Report of the Library Technology Officer
September 2005

Vanderbilt Television News Archive

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

A cumulative statistical summary of the Archive's activities for 2005 is available here.

NEH Project

The primary goal of digitizing the Archive's entire collection of the evening news collection is largely complete. The staff involved on the project have gone through the entire collection from August 5, 1968 through June 2003, the month when digital recording commenced. Quality checking of some of the material and reprocessing of programs identified as having problems still remains. The grant funding carries through the end of April 2006. The existing project staff members will begin digitizing the CNN portion of the specials collection with the time remaining on the grant.

Thanks and congratulations go to the persons involved in this project for completing an enormous project far ahead of the original schedule.

Personnel News

Sarah Dryden was hired to fill a vacant staff position funded by the NEH grant. We also hired Karen Williams, a graduate student, to work part time to work on the backlog of Fox News abstracts. This position is funded by the grant that supports the recording and abstracting of Fox News. David Winjum, now an undergraduate student at Vanderbilt, continues working with the Archive as a student assistant.

Visitors

On September 28 the a group of visitors from Chattanooga State Technical College visited to Archive to gather information related to digial video. Their institution is heavily involved in distance education and make heavy use of video. The visitors included Vicky Leather, Dean of Library Services, Elijah Scott, Coordinator of Reference Services, Donna Appleget, Library Server Administrator/Webmaster/Digitizing Specialist, and Bill Norman, Library Computer Technician.

Institutional Subscriptions

In September 2005 Williams College became a subscriber to the Archive following a trial subscription set up last month.

OpenWeb Project

In September 2005, the OpenWeb server received 5,886,368 page requests. Most of this activity was related to search engine spiders gathering pages for indexing. We have begun to see an increase of activity on the regular TV News Web site and the number of requests for videotape loans has increased. At least 2,640 visits to the regular TV News site were referred from the OpenWeb. We believe these increases are related to the OpenWeb, and we will continue to monitor activity and gather statistics to see if the data confirm this trend.

Library Technology Officer Activities

Global Music Archive

In addition to the musical recordings, the material associated with the Global Music Archive includes photographs taken at the performances and of the instruments used. Marshall has now created a database and interface to accommodate these images. Once the film is developed, the prints will be scanned and added to the database. Links will be provided between the related recordings and photographs.

In order to streamline the process of puting the audio files online, Marshall set up a process that automatically extracts WAV files from the audio CD's, copies them to a temporary drive on the local computer, converts the WAV file to RealMedia format using Helix Producer, depositing the finished file directly on the Library5 media server. This process makes it possible for John Turner, or anyone else working on the project to process the CD's with minimal training or knowledge of the details of the syntax associated with the software involved.

Marshall also made some additional enhancements to the interface for the sound recordings. It is now possible to search by CD number. We have also created a field to hold textual information related to the photographs associated with the recording.

Etana

At the request of Chuck Jones of the Oriental Institute in Chicago, Marshall created an RSS Feed for the ABZU bibliographic database of information related to the study of the Ancient Near East on the Web. The RSS feed will include new items as they are added to the database.

Meetings and Committee work

Marshall attended the Annual Conference of the International Federation of Television Archives in New York on September 16 - 20. The majority of the participants in FIAT come from organizations in Europe, though North American television networks are well represented. Marshall participated on a panel describing television archiving activities in the United States. His portion of the program focused on the Vanderbilt Television News Archive as an example of a television archive that is not operated by the network producing the content.

On September 30th, Marshall attended and participated in an all-day workshop in Berkeley, CA titled "Online Video and the Future of Television". Marshall's presentation gave an overview of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive and the issues it faces in providing access to its now complete collection of digitized news programming.

Marshall participated in the all-day Etana meeting on September 12th. One of the key concerns relates to the Dig-Base software that is being funded by the NSF and developed at Virginia Tech. Vanderbilt will host this software when the grant expires in August 2006. We need to become more involved in preperation for this transition.

Marshall participated in the usual library meetings: OUL Staff meetings, Strategy and Planning Council, TV News Staff meeting, and two meetings for the Global Music Archive.

Professional Activities

Marshall's publications this month include his Systems Librarian column in Computers in Libraries magazine and contributions to ALA's Smart Libraries Newsletter.