Report of the Library Technology Officer
June 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. Vacations of staff and the disruptions caused by the renovation of the TV News suite continue to diminish productivity, but the pace is improving with 949 programs digitized in the month. At the end of February, the collection had been digitized from 1968 - June 1998.

With the end of the 2004/05 fiscal year, Marshall and Pat worked on clearing out several payments that had been pending since earlier in the year. This resulted in a nice boost to the income for June. The fiscal year that just closed was a great year for videotape loan income. The $137,733 received for videotape loan service fee exceeds that of all previous years. In June alone, we collected $18,553, more than any other month this fiscal year.

Subscriptions

In June 2005 George Mason University became a subscriber to the Archive.

Other Activities

The renovation project in the TV News suite in the Baker Building continues, though much behind schedule. This month some of the work was done to enclose the Off-air room, replace the front door entryway, and add a door to the server room for the off-air backup system. The installation of the air conditioning units was completed in early July and the laying of the carpet and painting is still pending the delivery of the carpet.

Library Technology Officer Activities

This month we completed the transfer of TV News Web server to new hardware platform, finalizing a process that had been in the works for several months. The new configuration not only places the Web and database servers on faster hardware, but splits work previously done on a single server to two. This change should result in improved performance for both the users of the Archive and the work that staff perform in updating the database. The switch was completed on June 13, 2005.

Along with the new server arrangement, a new process was instituted for backing up the databases. Each night, files updated on the public server will be mirrored to the staff server, and vice versa. Copies of each database will also be copied to Library11, where they will backed up by the ArcServe automated backup routine. This routine will ensure that an adequate number of copies of the TV News database are available, both onsite and off.

Marshall worked on developing a proposal to the NEH to digitize and catalog the Archive's collection of news specials. The project to digitize the evening news is expected to be complete by Fall 2005. The funding for that project continues through April 2006. As stipulated in the original proposal to the NEH, if the digitizing of the evening news is completed early, we will commence digitizing the specials. That interval, however, will not be adequate to digitize the entire specials collection. In order to complete the digitization of that collection and to perform much-needed cataloging of that collection, we will be asking the NEH to fund another 2-year project. That proposed project will run from May 2006 through April 2008. The proposal is due to the NEH on July 15th.

Meetings and Committee work

Marshall participated in the MetaLib Task Force meetings, attended the all-staff open meeting on the strategic planning effort and the June 15 Webcast on the Google digitization projects in addition to the regular OUL staff meetings, Library Management Council, and strategic planning group.

Professional Activities

Marshall attended the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago from June 24-28. Among other activities, he participated as in the LITA Top Technology Trends panel, convened the Sirsi Large Sites Interest Group, and met with executives from each of the major library automation companies as part of his ongoing efforts to track trends in the industry. A significant topic of conversation was the recent acquisition of Dynix by Sirsi.

Marshall conducted a LITA Regional Institute on Wireless Technologies in Libraries, Elensburg, WA on June 14th.

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.