Report of the Director for Innovative Technologies and Research
January 2008

Vanderbilt Television News Archive

A statistical summary of the activities of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive is available here: January 2008.

A cumulative statistical summary of the Archive's activities for 2007/98 fiscal year is available here.

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:

TV News Infrastructure

Marshall performed a number of programming tasks related to the TV News infrastructure. The reporting modules needed to be reworked to accommodate the changes made in the way that logging is performed. Previously, each page or transaction was logged to a flat file. It is now recorded in a MySQL table, providing more uniformity and better options for producing system activity reports.

Marshall worked on extending the OpenWeb approach to search engines other than Google. In recent weeks, both Yahoo and Microsoft Live have begun supporting the SiteMap protocol originally proposed by Google. Marshall set up administrative accounts for both Yahoo and Microsoft Live and submitted the TV News sitemaps. It will be interesting to see whether the referral activity from these search engines increases.

Marshall developed a report to monitor all the streaming video clips delivered from the media servers to allow us to ensure that content is delivered only to subscribers. This report is one of many safeguards that we have in place to control access to the streaming video content of our collection.

Technology Activities

Meetings

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

Professional Activities

Marshall attended the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Philadelphia from Jan 11 – 15. His activities at the conference included participation in the LITA Top Technology Trends panel, meetings with the executives of library automation companies including SirsiDynix, Innovative Interfaces, Polaris Library Systems, Serials Solutions, and Ex Libris. Marshall convened the SirsiDynix Large Sites Special Interest Group.

Marshall's article "Ex Libris Captures NYU was published in the January issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter. Marshall's regular "Systems Librarian" column that appears in the January 2008 issue of Computers in Libraries was titled An analytical approach to assessing the effictiveness of Web-based resources.

Marshall published an article titled Perceptions 2007: An International Survey of Library Automation that reported the results of a major study that he conducted on the perceptions that libraries have about the library automation products they use and the companies that support them. Read Marshall's blog post about the article. He was interviewed by Richard Wallis of the UK-based Talis company regarding the article. The podcast of the interview is available. The report was covered in several library-related blogs and was covered by Informaton Today. See the blog post summarizing its coverage.

Read the archive of Mashall's GuidePosts blog for January 2008.