Report of the Library Technology Officer
July 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 2005 is available here.

NEH Project

The NEH-funded digitizing project continues. This month the team digitized 884 programs. At the end of the month, the evening news collection from 1968 through April 2000 has been digitized. Michael Ruzicka accepted a new position at the Battleground Adademy library and will no longer be working on the project. We are in the process of recruiting his replacement.

Other Activities

This month finally saw substantial progress on the renovation project. The carpet was installed for the suite over the course of four nights and each area has now been repainted. All the Archive staff worked hard to move the furniture and make other preparations for the work. John coordinated the effort and did much of the work related to reinstalling all the equipment in the off-air room.

Library Technology Officer Activities

NEH Grant Proposal

Marshall spent the first two weeks of July completing the grant proposal to the NEH to request funding for a two-year project to digitize the specials collection of the TV News Archive. With assistance from Paul, John Lynch, Flo, and Celia Marshall wrote the narrative sections of the grant, prepared the budget, and submitted the required forms to Vanderbilt's Sponsored Research office. Letters of support were solicited and obtained from a wide variety of institutions. The grant proposal requesting $279,507 was submitted in advance of the July 15th deadline.

Vanderbilt Television News Archive: Digitizing and Cataloging News Specials. Grant period: May 2005 through April 2008.

The project will digitize and enhance the cataloging for Vanderbilt Television News Archive's collection of national news special programs recorded off-air between 1968 and 2003. The scope of the project includes content on about 11,000 hours of ¾-inch U-Matic videotape that will be transferred to MPEG-2 digital format. The Library of Congress will receive copies of the files for long-term preservation. Access to this collection will be enhanced through descriptive cataloging. While portions of this collection have previously been cataloged, some parts have not or have only brief records. The project will employ methodologies, personnel, and equipment currently in use for digitizing the Archive's collection of evening news broadcasts.

OpenWeb Project

In the second half of the month, Marshall worked on the implementation of a project that aims to increase the activity on the TV News Archive's website by exposing metadata from the TV News database to search engines such as Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

In order to present selected information from the database to the open Web, Marshall wrote a series of perl scripts that extract data from the TV-NewsSearch database and write them out to static Web pages that can be harvested by the search engines. Each of the Web pages displays information from a segment of an evening news program and leads the user to the main TV-NewsSearch Web site. These scripts generated about 750,000 Web pages and the accompanying indexes needed for navigation. These pages can be browsed at openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu.

To facilitate the harvesting of these pages by Google, Marshall created a series of XML files that implement the recently released Google SiteMap Protocol. The large number of pages on the TV NEWS OpenWeb site made it necessary to create a SiteMap index that links to more than 500 individual sitemaps. The use of the Sitemap Protocol does nothing to increase pagerank, but helps Google identify the pages that need to be indexed. The SiteMap files for the TV News OpenWeb site are located at: openweb.tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/SiteMap.xml

Given that we expect a significant increase in the load of the Web server as a result of this project, the migration of the TV News web server to a new platform accomplished last moth was a perquisite. Separating the activity of end users from TV News staff and migrating to faster hardware should give us ample capability to handle whatever additional load this project might introduce.

The OpenWeb site was launched on July 21, 2005 and its base URL submitted to Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Marshall will be collecting data to measure the impact of this project on the TV News website. The first phase of activity will involve the harvesting of the OpenWeb site by the search engines. It will be of interest to see how quickly the bots of the search engines are able to harvest the 750,000 pages of the website and make them available through their indexes. Once available in the search engines, the key statistic will be the number of users that come into the TV News website through the OpenWeb site. We will be able to capture this statistic by monitoring the pages on tvnews.Vanderbilt.edu that have openweb.tvnews.Vanderbilt.edu as the referrer.

Programming

Marshall did additional work on the customized encoding program to correct some problems that surfaced after the backup system was turned back on following the construction to the server rack room. This program is implemented in Visual C++ .Net using the software development kit that Optibase provides for their MPEG-2 encoding cards. He iplemented new procedures related to ODBC database updates to avoid having multiple recorders attempt to update the status queue database at exactly the same time.

Meetings and Committee work

Marshall participated in the SFX workgroup meetings, attended OUL staff meetings, Library Management Council, and strategic planning group. He attended the brown bag forum on Wiki, Blogs, and Wikis; the presentation given by Heike Schniedermeyer on Frankfurt - Banks, Books and Bembels; and the cataloging librarian candidate presentations by David Moore and Molly Dahl.

Marshall presented as session of the Retirement Learning workshops on "Searching the Web"

Professional Activities

Marshall gave a presentation on "Security Issues with Library Wireless Networks" for an OCLC WebJunction Live Event webcast on July 21.

Marshall completed the research and writing for a complete issue of Library Technology Reports on "Wireless Networking in Libraries" Sep/Oct 2005 (Vol. 41, Issue 5) that will be published in September 2005. Abstract:

This issue of Library Technology Reports provides all the information needed to implement a wireless network in a library. It will explain the basics of the technologies involved as well as the practical issues related to installation. The report also will explore pertinent issues, including computer security, access policies, and appropriate use.

The target audience includes both library administrators and systems librarians and other computer-savvy library workers. For the library administrator, this report aims to provide background information and perspective in order to inform decisions regarding whether or not to implement a wireless network, the relative risks and benefits, the development of policies, and the general terminology and background information necessary to evaluate advice given by technical staff or consultants. For library technical personnel, it provides detailed information for implementing and securing a wireless network in the library setting. Some sections provide broad definitions of concepts and terminology while others will focus on in-depth technical details.

Marshall's other publications this month include his Systems Librarian column in Computers in Libraries magazine and contributions to ALA's Smart Libraries Newsletter.