Report of the Director for Innovative Technologies and Research
May - June 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 2005/06 fiscal year is available here.

NEH Project

Work is well underway on the NEH-funded project to digitize the Archive's collection of news specials. A considerable amount of material has been digitized as we work out procedures and workflows for the specials that are somewhat different from the evening news.

One of the major challenges will involve the disk storage needed to process the MPEG files produced by the project and for the RealMedia files on the media servers. We had purchased a generous amount of storage for the first digitizing project. While we have enough storage to handle all the RealMedia files, we will probably need to purchase some additional storage to have enough temporary space for staging the MPEGs prior to their transfer to the Library of Congress. We are also having some problems in the disk transfer of MPEG files to LC. The LaCie drives have a relatively high failure rate, apparently due to the rough handling they receive in shipping. At LC, all packages are opened, inspected, and repacked by a vendor as part of their enhanced security process. We are pursuing the option of transferring files using Internet2 to eliminate many of the bottlenecks inherent in our current system.

An article appeared in the Vanderbilt Register about this new grant award from the NEH.

Fiscal Year Close

The Archive finished the 2005/06 fiscal year with a budget surplus, meeting a long-time goal of financial self-sufficiency. A number of factors contributed to balancing the budget. We had a record-breaking year in the number of videotape loan requests, boosted by the increased exposure of our metadata through the OpenWeb project. All of our original sponsors became regular subscribers as thier two years of complimentary access expired. Most of all, the hard work of the Archive staff made it possible for the Archive to operate extremely efficiently while enduring a very heavy workload.

Institutional Subscriptions

The University of Miami Law Library purchased a subscription to the Archive in June 2006.

Other Technology Activities

Digital Recording System

Marshall continues work on the expansion of the digital recording system. This system provides continuous recording to supplement the primary recording system in the off-air room. In order to gain the level of reliability need to retire the VHS-based backup system, we need to add additional recorders to the system. We are also working with the Vanderbilt News Service to assist them in their needs in capturing televised coverage of Vanderbilt, which involves monitoring additional stations.

We have ordered additional equipment for the expansion of the backup system which will be installed over the next couple of months. This equipment includes four additional servers and the Hauppauge PVR-350 television cards, OptiBase MPEG encoding cards, XBOB character generators needed for the recording functions. We also ordered two EMC AX100 network attached storage units to provide the additional storage needed for recording additional networks and keeping the content longer.

Primo

Marshall participated in the Primo kick-off meetings on May 15-16 and in the all-day meeting on June 29. Marshall has begun the work of designing the metadata record structure, based on Dublin Core, that will be used to extract data from the TV News Archive.

Professional Activities

Marshall gave the Keynote address for the VTLS User's Group in Chattanooga, TN on "Trends in Library Automation: Meeting the needs of a new generation of library users."

On May 2 Marshall gave a Web presentation for the Education Institute of the provinces in Canada titled "Library Automation Update."

Marshall was on vacation June 1-18. While in Slovenia, he had meetings at the National and University Library in Ljubljana, Slovenia. During this meeting he received an extensive tour of the library, and met with library administrators to discuss the library's automation projects and digital initiatives.

Marshall attended the American Library Assocation annual conference in New Orleans on June 23-27. At the conference he particiapted in the LITA Top Technology Trends panel and gave a presentation titled "Understanding library users you don't see: Techniques for tracking and analyzing library web resources" for a program sponsored by LAMA.

Marshall authored the May/June issue of Library Technology Reports published by ALA TechSource titled Web Services and the Service-oriented Architecture.

As a contributing editor for ALA TechSource Smart Libraries Newsletter, Marshall wrote articles on OCLC's acquisition of RLG and on the new Encore product from Innovatived Interfaces.