Report of the Director for Innovative Technologies and Research
June 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.

Personnel

We created a new staff position for the TV News Archive with the title "Coordinator for Billing and Marketing." This individual will be responsible for many of the responsibilities that were formerly conducted by NELINET to promote the subscription product to colleges and universities and to manage the process of collecting funds for those subscriptions. In addition to these activities, the person in this position will help with the font desk of the Archive.

We interviewed four candidates for this position and eventually selected Ron Zolkower for the position. Ron graduated with a BA from University of Central Florida with a major in Advertising and Public relations and a will receive Masters of Sport Administration from Belmont University in August 20007. Ron will start July 5, 2007.

Given that we have many subscription renewals due at the end of June and the new position will not be filled until July, Marshall worked on contacting the libraries and consortia involved and producing invoices. He had conversations, either by phone or e-mail, with representatives from each of the consortia that had previously been promoting our subscription product to their members. Each of these, with the exception of Amigos, will continue this role.

Budget

The Vanderbilt Television News Archive finished the fiscal year with a positive balance.

ETANA

Marshall continued work on the eTACT resource. As scholars begin to contribute to eTACT, we received a few requests for enhancements and modifications. One of these changes involved changing the default of the search engine to handle 3-letter terms. After some research, Marshall was able to make this change in the MySQL database configuration. Some modifications were also needed in the way that the editor selects categories. A feature was added to the submission process that allows the editor to specify new lines and indentations by inserting special characters.

Meetings

Marshall attended the Webinar given by Serials Solutions on their electronic resource management system.

Other meetings attended this month include the New Employee Welcome Session, a meeting with Mike Schoenfeld on TV News issues; a meeting with Kathy Conkwright, a faculty member in Film Studies on video archiving issues; regular meetings of Strategy and Planning Council, OUL staff meeting, and the Digital Library Steering Committee.

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

Professional Activities

Marshall attended the American Library Association Annual Conference held in Washington, DC. At the conference he convened a meeting of the Sirsi Large Sites Interest Group, participated on the LITA Top Technology Trends panel, co-moderated with Andrew Pace the new Speaking Technically panel of chief technology officers from each of the major library automation companies, and spoke at an Ex Libris Primo Seminar.

Marshall and Zora gave a presentation on their recent trip to Asia for a Library Brown Bag event on June 8th.

Marshall wrote several short articles for the June issues of ALA TechSource Smart Libraries Newsletter.