Report of the Director for Innovative Technologies and Research
May 2007

Vanderbilt Television News Archive

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

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

NEH Grant

Work continues on the NEH-funded project to digitize the specials collection of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. This month marks the end of the first year of the 2-year project. Marshall prepared the performance report due to NEH for the second quarter. The following describes the progress made to date on digitizing and metadata creation:

Completely Finished:

Mostly Finished Except for Some Records:

--1980 ABC (including Nightline)

Finished Except for Records:

Personnel

The Vanderbilt Television News Archive has ended its arrangement with NELINET for marketing and billing services. We will be performing these functions on our own, effective May 15, 2007. We have defined a new position that will be funded through the savings from the commissions on subscriptions and on anticipated increases in revenues. The position with the functional title "Billing and Marketing Coordinator" was posted in late April and we have begun to interview candidates.

ETANA

The creation of the new iTACT resource provided the impetus to restore ETANA to its own server. The original planning grant that the library received from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded the acquisition of a server for the ETANA Web site and the ABZU bibliographic database of resources related to the study of the ancient near east. About a year ago, ETANA was moved to another library server (Library11) due to a technical problem and has resided on that server since.

In April, LITS purchased and installed a new Dell PowerEdge server for Etana.

The major portion of the migration to the new ETANA involved moving the ABZU database, which was made more complex by our decision to go ahead and convert that database from DB/TextWorks to MySQL. Marshall installed the components necessary for the ABZU database, including the MySQL database engine, Perl, the ODBC connectors, and the perl-based Digital Library Framework. Part of the migration included writing the perl script that defines the ABZU database in MySQL. Marshall then extracted the ABZU data from DB/TextWorks on Library11 and wrote a conversion program to load the data into the new framework on the new ETANA server under MySQL. The conversion of the ABZU database was coordinated with Charles Jones, the editor of ABZU who current works from Athens, Greece. New Etana server and ABZU database were put into production on May 29, 2007.

The launch of the new eTACT resoruce was tied to the migration to the new ETANA server. As part of our strategy to migrate database applications to MySQL, eTACT was developed under this new database, using one of the TV News servers as the devleopment platform. While this arrangement was fine during the development stage, we needed for eTACT to be on the ETANA server before we started providing wider access. Once the ETANA and ABZU databases were put into production on the new server, it was then possible to activate eTACT as well. In the days following its implementation on the new server we did a new round of adjustments to the software to make it ready for produciton use.

With the migration to the new server and database environment we also implemented the user registration system for ETANA members. Only registered members can now submit suggestions into ABZU or translationns into eTACT. This registration process along with the higher level of security built into the new Digital Library Framework should eliminate the problem we have been having with the insertion of records into ABZU of material not related to its content focus.

Meetings

Since Marshall was away much of the month, he did not attend many of the usual committee meetings.

Professional Activities

Marshall was away much of the month of May. He took a week of vacation during the first week of the month to teach a series of workshops, called "Tech Expectations" throughout the state of Minnesota. From May 8 - 22 Marshall was in Asia for a series of speaking engagements. He was the primary presentor for the Fifth Annual Leadership Institute sponsored by the University of Hong Kong and Xiamen University held in Xiamen China. He also gave presentations at the Special Seminar for Library Development Program in Chiang Mai, Thailand and for the "Web 2.0 Conference" in Singapore.

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