Report of the Director for Innovative Technologies and Research
November 2007

Vanderbilt Television News Archive

Statistics for the monthly use of the Web site are not yet available for the month

TV News Institutional Subscribers

As a result of the marketing campaign that Ron has been working on to identify and solicit new subscribers, during December we received interest from the following institutions and have set up trial subscriptions:

Met with Hilary and Ron to talk about search engine optimization issues with the TV News website. We hope to be able to follow up on Hilary's great suggestions.

TV News Infrastructure

Marshall completed the switch-over of the cluster of servers that underlies the TV News website to the new framework on November 28, 2007. This new software provides a number of new features that will be beneficial to Archive staff and provides an improved interface for its users. This change was made following an extensive period of development and testing.

Technology Activities

Marshall made a few changes to the Etana Web site in response to requests. He also added the OpenWeb interface to the Etana site, creating a permalink for each record, generating XML sitemaps, and submitting them to Google, and referencing the sitemap in the robots.txt directives. Sitemaps were created for both the ABZU bibliographic database and the eTACT resource of Cuneiform translations. It will be interesting to see if this results in additional traffic on these Etana resources.

Marshall did some programming to improve the session management handling for the perl framework. He created routines to better detect and more gracefully handle session time-outs. The system now detects an inactive session, collects all parameter data, requests the user's password, and resumes the session with no loss in data that the user might have had in forms prior to the time-out.

Meetings

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

Participated in the Digital Media Archive Project Team meetings.

Marshall chaired the Metadata Committee meetings on 12th and 26th.

Professional Activities

November 7, 2007. Marshall gave a keynote talk for the Talis Insight talk in Birmingham, England on Working toward a new generation of library automation: opportunities to break free from the traditional mould".

November 9, 2007. Marshall gave a presentation to the Art Libraries Society / Southeast Chapter on Vanderbilt Television News Archive: A resource for News, Popular Culture, and the Arts.

November 27, 2007. Marshall was invited to give a presentation to library staff at Northwestern University on Library automation systems: breaking from the past into a new future

November 15, 2007 Marshall gave two presentations at the Mississippi Library Commission annual Library Directors Conference in Jackson, MS on Young and Wired and Hot Technologies.

Marshall wrote several short articles for the June issues of ALA TechSource Smart Libraries Newsletter. Marshall's regular column in Computers in Libraries was titled "It's Time to Break the Mold of the Original ILS".