Report of the Director for Innovative Technologies and Research
February 2007

Vanderbilt Television News Archive

A statistical summary of the activities of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive is available here: Feb 2007.

A cumulative statistical summary of the Archive's activities for 2006 calendar year is available here.

Transition from DB/TextWorks to MySql

Marshall continued work on the project to migrate the TV News infrastructure from the DB/TextWorks database to MySql. The transition to using the new database and software was made on February 14, 2007. The new system has given us the expected improvement in performance, even with both staff and public activity once again combined on the same server. All the system administration scripts, including daily backups of the database, e-commerce reports were re-implemented for the new database during February. Following the migration of to the new environment, Marshall monitored all aspects of the system for problems and corrected any minor issues as they were discovered. Some work on the staff side interfaces related to transcoding and quality checking were accomplished the day after the switchover, but resulted in very little interruption to TV News staff.

East African Music Archive

Marshall participated in a meeting to discuss the current status and next steps regarding the East African Music Archive, also known as the Global Music Archive. The meeting included Holling Smith-Borne, and Jason Battles.

ETANA grant proposal to IMLS

Participated on the development of a grant to IMLS for the further development and enhancement of the DigBase software, a component of the library's ETANA (Electronic Tools and Ancient Near East Archives). The grant involves taking the prototype developed at Virginia Tech through an NSF-funded project and building a production-quality application that can be used by archaeologists. The work will concentrate on improving the usability of the prototype and reengineering the software to be more reliable and scaleable.

Electronic Translations of Akkadian Cuneiform Texts

Marshall met with Bill Hook and Prof Jack Sasson to discuss the creation of a new resource called Electronic Translations of Akkadian Cuneiform Texts (eTACT). This will be a relatively simple text database that provides access to translations of Akkadian texts. Prof. Sasson is ready working with an editor that will be responsible for the content. Marshall showed the beginning of the prototype which will be further developed over the next few weeks. Bill Hook will provide some sample texts that we can use as we develop the interface. This project will be an additional component of the ETANA initiative.

Meetings

Marshall and Paul met with Mike Schoenfeld to give a briefing on the recent accomplishments of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive.

Marshall participated in regular committee meetings, including Strategy and Planning Council, Metadata Committee, TV News Staff.

Professional Activities

Marshall attended the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Seattle, WA. Conference activities included participation on the LITA Top Technology Trends panel, convening the SirsiDynix Large Sites Users Meeting and many individual meetings with executives from library automation companies.

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