Report of the Director for Innovative Technologies and Research
August 2007

Vanderbilt Television News Archive

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

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

High Capacity Storage for TV News

Marshall and John Lynch met with Bobby Brown of ACCRE to get a client set up in TV News for accessing the high performance storage systems. We will also be using some interim storage provide by ACCRE to meet some short-term needs that the Archive has regarding MPEG staging while were working on getting the new system established.

Watergate Hearings

Marshall began creating an interface for the House and Senate Hearings surrounding the Watergate events. We had previously contracted to have these materials digitized. The digitized volumes are now mounted on one of the TV News servers. The interface provides basic access to the PDF files. The next phase of development will involve an extension of the TV News environment to accommodate adding the text of the transcripts to the descriptions of the corresponding videos of the televised news coverage.

Primo

Several months back, Marshall had created scripts on the TV News servers to extract records from the database, transform them into Dublin Core and package them to be incorporated into Primo. That work was done when the TV News database was based on DB/TextWorks. This month Marshall worked on updating all those scripts to operate under the MySQL version of the TV News database. He also introduced additional routines to avoid data-related XML parsing errors, and created a version of the scripts that perform weekly incremental extraction of records changed or modified in the last week. Marshall also re-built the way that the records are compressed and packaged to work with Primo. Dale assisted in the process, especially in setting up a share using Samba for the Primo server to better accommodate an automatic transfer of files between the TV News server and the Primo server. Marshall and Dale tested and verified the process.

TeleVU

Marshall was involved with helping get the Library Channel set up for TeleVU in time for the Fall Semester. He met with Sue Erickson and Amy Stewart-Mailhiot to discuss requirements and options for the equipement needed to provide content for the library's channel. We later met with ITS staff regarding the equipment in the former Micro Media Office related to TeleVU.

Marshall subsequently worked with Sue Erickson to set up a computer system that would give them options to broadcast PowerPoint presentations (or other PC-based content), DVD's played through the computer, and VHS videotapes played through an external player.

Meetings

Marshall participated in the Strategy and Planning / Directors' Council retreat held at the Nashville Public Library on August 14th.

Marshall participated in regular meetings of OUL Staff, Strategy and Planning, and the Metadata Committee.

Professional Activities

Marshall authored the July/August 2007 issue of Library Technology Reports on Next-Generation Library Catalogs.

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