Report of the Director for Innovative Technologies and Research
February 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

Work on the NEH project continues. Project staff continue to work on the quality checking of the Evening News collection and re-digitizing of programs that need attention. We have begun digitizing more of the specials collection. Beth Abernathy resigned to pursue another job. We are in the process of hiring a replacement. Steve Davis returned to work.

Eric Adams has shifted from the Fox News abstracting project to being split between the TV News regular operations and the NEH-funded project. Sarah Dryden shifted from the NEH project to take over Fox News abstracting.

Institutional Subscriptions

In January 2006 a trial subscription was set up for the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Library and the University of Minnesota -- Twin Cities purchased a subscription.

Library Technology Officer Activities

OpenWeb Project

We continue to monitor activity of the OpenWeb and its impact on searching, viewing, and orders on the TV News Public Web site. In February, we saw the number of referrals from the OpenWeb to the Public Web almost double, increasing from 4769 to 9380. Of the 72 orders placed for videotape loans, 52 can be linked to OpenWeb activity. So far this year, the value of services fees associated with OpenWeb orders totals $14,084.

Etana DL

Marshall participated in the weekly conference call for the Etana-DL participants. These calls have touched on various subjects, including a new GIS interface being developed by a Virginia Tech student, issues related to the ontologies developed by Linda Cantara, and usability and interface design issues.

Marshall also met with Deborah Cantrell, a Ph.D. canidate in the Graduate Department of Religion that has participated in archaeology projects in Israel. Deborah has agreed to help us test the interface and evaluate its usability and suitability for experts in the field. Rather than give her extensive training on how to use the application, part of the exercise will be to see how well she is able to understand how it works independently. We believe that this will be a worthwhile process to see what improvements might need to be developed in the user interface.

Ecclesiastical Sources for Slave Societies

Marshall met with Jane Landers and Frank Robinson on Feb 10th to talk about the finding aid that we have developed for the collection. The brought an disk drive and CDs with additional images. These have been copied to the network, but need to be added to the finding aid.

Following discussions with Roberta Winjum and others, we decided that Molly Dahl would be able to work on metadata and image processing for this collection. This builds on her interest in Web applications and her spanish language expertise. Marshall trained Molly on the procedures for creating the database records and populating each of the fields for the volumes. Molly will also generate the thumbnail images and turn images that are not oriented correctly. Marshall set up a workstation for Molly to use to perform this work, including installing the two image utilities. Molly has created all most of the metadata and is working on adjusting images.

Ex Libris Primo

At the ALA conference in San Antonio, Marshall identified Primo as a technology that the library might be interested in using as part of its digital library infrastructure. Ex Libris is currently looking for libraries to work with them as development partners. This possiblity is being discussed by the Strategy and Planning Council and the Digital Library Steering Committee. Marshall coordinated a Web-based presentation with Oren Beit-Arie, Director for Strategy for Ex Libris, on February 20th. Follow-up meetings and discussions being planned.

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 an invited speaker at the Alaska Library Association Annual Conference in Anchorage, AK on November 23 - 25. He gave presentations on "Library Security Issues," "Wireless Networks in Libraries," and "Trends in Library Automation."

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