Marshall Breeding
Report of the Director for Innovative Technologies and Research
March 2007
Vanderbilt Television News Archive
A statistical summary of the activities of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive is available here: March 2007.
A cumulative statistical summary of the Archive's activities for 2006 calendar year is available here.
Local News Archiving
We continue to investigate funding options for the proposed project to create and archive of local news. We had prepared a letter of inquiry to the Annenburg Foundation, but have received a response that they would not be able to fund our project. We continue to explore other options.
eTACT
During March Marshall worked toward the creation of the eTACT (Electronic Translations of Akkadian Texts) that had been discussed last month with Bill Hook and Jack Sasson. The application was expanded from the very basic prototype that served as the basis for discussion into a more full featured interface. One of the most challenging aspects of the interface involves a selection tool for classifying the texts. This tool uses a set of expandable categories and radio buttons that the submittor or editor can use to quickly select the appropriate category from a predefined list of options.
One of the key features of eTACT involves the ability for students and scholars to submit translations of Akkadian texts in to the repository. To support this function, Marshall created a site registration feature for ETANA. This feature will give us information about users and control over the way that users submit content to the Web site. Once the user registration feature is in place, it will be used for both ABZU and eTACT. Previously citations suggested for ABZU were less controlled. While we did require the user to supply a name and e-mail address, the process was subject to unwanted spam submissions.
In order to control the quality of the material in the eTACT repository, translations submitted by users will not display until they are approved by the Editor. All user-submitted translations enter the database with a status flag automatically set to "unapproved." Once the translation has been reviewed and the metadata verified, the Editor can check the Approved box.
Cornelia Wunsch will serve as Editor for eTACT. Marshall set up a staff-level account for her and set up a mail-to form as the primary contact for eTACT.
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.