Report of the Director for Innovative Technologies and Research
October - November 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.

Contini-Volterra Project

In support of the project funded by the Kress Foundation to digitize the photographs from the Contini-Volterra collection, Marshall created a new version of the image management system. This version of the interface was significantly different than previous versions in that it uses MySql as the relational database instead of DB/TextWorks. This will be the first of the library projects to use this version of the infrastructure we use for digital projects.

The application for the Contini-Volterra project includes a base record modeled after VRA Core Version 3, with additional fields to accommodate local needs. Authority files control multiple fields, including: Artist name, Style/Period, Medium/Materials, Topical Subjects, Photographers, and Museums/Repositories.

The Contini-Volterra application was designed according to the requirements of the staff in Special Collections working on the project. Marshall created a draft version with basic functionality, which was presented for review of the staff on November 3rd. Subsequently Special Collections staff tested the interface and produced a list of problems and enhancements. Programming has been completed to address these issues, though some work remains on enhancing the search interface. The interface is at a point where project staff can begin entering the metadata for the photographs.

Transition from DB/TextWorks to MySql

Marshall has been working toward the transition from DB/TextWorks to MySql for the last few months. His Library Technology Guides and lib-web-cats databases were converted to this new infrastructure in October 2006. The new 24-hour backup system was also based on the MySql-based infrastructure. These earlier projects provided the opportunity to work out the technical issues related to operating the front-end Web applications with a different back-end database. This process demonstrated that the application was already largely database independent. Only a few minor changes needed to be made in the Web applications to accommodate the new database structure. It should also be fairly easy to transition to environment to Oracle should we need even higher performance database environment. This project also paves the way to migrate the TV News applications to the new database infrastructure. The database size and the volume of activity that we have seen over the last few months is pressing the limits of DB/TextWorks.

Network Storage Issues

Marshall met with Shanmuga Sundaram who is the person in ITS responsible for developing storage strategies and infrastructure. He had asked to meet to assess the storage needs of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. I related our interests in having local backups made of our 14TB of RealMedia files and the desire to keep our 100TB of MPEG-2 files online. Sundaram will get back with us once he has more information on what ITS will be able to accommodate as they expand their network storage infrastructure.

We also began the process of re-organizing the RealMedia and the MPEG files on the storage servers in the General Library Building. The cluster of storage servers is reaching capacity, and we need to reorganize and consolidate the directories to make best use of the available space. We also have two NAS servers in the Baker Building that are now available to help meet the storage needs. Marshall began the re-organization in November, but due to the large volume of files, it is expected to take until Mid-december to complete.

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.

Professional Activities

Marshall was invited by the OCLC Office of Research to deliver the latest in their Distinguished Seminar Series. The presentation was titled "Trends in Library Automation: Meeting the challenges of a new generation of library users." In addition to this presentation, Marshall met with a number of other departments and ind ividuals at OCLC on various topics.

Marshall attended the Internet Librarian 2006 and gave a number of presentations including: "Using Google and Search Engines to Increase access to Digital Collections," "Repositories in Action: Vanderbilt Television News Archive," and "Web Managers Academy: Web Services."

Marshall was invited to speak at the Hawaii Library Association's annual conference held in Hololulu, HI. He gave presentations on "Trends in Library Automation" and "Library Security Issues" and participated on a panel addressing the topic of "Dead and Emerging Technologies."

Marshall's regular column appeared in Computers in Libraries and he wrote several short articles for the October and November issues of ALA TechSource Smart Libraries Newsletter.