Report of the Director for Innovative Technologies and Research
March 2008

Vanderbilt Television News Archive

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

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

Personnel

Ron Zolkower who has been working with the Archive since July 2007 as the Marketing and Billing Coordinator resigned to take a position with the Nashville Preditors. We appreciated Ron's great work for the Archive and will begin recruiting for his replacement immediately. A going-away event was held for Ron on March 13th.

Institutional Subscriptions

On March 3, 2008 Marshall Breeding and Jody Combs met with ITS staff to discuss the network infrastructure implications of the expansion of the streaming video service of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. Since this has been in place since January 2004 and since we do not expect dramatic increases in the number of silmultaneous video streams, we likewise do not expect a significant impact on the campus network.

TV News Infrastructure

Marshall performed a number of programming tasks related to the TV News infrastructure. Much of the programming this month focused on functions related to Institutional Subscriptions. As we work with the system, it became apparent that we needed a more granular approach to managing the payments. The data structures of the subscription system was redesigned to include separate status and payment elements for each subscription term. The search page was revised to be easier to select subscription records. The administrative login for each institution was updated to allow viewing and printing of invoices for each subscription term.

Marshall participated in a meeting with Beth Boord, Adele White, Paul, and others to discuss fundraising opportunities for the Vanderbilt Television News Archcive.

Technology Activities

On March 28th Marshall was interviewed by Tom Peters of OPAL (Online Programming for All Libraries) on topics ranging from the Vanderbilt Television News Archive to his writing and speaking activities on library automation. A podcast of the interview is available from the OPAL archive.

Marshall attended the workshop on ILS Discovery Layer API convened by the Digital Library Federation on March 6 in Berkeley, CA. He wrote a summary of the meeting on his blog.

Marshall has been invited to participate in a project to develop requirements for a next-generation library automation system for higher education. Duke University will serve as the lead institution, with Marshall serving as a key advisor, with participation by other core and advisory institutions. The group has been invited by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to submit a proposal to fund the effort.

The project will be working through business process modeling toward the creation of specifications for a next-generation library automation environment within a service-oriented architecture. We will be working with one of the leading SOA experts, which will be an incredible learning opportunity. Marshall's proposed involvement will include several workshops that will mostly take place at Duke, but may also be hosted by other institutions.

Meetings

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

Marshall participated in the New Employee Welcome Session on March 20.

Professional Activities

The April 1, 2008 issue of Library Journal included "Automation System Marketplace 2008: Opportunity Out of Turmoil by Marshall Breeding. This is the seventh year that Marshall has produced this major report on the library automation industry. See his blog post about the article.

Marshall gave the Keynote presentation at the Next Generation Library Interfaces Symposium sponsored by the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries titled "New Generation of Library Interfaces: meeting the needs of today’s library users on March 14, 2008 in Denver Colorado.

Marshall gave a workshop titled "An Introduction to Next Generation Library Interfaces" at the NSLS Workshop on Next Generation Catalogs sponsored by the North Suburban Library System in Wheeling, IL.

Marshall's articles "OCLC Acquires EZproxy" and "NewGenLib: An Open Source ILS for Libraries" were published in the March issue of Smart Libraries Newsletter published by the ALA TechSource.

Marshall's regular "Systems Librarian" column that appears in the March 2008 issue of Computers in Libraries was titled Making a Business Case for Open Source ILS.

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