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 BreedingMarshall BreedingDirector for Innovative Technologies and ResearchDirector for Innovative Technologies and ResearchVanderbilt UniversityVanderbilt Universityhttp://staffweb.library.vanderbilt.edu/breedinghttp://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 broadcastsEstablished August 5, 1968

–ABC, CBS, NBCCNN 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– 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