Report of the Director for Innovative Technologies and Research
September 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 2006 calendar year is available here.

NEH Project

Work continues on the NEH grant-funded project to digitize the Archive's collection of news specials. So far we have digitized the special news programs for the years from 1968 through 1979 for the networks ABC, CBS, and NBC. We have not yet digitized the Watergate Presidential speeches and Press Conferences for those years. The team has completed digitizing CNN specials for the years 1989, 1990, 1992-1994. The have started 1991 CNN specials which invovles 24-hour coverage of the first Persian Gulf War, one of our more extensive collections.

Archiving of Local News

Discussions continue regarding a possible partnership between the Nashville Public Library, WSMV television, and the Vanderbilt Television News Archive regarding a possible project to digitize the archive of the news programs of the local station and to perform ongoing off-air recording. There was a meeting of participants from the Nashville Public Library, WSMV Television, and Marshall representing the TV News Archive. We are at the point where we have a fairly good idea what the project will involve and considering options for funding.

Digital Recording System

Work continues on implementing a new 24-hour digital recording system. Progress this month included adding three additional Dell PowerEdge 850 servers, each equipped with two 500 GB SATA drives.

Marshall spent a considerable amount of time addressing problems affecting the reliablity of the system. We have found that the software controlling the PVR-350 card had a high number of failures. Marshall wrote a script that constantly monitors the status of the MPEG files produced by the card and attempts to take corrective action when it detects a problem. This strategy also involved making some modifications in the PVR-350 software and the software for the Optibase card to allow a gracefull shutdown of these applications from a remote system. This was accomplished by having these programs poll a control file at the same time that they post thier status to the database. While there is now some improvement, work continues toward increasing the reliablity to a level where we are comfortable with discontinuing the backup recording performed by the VHS systems.

Primo

Marshall worked on some revisions to the Perl script that performs the extract of records from the TV News database in Dublin Core XML format, addressing some issues raised by the Primo Mapping Project Team.

Meetings

Marshall participated in regular committee meetings, including Strategy and Planning Council, Metadata Committee, TV News Staff. He also met with Beth Board to give her an overview of the development issues forthe TV News Archive.

Marshall participated in the all-day ETANA meeting held here at Vanderbilt on Sept 8th.

Professional Activities

Marshall delivered the keynote address for the NISO conference held in Denver, CO on September 28th titled "The Millennial Generation Joins the Library Community.

Marshall gave the kenote presentation for the Wyoming Library Association Annual Conference in Gillette, WY on September 29th.

Marshall's regular column appeared in Computers in Libraries.