Report of the Director for Innovative Technologies and Research
July 2007

Vanderbilt Television News Archive

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

A cumulative statistical summary of the Archive's activities for 2007 calendar year is available here.

High Capacity Storage for TV News

Marshall met with Alan Tacket, Santiago de Ledesma, Bobby Brown and others from Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education group to discuss high-capacity storage for TV News. They have developed a high-performance storage environment which should be able to facilitate the transfer of MPEG files to the Library of Congress. This project is part of a larger set of collaborative activities that ACCRE has with the Library of Congress.

Personnel

Ron Zolkower began employment with the Archive as the Coordinator for Billing and Marketing. During his initial training period Ron will focus on learning the overall operations of the Archive in preperation for taking on more tasks related to increasing the income received through sugscriptions and loan requests.

Marshall continues to work with Lincoln Bryant, a volunteer intern who is working on developing documentation for the perl-based digital library framework.

Global Music Archive

The resources of the Global Music Archive have been somewhat redefined recently. While the "Global Music Archive will continue as the name for the overall project initiative, the database of the sound recordings from East Africa will now be called the Digital Collection of East African Recordings. We would like for this resource to be made publicly available by sometime in the Fall. In preperation for its public release, a number of improvements need to be made to the interface.

On July 3rd, Marshall participated in a meeting with Blair, LITS and other staff to discuss requirements for the next phase of development of the database and establish timeline for its roll out.

ETANA

Marshall extended the ABZU environment to serve as a digital repository for the PDF documents associated with the Core Texts produced for ETANA. The need for this capability came about due to problems that we were having with having the texts served though the servers at Case Western Reserve University.

The system Marshall developed allows the PDF documents to be easily uploaded to the server and to automatically build a splash page describing the object to allow individuals to download the electronic books. The system provides a persistent URL for each of the core texts.

Meetings

Marshall participated in the Retirement Learning seminar held on July 10th. He led session on Searching the Web.

Professional Activities

Marshall participated in the invitational meeting held in Berkeley, CA sponsored by the Digital Library Federation on “Moving Images: Digitization for Access,” now known as the Lot 49 group.

Marshall gave a presentation at the “New Age of Discovery Institute” as part of a panel on "Tools for Better Discovery" with Judi Briden and Andrew Pace in Decatur,Georgia. The institute, held on July 19th, was co-sponsored by ASERL, Solinet, and the Auburn University Libraries.

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