Report of the Library Technology Officer
October 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

With the first pass complete of digitizing the evening news collection, work continues to review the quality of each digitized file, to redigitize any programs with problems, and to prepare for the process of digitizing the specials collection. We currently expect the quality review process to be complete at the end of November.

Personnel News

The Archive welcomes two new staff members. Beth Abernathy and Ben Cummings were hired to work on the NEH project. Both will be working on the quality review process of the material digitized from the evening news collection.

Visitors

Two reference librarians from the Central Library, Susan Erickson and Hillary Rudsenske were given tours of both the behind-the-scenes digital technologies employed by the Archive and the standard tour of the Archive's operations.

Institutional Subscriptions

This month a trial subscription was set up for the HELIN Library Consortium in Rhode Island. Letters were sent to all the original ARL Sponsoring libraries to invite them to subscribe once the sponsorship agreement concludes in December 2005.

In September 2005 Williams College became a subscriber to the Archive following a trial subscription set up last month.

OpenWeb Project

In November 2005, the OpenWeb server received 5,588,251 page requests. Most of this activity was related to search engine spiders gathering pages for indexing. We have begun to see an increase of activity on the regular TV News Web site and the number of requests for videotape loans has increased. At least 3,133 visits to the regular TV News site were referred from the OpenWeb.

Library Technology Officer Activities

Marshall worked on some programming issues related to the e-commerce system for videotape loan requests. He made improvements to the way that the system handles new incoming orders adding a new date field for when the order was submitted rather when the user began creating the order. We have learned over time that orders may be initiated weeks or even months before submitted.

Other TV News programming tasks included adding a new feature to the interface for tracking quality checking to accommodate search and display by date an item was checked.

Ecclesiastical Sources for Slave Societies

One of the major projects Marshall worked on this month involved creating a Web-based interface to a collection called Ecclesiastical Sources for Slave Societies. This collection is the product of a research expedition by Vanderbilt faculty member Jane Landers to Cuba to digitize materials in Cuban church archives. The project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, produced ?? digital images of pages from volumes in church archives containing birth, baptismal, confirmation, marriage, and death records in several parishes throughout Cuba. Landers met this summer with Paul, Marshall, and Jody, resulting in an agreement that the library would ensure the preservation of this collection by storing the images on managed file servers and that we would attempt to produce some type of interface to the images.

Following a period of studying the images, Marshall began work on developing an interface to serve as a finding aid for the collection. A listing of the volumes in the collection and the number of images scanned in each was the only documentation provided.

The key challenge to creating the interface related to extracting adequate metadata for each image to provide adequate description for the material and to provide points of access. Further, it is important to preserve any administrative metadata regarding the digital files. Marshall wrote a series of perl programs to extract descriptive metadata from the names of the directories in which the files were stored and translated into the forms provided in the table of contents. This process yielded several metadata elements for each image including parish, series title, and volume title. Each image had several common metadata elements such as country, collection, and language. Marshall was able to define and populate a database for the collection based on these metadata elements, linked to each image through its file name. The image files resided on a Web-enabled directory on a NetWare server within the library network. Marshall then designed an interface and implemented it in perl, consistent to the way other image collections have been created in the library. In order to preserve the administrative metadata held in each digital file in jpeg format, Marshall wrote a program to extract selected data elements in the EXIF header and load them into the corresponding database record.

Marshall gave a presentation for the Metadata Committee on October 31 describing this project.

Meetings and Committee work

Marshall participated in the usual library meetings: OUL Staff meetings, Strategy and Planning Council, TV News Staff meeting, the Library Service Awards Reception, and the Metadata Committee.

Professional Activities

Marshall attended the Internet Librarian conference in Monterey CA from Oct 22nd through 23rd. At the conference he taught a section of the "Web Managers Academy: Building Next-Generation Library Web Sites," a full day workshop to introduce new skills to those responsible for managing Web sites in a library, and did presentations on "The Open Croquet Project", "Web Management Tools", and on "Systems Management: Automation Tools to expedite the digitization of video at the Vanderbilt Television News Archive."

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