Report of the Director for Innovative Technologies and Research
April 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 Vanderbilt Television News Archive received notification from the National Endowment for the Humanities that they have been awarded a two-year grant of $279,507 to fund the digitization of its collection of special news broadcasts. The Archive just completed a two-year $281,154 grant from the NEH to digitize the collection of evening news broadcasts.

This grant, our second from the NEH, will focus on digitizing and cataloging the Archive's collection of "news specials." This material consists of news coverage of major events broadcast outside the regular evening newscasts. Some of the major events covered in this collection include: all the Democratic and Republican political conventions since 1968, coverage of election results, State of the Union addresses, the hearings in the Senate and House of Representatives on the events related to Watergate, the Persian Gulf War, the events surrounding September 11, 2001, the War in Afghanistan, the War in Iraq, and coverage of presidential speeches and news conferences.

Some of this material has not been fully cataloged, so a significant portion of the grant project will involve creating descriptive metadata for the TV News database. The project also includes a component to digitize the transcripts of the Watergate hearings available in print and associate the text with the televised hearings.

The new grant will begin on May 1, 2006 and will run through April 20, 2008. Marshall Breeding is the Project Director; John Lynch will coordinate the day-to-day operation of the grant. All the staff funded by the previous NEH grant will continue with this new project, including Steve Davis, Honor Gherman, Nick Purvis, Ben Cummings, Madison Stubblefield, and Stephanie Saujon Baltz.

This award brings the total value of grants and gifts to the Library on behalf of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive to $1,114,663 over the course of the last four years.

Institutional Subscriptions

Tufts University purchased a subscription to the Archive in April 2006.

Library Technology Officer Activities

OpenWeb Project

We have seen a significant increase in videotape loan requests since launching the OpenWeb project. Many of these new orders are for single items. We are concerned, however, that the user may simply request the one item they were able to discover through the OpenWeb site and not search for other related material in our collections. This month we made some adjustments to the OpenWeb, providing a new layout for the page that puts more emphasis on informing the visitor about our loan service and that additional materials may be available. The page now includes a sample search that allows the visitor to get some idea of the amount of material in our collection of interest prior to registering. As a result of this change, there seems to be an increase in the multi-item loan requests. It will be interesting to see if this trend persists. Overall numbers of loan requests and income continue to come in at record levels.

Meeting with MRBS

While in Washington for the CNI meeting, Marshall met with the staff of the Motion Picture, Broadcast, and Recorded Sound (MRBS) division of the Library of Congress, including Greg Lukow (Division Chief), Mike Mashon, and Dick Thaxter. Topics covered included notification to LC of the new NEH grant and the ongoing need to transfer MEPG-2 files to LC, activities and planning related to the move to the new facilities in Culpepper, VA, LC's strategies regarding providing wider access to digital video content, and the stipend LC pays to Vanderbilt.

Digital Recording System

One of the technical projects that Marshall worked on this month involved the digital recording system used at TV News. This system currently records six channels of television simultaneously, keeping content for 3-5 days, primarily for the purpose of catching news content broadcast outside of the regular news programs. The current system records programs with the network-date-time overlay required for the items added to the Archive's collection. We also provide recordings to the Vanderbilt News Service, which needs them without the overlay. Marshall developed an enhancement to the system so that it can simultaneously record two versions, one with the overlay and the other without. This is accomplished by taking advantage of the Hauppauge PVR-350's capability to capture programs to MPEG. Marshall added the DirectX filters and file management routines necessary to take advantage of this capability to the custom software he had previously developed to control the card. This programming task is largely complete and should be ready to put into production use next month. Marshall also modified both the control software for the PRV-350 and the OptiBase MPEG-2 encoding card to use MySQL instead of DB/TextWorks for the underlying database.

Professional Activities

Marshall attended the Coalition for Networked Information meeting in Washington, DC on May 3-4.

This month, Marshall wrote an article for the Smart Libraries Newsletter published by ALA TechSource. The topic for this article was SirsiDynix new arrangement to rely on products from Serials Solutions for linking, federated search, and electronic resource management. Marshall interviewed Jane Burke of Serials Solutions and Berit Nelson from SirsiDynix.