Report of the Library Technology Officer
May 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 continues, but this month at a somewhat slower pace than previous months. Vacations of staff and the disruptions caused by the rennovation of the TV News suite made a considerable impact on productivity. At the end of February, the collection had been digitized from 1968 - July 1997.

Subscriptions

In May 2005 The University of Connecticut and California State University at San Bernardino became new subscribers.

Other Activities

Much needed renovations have begun in the TV News suite in the Baker Building. The project will include adding a new wall to enclose the off-air recording facility, installation of new dedicated air conditioning equipment for the off-air facility and the server cabinet room, new carpet and paint throughout the suite. A new entryway to the Archive will be created with a new door and glass sidelight. John Lynch worked diligently to prepare the off-air room for the move. In order to allow for the installation of the new carpet, all the equipment needed to be moved to a temporary location across the wall in the reception / viewing room. Delivery of the carpet has been delayed, causing the completion of the project to be delayed until late July.

Library Technology Officer Activities

This month, much of Marshall's technical work involved final preparations to move the TV News web servers. As part of that move, the Inmagic DB/TextWorks software will be upgraded to Version 8 from Version 4.1. This new version has only minor changes in functionality, but it supports much larger databases and fixes problems in the error recovery facilities. Upgrading the DB/TextWorks software requires that the ODBC drivers also be moved to the current version. Marshall installed and tested Inmagic ODBC Version 8 in Library22 and Library25.

As we move the TV News Web site away from their current platform on Library14, it will be split into two separate servers. The public Web site (http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu) will operate on library22 and will handle all the traffic related to end users. TV News staff use will occur on Library25 under the alias http://staff.tvnews.Vanderbilt.edu. All creation and modification of records will occur on this server and will be copied to Library22 daily. The live files for orders will reside on Library22 and will be copied to Library25 daily. Marshall developed and tested a perl script that will automatically perform these daily data transfers.

Marshall also continues to manage the transfer of MPEG files to the Library of Congress and the allocation of space on the MPEG file servers. This month he implemented a number of shifts among the MPEG and RealMedia directories to accommodate the increased space needed for the completed RealMedia files.

This month marks the end of the first year of the NEH-funded project to digitize the Archive's evening news collection. Marshall prepared the semi-annual performance report required by the NEH. With 50% of the time elapsed, we have digitized 81% of the material and spent only 42% of the funds. By all measures, the project is advancing ahead of schedule. We currently expect to finish the evening news collection by about August. At that time, we will commence digitizing the specials collection, as we stipulated we would do should we complete the evening news collection early. By our current projections, we will not be able to finish the specials with the remaining funds, so we plan to prepare a new proposal to the NEH to fund a project to complete that collection.

Meetings and Committee work

Marshall participated in meeting related to the Strategic Plan and MetaLib implementation. He attended Library Management Council, staff meetings for OUL and TV News and participated in a usibility testing session for MetaLib.

On May 11th, Marshall gave a brown-bag lunchtime session on "Current Trends in Library Automation."

Professional Activities

Marshall gave a presentation for the Massachussetts Library Association annual conference in Cape Cod, MA on "Multimedia Digital Projects at Vanderbilt University." He also represented the Vanderbilt Television News Archive at the SOLINET Annual Conference in Atlanta on May 5th.

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.