IMLS Projects, Semester 2

This semester I have been engaged in two projects, one of which I don't recall the name of, and the continuation of the ATN project. The project which shall remain nameless was a last minute offering that focused on web 2.o technologies. One thing Nameless taught me is that I am not an IT person. I do not have the background, nor the capacity or interest to pick up everything web 2.o in a few short weeks. I know thats not what the organizers of this project ever intended, but I think thats partly what I expected of myself. Maybe the LIS/Apps department thought I was bringing more tech skills to the table than I actually have. Whatever it was, circumstances lead to something of an uphill battle.

Things did, however, get off to a pretty good start. Apps was interested in the LibraryThing tags and the LibraryThing for Libraries widget because the University of Iowa's OPAC, Ex Libris' Primo, has a new tag function that is relatively useless until there is a critical mass of collected tags. I looked into these things and also into other libraries using the widget and it made more sense to approach LibraryThing to see about purchasing a Tag Boost (copyright pending). LibraryThing was indeed already in negotiations about making this work, but it sounded like Ex Libris was being difficult about access to Primo code. LibraryThing staff said things were likely to be worked out in a month or two. At this point Apps felt it best just to sit on our hands and wait to see what happens with the negotiations.

Following the LibraryThing investigation, this project moved into its second phase... implementation of the Google Mini Search Appliance. More on that and my thoughts on my overall experience as a digital libraries fellow to come....

The end of an era

I know its been a spell since I forked over a flannel mouthful of fuss. And it ain' t because I've been full as a tick, roostered, or half seas over neither. Nope. Seems we got a spoke in the wheel. Not on account of any ole body, but just because sometimes things all come a cropper all by their lonesome. So nobody go running around with the scuttlebutt, waking up the wrong passenger. Yet I do reckon I feel I got it in the neck a bit. And I sure wouldn't mind throwing up the sponge and heading to the bone orchard because at this point in the semester I don't care a continental. Then again, I don't want nobody thinking I'm just trying to beat the devil around the stump. Politics. One thing I will say is that both of my mentors, the Big Bugs, are all aces-high, game as banty roosters... teaching a croaker half way between hay and librarian to fight like Kilkenny Cats.

Fall 2007, Weeks 9 - 11

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
-- Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965) --



"Don't be discouraged by a failure. It can be a positive experience. Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid." -- John Keats (1795 - 1821) --

The above are words of advice anyone taking on an experimental digital library project absolutely must keep in mind as they stumble along their merry way. I believe I began my last post with the famous last words " things are turning around," or something to that effect. The very next day, or shortly thereafter, the U-Matic deck malfunctioned yet again.


There once was a man named Bob, who took on an unpaid job.
He made some repairs, to a tape deck that had erred.
But now that he's gone I've got probs.

Bob isn't responding. And you know what? That is okay. The guy isn't paid to do work for the library. So what do we ? Herein lies the problem....

Special Collections will split the cost of a new deck. DLS, based on advice from Bob, thinks spending money on a new deck is silly since all decks will likely have the same problems. What we've been trying to figure out with this collection is - can we do this in-house? That is, can we reformat obsolete analog video media to a digital file with money only for storage with the equipment available in the library usable for no cost? After weeks and weeks of repeating failures we've decided the answer is no.

The deck is malfunctioning in two ways. 1) Its old and the mechanisms aren't engaging and releasing properly, and 2) the tapes are shedding. Sticky shed syndrome is a problem with our tapes. Not only are the magnetic particles flaking off and clogging the tape heads, but they are flaking off and degrading the video signal with every movement. We do not have the means to deal with tape cleaning, potential baking, and tape head cleaning. Time to outsource.

During the last three weeks Preservation got involved in the project and came up with some money. We now have the funds to have 30 tapes reformatted at the university's Center for Media Production. Not my first choice. They will reformat the tapes to DVD and save a digital copy on hard drives that DLS gives them. 10 tapes are being sent over but we have no idea what file format the digitals are going to be, or what quality of DVD media they use.

OH WELL!!!!!! Its come to my attention that the preservations issues are beyond my control. Far, far beyond my control. Maybe, one day, I'll be in a position with the authority and resources to preserve a video collection in my own vision.

So, Basically for the next week I worked selecting clips and compressing clips from the digital video files on the hard drive in the InfoArcade. The clips will go on the ATN web prototype. The clips are reformatted to flash video files (.flv) and are no more than 3 minutes in length for copyright purposes. I also extracted still images from the clips to use as thumbnails for the video clips.

Also during these three weeks I designed the interface, and am now tweaking it a little with the help of the DLS(?) webmaster. I should mention that any tapes with serious problems will be sent to VidiPax for resoration. With funding limited, we will use the web prototype with the clips from the thirty tapes CMP reformats as a visual aid in requesting a grant or other such funding to finish the project.

And the ongoing video preservation bibliography for the report I will submit to DLS about this project.

I talked with my mentor about next semester and it looks like there will be some work to be done on this project. So hopefully I can stay in the department working on a new project and doing work on this video project as it comes around.


Success isn't permanent, and failure isn't fatal. -- Mike Ditka (1939 - ) --

Fall 2007, Week 8

Full steam ahead. Chugging away at production.

Really not too much to say here. I guess I could say that I am totally pumped up about being in the full swing of production. Everything is going smoothly for once. Here's what I do:
Insert U-Matic tape into deck. Fast forward to the end, rewind to the beginnging. This acclimates tape the the environment and gets rid of bad tension on the spools.
Play tape into computer through DVCAM deck. While playing tape I capture in Final Cut Pro. I then export a DV NTSC 48 kHz Quicktime movie to the hard drive. I then transfer that file to the library server.

Next I select a segment of the video for the web collection, or use the whole thing and export a Flash video file (.flv). Move this to the server. Select a freeze frame from the video to use as a thumbnail for the video. Export as jpeg and move to server. I also clean up the ends of the video so there rough ins and outs. Though part of me wonders if I should be saving the color bars.

Next is the metadata creation, for which we're using Dublin Core. Here's a link to my single completed record: http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/atn&CISOPTR=0&CISOBOX=1&REC=1

The trouble with the metadata for me so far has been the uncontrolled vocabulary "Keywords" attribute. Its difficult to accurately define video art.

What else...? Oh somewhere in there we up load the .flv files to a different server that will house all the video for my collection.

Oh and a problem I ran into: 30 minutes of video is about 6.34 GB. When transfering these files over to the library server, the server connection times out. So what I have to do is cut these videos in thirds, keeping the segments under 3GB. This means that whn working with the files in the future we will have to stitch the video back together. Not too difficult, but still this NOT ideal.