 4-5.

Marshall gave a presentation April 7th at the Tennessee Library Association on the "Recent Accomplishments of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive"

Marshall's publications this month include his Systems Librarian column in Computers in Libraries magazine on "Looking Toward the Future of Library Technology", and contributions to ALA's Smart Libraries Newsletter.