Report of the Library Technology Officer
November 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.

The Third Period Performance Report to the NEH was due at the end of November. Highlights of that report include:

The goal of this NEH-funded project is to digitize the evening news collection of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. During the six-month period from May 1 through October 31, 2005, we processed 8,842 evening news programs on videotape into MPEG-2 digital files. At this point we have made a complete pass through the Evening News collection, resulting in almost 100 percent of the digitizing complete in 75% of the project duration.

We still have considerable work to do in verifying the quality of all the digital files produced and in re-digitizing videotapes where some type of problem was present. In some cases, the problems identified were on the tape itself. We have compiled lists of programs that need to be digitized from the duplicate copy that we had previously deposited at the Library of Congress. We expect the quality checking to proceed through mid-December 2005. At that point one or two project staff will work through the re-processing of videotapes.

The remainder of the project staff will begin digitizing selected portions of the News Specials collection. We specified in the original grant proposal that we would work on digitizing the specials collection should we finish the evening news collection before the end of the grant period.

In this third six-month period from May 2005 through October 2005, the team digitized 8,842 programs, bringing the total programs digitized during the course of the project to 35,999, just under the 36,014 programs estimated to be in the collection. The entire evening news collection from August 1968 through June 2003 has now been digitized. Programs since June 2003 were recorded digitally.

The final stage of the digitizing process involves sending the MPEG-2 files produced to the Library of Congress. The procedure for this transfer invol

Personnel News

Some reshuffling occured in project positions. Eric Adams will is now assigned to the NEH Grant working on quality checking and will continue to be in the rotation to help with week-end recording. Sarah Dryden will shift to the Fox News abstracting position. Karen Williams, a part-time student worker will continue to assist with Fox News abstracting.

Institutional Subscriptions

In November 2005 trial subscriptions were set up for the University of Southern Mississippi and Western New England College.

OpenWeb Project

In November 2005, the OpenWeb server received 4,424,691 page requests, down slightly from the previous month. The majority of the activity on the OpenWeb server continues to come from search engine spiders. We do expect the spidering activity to decline over time as each of the search engines have fully harvested the content on the site and return for incremental updates. At least 2,929 visits to the regular TV News site were referred from the OpenWeb. The activity on the regular TV News website continues to increase. We do not have a good statistical measure for this increase relative to the same period last year given some significant changes in the overall configuration of the Web site. Last year, both public and staff activity occurred on the same server. In June 2005, staff access was split off onto a second server.

Library Technology Officer Activities

TV News COUNTER Statistics

One of the projects Marshall accomplished in November involved enhancing the way that the Archive reports statistics to its institutional subscribers. Although we have offered use statistics to the subscribers since the inception of the program, some additional work needed to be done to make the service comply with the COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) guidelines. Most of the components of service recommended by COUNTER were already in place, including an administrative login page for authorized representatives of the institution which provides access to statistics that reflect the use of the resource by individuals associated with the institution. We maintain and display the number of logins, searches performed, and the number of video clips requested for each month the subscription has been active. The table structure of these statistics was adjusted to be more consistent with the examples given by COUNTER. In order to comply to the guidelines, Marshall added a section that allows the institutional administrator to copy the statistics in CSV format for more convenient import into a spreadsheet or electronic resource management system. COUNTER also specifies that the institution should be notified when each month's statistics are ready. In our case, the statistics are maintained automatically and posted to the institution's administrative account in real time. Marshall wrote a mail script that executes two days after the end of the month to satisfy this notification requirement. Following the first notification, there was quite a bit of e-mail activity to assist institutional representatives with usernames and passwords.

Backup Recording System

Marshall and John met with Liz Latt and Emily Pearce of the Vanderbilt News Service to continue our discussions regarding the digital backup recording system. In previous discussions we had agreed that this system would be implemented in such a way to assist the News Service in their role of collecting the news coverage of Vanderbilt University in local and national television. In this meeting we brought them up to the progress that we have made to date on the system and gave them a demonstration of how it works. They continue to be interested and we will continue the process of refining the system so that it better accommodates their needs. We agreed that Marshall would provide additional information regarding the costs of the system so far, and the additional costs involved in building the system out to the next level. We will begin providing access to the News Service staff for the Web-based interface and give training.

In the next few months, Marshall will work on additional programming tasks to enhance the functionality of the backup system. We believe that we need to add redundant records for each network, and to make it so that each of the two recorders rotates its digital files at different times so that any frames lost in the rotation can be spliced from the second copy. We also need the ability to simultaneously record two copies of each program, one with the network-time-date overlay and one without. This should be possible by adding an additional set of DirectX filters to to the custom software that Marshall created to control the Haupauge PVR-350 cards.

Meetings and Committee work

Marshall participated in the usual library meetings: OUL Staff meetings, Strategy and Planning Council, TV News Staff meeting, and the Metadata Committee. Marshall attended each of the presentations given by the candidates for the Director of the Science and Engineering Library.

Professional Activities

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