Report of the Director for Innovative Technologies and Research
April 2007

Vanderbilt Television News Archive

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

A cumulative statistical summary of the Archive's activities for the 2006/07 FIscal year is available here.

Global Music Archive

Last month we received a request to put a copy of the Global Music Archive on a laptop computer that Greg Barz could take with him on his upcoming trip to Africa. This request presented the opportunity to go ahead and migrate this resource to the new MySQL infrastructure. It was fairly easy to accomplish since this resource operates in its own virtual Web server, even though it is on Library11, which hosts many of the library's digital library resources.

Marshall wrote the scripts to define the resource under the new database and to extract and convert the data from DB/TextWorks. A copy of the new version of the digital library framework was copied to Library11, and the perl scripts for the Global Music Archive were upgrated to use the new core modules.

Jason Battles has been working with the Music Library staff to help them rework the existing data and to migrate new data from spreadsheets which they have been using to enter records. Jason moved all the new data provided by the Music Library Staff into database prior to its migration.

Digital Storage

Marshall met with Paul Sheldon from the Department of Physics and Astronomy who is involved with a number of projects involving high-capacity storage. One project involves collaborations with the University of Kentucky and the Library of Congress. We discussed the possibility of making additional storage available to the Vanderbilt Television News Archive to make it possible for us to keep our MPEG versions of our news programs online and to expedite the transfer of content to the Library of Congress. This was a preliminary meeting, but there did seem to be a strong possiblity of developing this collaboration.

Personnel

All TV News staff participated in the annual performance review process. Kudos to all the staff members for another very sucessful year and truly great work!

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.

Marshall spoke at the annual ASERL meeting in Asheville, NC on "Open Source versus Vendor Opportunities."

Professional Activities

Marshall's article "Automated System Marketplace 2006: An Industry Redefined" was published in the April 1, 2007 issue of Library Journal. Marshall has been the author of this annual indusrty report for the last six years.

Marshall gave a presentation "Current Trends in Library Automation" at the Texas Library Association Annual Conference in San Antonio, TX on April 13.

Marshall gave a number of presentations at the Computers in Libraries conference held in Arlington, VA jfrom April 15-18, 2007. These included a section of the "Web Manager's Academy," "Millennials and the Library," "Using Google and Search Engines to Enhance Access to Digital Collections," and "The New Automation Landscape."

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