Report of the Director for Innovative Technologies and Research
March 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 Two-year NEH-funded project will conclude at the end of April 2006. We have completed the work of digitizing all the content stipulated in that grant, and are working on quality checking and any neededredigitizing and have begun digitizing portions of the specials collection.

This month we hired to new workers on the grant, Madison Stubblefield and Stephanie Baltz.

Institutional Subscriptions

There were no new subscriptions initiated this month. NELINET has processed the subscription renewals that were due at the end of 2005. This group also included the original Sponsoring Institutions that were offered two years of access as a benefit of thier contribution as well as a discounted price for videotape loan fees. The term of the offer concluded in December 2005. We offered continued discounts to videotape loan fees if they would agree to subscribe for an additional two years. All of the sponsors have taken advantage of this new offer and have purchased subscriptions.

Library Technology Officer Activities

OpenWeb Project

The OpenWeb project continues to make a remarkable difference in the amount of activity on the TV News website and on the number of requests for videotape loans. This month alone, the number of page requests (excluding indexing spiders) on both the regular TV News site and the OpenWeb site doubled from the previous month. The number of new users registered also almostdoubled from 1,134 in February to 2,024 in March. The OpenWeb has made a dramatic impact on videotape requests: The 154 loan requests represents an all-time record for the Archive. Of these 113 (73.4%) come from users that arrived at our site through the Open Web. OpenWeb orders tend to be smaller in value than those that come from our more regular users, but still represent 37.2 percent of the total videotape loan service fee income. The total income from OpenWeb requests also almost doubled from the previous month.

Etana DL

Marshall participated a usability exercise for the interface of the Etana-EL application and sat in one one of the weekly conference calls for the project participants.

Ecclesiastical Sources for Slave Societies

Marshall met with Jane Landers and Mariza Soares on March 3 to talk about the procedures that can be used for producing the page images in future parts of this project. Some of the topics discussed included what resolution should be used for page images, whether the images should be of single pages or dual pages, how to stabalize the camera with some type of copy stand to ensure proper focus of each image. We also talked about how to ensure that there are enough copies made of the images to ensure their safety.

Molly Dahl conttinues to work with the images in the ESSS collection. She produced the metadata for several of the remaining volumes and is working on creating thumbnails and rotating images that do not have the proper orientation.

Ex Libris Primo

Marshall was involved in coordinating a visit from representatives from Ex Libris to talk with us regarding a possible partnership in the development and testing of their new Primo product. Dan Trajman, President if Ex Libris (USA) and Oren Beit-Arie, Vice President for Strategy come for an on-site visit on March 30th. Marshall participated in the committee meetings, lunch, and attended the demonstration Oren gave to interested library staff.

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 gave a "Brown Bag" lunchtime presentation on two of the image projects in which he has been involved: the classroom interface for the Art an Art History departent and the Ecclesiastical Sources for Slave Societies.

Marshall wrote a short article for the Acorn Chronicle on the TV News OpenWeb project.

Professional Activities

Marshall gave the closing presentation for the 2006 KLA Academic Library Section, Special Section, SLA Kentucky Chapter, and ACRL Kentucky Chapter Joint Spring Conference held at the Jenny Wiley State Park in east Kentucky.

Attended the Computers in Libraries conference in Washington, DC. Marshall participated in a panel on "Dead and Emerging Technologies," was a co-instructor on a full-day workshop for Web Managers and gave conference presentations on "Wireless Networks in Libraries," "Measuring the Impact of Google: The Vanderbilt Television News OpenWeb Project," and "The Net of the Future? Open Croquet."

Publications this month include the "Library Automation Marketplace 2006" published in the April 1, 2006 issue of Library Journal. This is the fifth year in a row that Marshall has authored this annual feature that describes the technology trends and assesses the performance of the companies in the library automation industry.

For the Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSource, Marshall contributed an article describing the product transitions at Endeavor Information Systems from LinkFinderPlus and ENCompass for Resource Access to a new family of products licensed from TDNet. Marshall spoke with Roland Dietz, president of Endeavor and Michael Markwith, president of TDNet as part of the research for this article.

Marshall's monthly column that appears in Computers in Libraries published by Information Today talked about how exposure of content from the TV News Archive into Google has increased awareness and activity of this resource.