Draft Project Proposal—Digitization of Owen Distinguished Speaker Videotapes
February 16, 2006
Project Summary/Abstract:
This project includes digitization, preservation, and creation of a web interface for approximately 118 videotapes made from 1973-1998 as part of the Owen Distinguished Speaker Series. Speakers include, for example, CEO’s of Coca Cola, Sears Roebuck, American Express, and Presidents of General Motors and the New York Stock Exchange, to name a few. The videos currently reside on shelves in the Walker Management Library, with some in older video formats and some on small diskettes. Their usefulness in their current format is limited. It is not known whether backups exist.
Because of Vanderbilt Library staff’s expertise in video digitization, thanks to our experience with the TV News Archive, we are well-positioned to reformat these tapes into something that can be accessed via the web. We also have at our disposal the various types of equipment required to digitize the various video formats. Reformatting is allowable within copyright restrictions. We also have experience in creating interfaces for accessing digital content.
Regarding other copyright concerns, many of the speakers originally signed a release form allowing Owen students to watch the videos. At the very least, the digital videos can be made available to students via the Owen School’s IP range. For the long term, it would be desirable to contact the speakers or their companies and request permission to make the digital videos more broadly accessible.
Completion of the project will occur when the videos are digitized, preserved, described, and made available within Owen, with a long term plan for contacting speakers to request permission for open access. A further desirable step would be setting up a process to begin digitally recording and storing lectures of new distinguished speakers as they take place. One more desirable step would be to create digital transcripts of the speeches.
Timeline:
(actual projected completion dates will depend upon start date)
Within six months of the start date, the project team and assigned staff should be able to: • Obtain and review copies of release forms • Design interface and metadata scheme • Reformat tapes to digital format • Create and store preservation copy • Create metadata
Over the long term (during the next year or more), the project team will: • Contact speakers for broader permission • Create digital transcripts • Develop plan for recording future speakers
Statement of Need:
These videos form a “hidden treasure” within the Walker Management Library. The value of preserving them and making them easier to find and use is unquestionable. Because the speakers have been prominent in global business, hearing their visions, opinions, or business practices of 10-30 years ago would be very informative. Initially the value of digitizing the videos would be through making them much more accessible to the graduate students in Owen. If speakers’ permissions to make the videos openly accessible can be obtained, they would be available to anyone searching for them on the web, and this would highlight not only the speakers but also the Owen School.
Project Champion/owner:
The project owner is the Digital Library Steering Committee (DLSC), with significant participation by the Metadata Committee and the Collections Committee. The DLSC will coordinate with other committees as needed.
Project leader/coordinator:
Amia Baker will serve as project leader.
Documentation and Reporting:
The project leader will report project activities to the DLSC on a monthly basis for the duration of the project.
Other Personnel involved/required:
The project requires at least one additional project team member to assist with the technology tasks associated with this project, and at least one member chosen from the Cataloging team to help with metadata creation. In addition, a student assistant should be hired to perform many of the digitization tasks.
Other staff, including Owen technology staff, may be called for consultation or assistance.
Related Project(s):
This project will benefit from the experience of the TV News Archive and our growing involvement with other Vanderbilt video and broadcast collections.
Budget:
(not all costs are known)
Technology: We would encode the videotapes in to MPEG-2 format. The 6mb/sec bitrate we regularly use would probably be about right for these videotapes as well. This encoding would result in files about 3GB in size for each hour of content. This would be about 350GB of MPEG-2 files altogether.
To provide access to the collection would involve transcoding the MPEG-2 files into Real Media. The Real Media files are about 400MB per hour, so 118 of these would involve about 47GB of storage. TV News, ITS, or Owen could provide the storage, for varying costs.
$120-240 ($1-2 per disc) to create preservation DVD-R
The actual digitizing of the collection could be performed on equipment that is already available in the library.
Staff: Creating an interface in which to browse and search the collection and a system for entering the metadata will be a simple increment to work the library is already performing for Vanderbilt News Service, so no notable cost is incurred. TV News or other student assistant enlisted to encode the videos ~200 hours to encode videos @ $7.50/hour = $1500 Cataloging staff to create metadata ~120 hours to create metadata @ $22/hour = $2640 Staff cost estimate = $4140.
These are estimates only; total cost would depend on the level of staff and actual time required. Cataloging staff could be assigned the responsibility as part of their work assignment. It would be worthwhile and reasonable to present this proposal to the Dean of the Owen School to see if any monetary support would be available.
Assessment:
This project will result in the creation of a new digital product, the Owen Distinguished Speakers Series, 1973-1998. Success of the project would be shown by a usable digital collection of the videos.
Active participation in project teams is critical to the success of the library’s strategic plan. All project team leaders will be asked to complete an assessment form for project team members at the completion of the project. -