Vanderbilt Television News Archive Off-air archiving of news broadcasts from national television networks NDIIPP Partners Meeting July 2008 Breakout session: Broadcast and Satellite Television Marshall Breeding Director for Innovative Technologies and Research Vanderbilt University http://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/breeding http://www.librarytechnology.org/ http://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu

Talking points 10:40 Marshall Breeding, Vanderbilt, the classic example. Where does the incoming signal come from? About the digital capture setup, i.e., the workstation. What sort of worker does the capture work. About the archiving format: what were the considerations, what was the decision? About the quantity or rate of capture. About metadata (just a little!). About producing "access" copies. About the Web site. Who are users?

The Vanderbilt Television News Archive Off-air capture and archiving of US National News broadcasts Established August 5, 1968 ABC, CBS, NBC CNN added in 1995 (One hour / day) Fox News added in 2004 (One hour / day) Specials – selected news content beyond regular news broadcasts

Signal sources Standard cable service Roof-top antennas Comcast Roof-top antennas Satellite service Not reliable enough to justify Unable to get agreements to tap non-local feeds May add to gain access to additional news networks

Digital Capture hardware and software

Digital Recording system Manual digital system Dell OptiPlex towers Automatic 24/7 recording system Dell PowerEdge rack-mount servers Need a highly reliable redundant environment We only get one chance to record each program

Digital Video Workstation Dual purpose Off-air recording of newscasts Conversion of videotapes

Digital Recording Hauppauge WinTV PVR 350 tuner card Video composite output to OSD overlay OSD output to Optibase Moviemaker video input

Digitizing Workstation

Digital Studio 2

Digital Studio 3

Staffing issues Work with staff members of the Archive that have evolved through many generations of equipment and technology Strong dedication to the mission Able to adopt each new generation of technology to the Archive’s work

About the quantity or rate of capture Quality considerations included File size vs video quality Dealing with off-air capture, not studio quality Aggressive data rate and resolution would not lead to perceptible improvements in quality

MPEG-2 Options NTSC Signal Format Main Profile @ Main Level Program Stream (video/audio multiplexed) 29.97 frames per second 6mb/sec video bit rate D2 Resolution: 720 x 480 Audio Sampling: 44 kHz Audio bit rate 192 kb/sec

Metadata Qualified Dublin core Abstract + structured fields Headline Date / Begin-end times Reporters One record / story (25+stories / broadcast) Web-based process for submitting metadata

Metadata

Access TV news Web site On-campus: Ex Libris Primo interface

Access copies Streaming currently offered in Realmedia format Automatically transcoded from MPEG-2 to RM upon initial ingestion Realmedia was best choice in 2002. Today most users prefer Flash or other formats

TV News web site Locally developed content management environment Windows 2003 Server / Dell PowerEdge server hardware MySQL database Perl-based interface layer E-commerce for loan requests IP-authentication for subscriber access

Users Academic Individual researchers Journalists Legal

Registered Users

Questions? Marshall Breeding Marshall.breeding@vanderbilt.edu