Report of the Library Technology Officer
August 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 1077.5 hours of content. At the end of the month, the evening news collection from 1968 through August 2002 has been digitized. We continue to recruit a replacement for Michael Ruzica, who left the project in August. Rachael has been working some additional hours in the interim.

As the volume of RealMedia files accumulates, we periodically need to reorganize the placement of files across the 14 storage volumes associated with the video server cluster. This month, the volume that was receiving the RealMedia files reached its capacity. Marshall changed the placement of some of the volumes designated for MPEG files to make room for a new volume allocated to Realmedia files. This reorganization should accommodate the files produced through the completion of the current NEH project.

Baker Suite Renovation

The rennovation project for the TV News space in the Baker is now almost complete. With new carpet and paint throught the Archive, the space is much more attractive. The hazards due to the older carpet are now gone, making for a safer work environment. The new air conditioning units and the enclosing of the off-air media room will give us much needed improvement in the providing adequate temperature control for our equipment. The new doorway and the improvements to the hallway provide a nicer entry-way into the Archive for staff and visitors. Although the project turned out to be much more disruptive than planned, all the staff seem to be pleased with the results.

Institutional Subscriptions

In August 2005, we received requests for three trial subscription accounts: Ithica College, Williams College, and Quinnipiac University. Marshall set up institutional subscription records for each institution, loaded the network ranges associated with each into the database of authorized IP addresses, and notified the designated contacts once the accounts were activated. Marshall performed some troubleshooting with the contacts at Ithaca to resolve a problem related to their institution's firewall.

Library Technology Officer Activities

Backup Digital Recording system:

Marshall continued to make improvements to the system to improve its reliability. The system will now automatically respond to problems detected by any of the encoders. If one of the encoders fails to respond, the master system will issue a directive to restart the failed system. Each of the recording systems has been reconfigured to automatically login and run the television and encoding programs. For most problems this new approach will significantly reduce the amount of content that might be lost should one of the Optibase MPEG-2 encoders stop responding. The timing of the process monitor script was adjusted to detect a failure of an encoding card within five minutes.

Capturing Closed Caption Data

Marshall returned to a research and development project to produce text files of the audio portion of the news programs by capturing the closed caption data. This project involves using the DirectX software development and the GraphEdit utility to capture the data from the vertical blanking interval that holds the closed caption data. The goal of this project involves producing text files of the closed caption track of news programs to supplement the process of describing each segment.

Other TV News activities

Marshall provided quarterly statistics report to CNN as required by our contract with them to allow streaming video of their content.

Marshall worked with the Library of Congress on getting a procedure for transferring the RealMedia derivative files so that we will have a backup copy and not need to regenerate them in case of a hardware failure on the media servers.

Global Music Archive

Marshall created a new database for the metadata that describes the digital field recordings. He met with group of stakeholders to demonstrate the database and begin a process for feedback and enhancement. One part of the process involves the conversion of the audio tracks on the CD's recorded in the field into RealMedia files that can be linked to the database records and streamed from the Library's media server. Marshall did some research to discover appropriate software for extracting digital music files from audio CD's. He concluded that a free application called AudioGrabber will work well to extracting the audio tracks into digital files in wav format, and that Helix Producer can be used to convert the wav files into RealMedia format. Marshall worked with Helix Producer to set up an automated procedure for converting the extracted .wav into streaming audio files in multi-bit rate RealMedia format. George set up a folder on the LITS streaming media server for the files and Marshall set up the linkages in the database to the files located in that directory.

Marshall acquired the domain globalmusicarchive.org on behalf of the project and configured a virtual web server on Library11 to respond to this domain name.

Marshall set up user accounts for Greg Barz, John Turner, Catherine Gick, Dennis Clark to access the newly created database.

Other Programming Projects

In response to a user problem, Marshall fixed an error in the TV-News e-commerce interface for videotape loans that required users outside the United States to enter a state when setting up their address.

Work continues on the TV News Open Web project. We have generated over 750,000 Web pages, and are now waiting for them to be fully indexed by Google and the other search engines. Marshall made some adjustments to the XML SiteMaps to facilitate the way that googlebot harvests the site. As of the end of the month, most of the pages from OpenWeb have been requested by googlebot, but they still do not appear in the Google index.

Marshall also worked on enhancements to the primary TV News web site so that it will not to generate session keys for googlebot.com to prevent excessive page requests as the site is harvested for search engine indexes. This code was later extended to avoid a similar problem with the Ultraseek bot used for the search engine on the Vanderbilt Web site.

Worked on improvements to the sitemap XML documents provided to facilitate the indexing of the site for Google.

Meetings and Committee work

Marshall participated in the final meeting of the SFX workgroup, attended OUL staff meetings, participated in the New Employee Welcome Session, and strategic Planning Council.

Professional Activities

Marshall was invited again to provide a brief article for latest edition of SirsiDynix Upstream publication. This issue of Upstream focuses on network security issues and will appear in late September 2005.

Marshall taught full-day workshops on Wireless Networks for three different regional libraries in Tennessee.

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