Report of the Library Technology Officer
January 2006

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 project to digitize evening news continues, focusing primarily on finishing the quality checking of the digitized files and re-processing ones that have errors and problems. As we work on finishing the evening news collection, we have begun working on the specials collection. We begin this effort with the CNN specials, since that material can be made available to subscribers once it is digitized. Our preliminary work with the specials will help us develop procedures for a more wholesale approach that will commence if the NEH funds our second grant.

Steve Davis was out for the month, which slowed the operation considerably. Steve will be back in February.

Institutional Subscriptions

In January 2006 a trial subscription was set up for the University of Southern Florida.

Library Technology Officer Activities

OpenWeb Project

This month Marshall developed a perl script to analyze the impact of the OpenWeb project on the TV News Web site and on videotape loan requests. The script processes the log files of both the OpenWeb server and the regular TV News server to measure the amount of activity from the search engine spiders, and the users that come to these two sits from Google, and what kinds of searches on Google drive users to either site.

One of the items of interest was the number of visitors to our regular site come from the OpenWeb. The script also captures the referrals from Google to both sites, and the search queries involved. To answer our beginning hypothesis about increasing income, the script also traces each of the videotape requests made each month to determine whether they originated from the OpenWeb.

As hoped, our OpenWeb project did result in additional Web site activity and an increase in videotape loan requests. For each month since the OpenWeb site has been active we have been able to document a significant level of activity where the user begins with Google, find a page on the OpenWeb, and enters our production Web site. The number of visits that follow this path is about three to four times the number that arrive at our site directly from Google. The analysis also revealed the number of where the user begins on Google, hits our OpenWeb site, enters the production site, and subsequently places an order. From August 2005 to January 2006, roughly 30 percent of our videotape requests can be directly attributed to this path. The number of items in these requests tends to be small.

Bottom line: During this period 13% of our income from videotape service fees can be attributed to our OpenWeb initiative. That figure represents income we would not have taken in otherwise.

Etana DL

One of the components of the ETANA project is the NSF-funded development effort to create a digital library for archaeology data. This grant was awarded to Case Western Reserve University and the primary development site for the application is Virginia Tech University, under the direction of Professor Ed Fox. With the completion of the NSF grant project in August 2006, the application created at Virginia Tech will be hosted at Vanderbilt. In order to be sure that Vanderbilt will be ready to take responsibility for the application and that the application is ready for us, Marshall will take a more active role in the project for the next few months.

Marshall spent January 16-17 at Virginia Tech working with Ed and his students on the ETANA-DL application. We reviewed installation requirements and procedures so that we can install the software on a server at Vanderbilt. We have ordered a server that will be used for the project. Marshall spent some time reviewing the software components of the system and analyzing and assessing the technical architecture and implementation. As a follow-up to the meeting, Marshall wrote up a set of issues that might be addressed during the remaining development time that will make the application more generalizable for new dig sites and to improve usability of the interface.

The Virginia Tech team will have a weekly meeting on the Etana-DL. Marshall will participate in these meetings via conference call.

Special Collections Photo Archives

On January 13, Marshall met with Juanita, Teresa, and Karin of Special Collections to talk about the interface to the Photo Archives digital collection. Marshall wanted to check in to see if what problems they might be having with the interface and to see if there are enhancements they need. There are improvements that have been made to the image management application that have been put into some of the new collections we've created that we have not added for this one. As a follow-up to the meeting Marshall agreed to make several changes and enhancements. These included creating a pick list for names on the search interface, to create an edit link on the thumbnail result page to save a step when editing a record, to create active links on the record display to execute a new search on names and subjects under authority control, the ability to sort search results by accession number or by the record number. They reported that searches with an apostrophe return an error. Marshall implemented all these requests within a few hours of the meeting.

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.

Professional Activities

Marshall was invited to give a presentation on January 12th for the Orbis Cascade Alliance in Oregon on "The Future of Integrated Library Systems."

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