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Vanderbilt’s Open Web Project

print   email   discuss A Step Closer: Vanderbilt’s OpenWeb Project and the Future of Public Media
by John Cheney

An invaluable resource for researchers and documentarians alike, the Vanderbilt Television News Archive houses over 40,000 hours of taped news programs from major networks’ evening broadcasts since 1968. Last year, the staff at the Vanderbilt archive began a project to increase traffic on their site by mirroring their database – previously available only through the main page of the archive’s web site – onto a set of web pages searchable by popular engines like Google or Yahoo!. This simple reproduction opened a wide set of doors to people previously unable to find Vanderbilt’s content. Since the OpenWeb project started, traffic on the archive’s site increased two-fold. From July 2005 to April 2006, income from videotape rental nearly doubled as well.

In April 2006, Vanderbilt’s systems librarian Marshal Breeding published an article titled “How We Funneled Searchers from Google to our Collections by Catering to Web Crawlers,“ outlining this process. In it, he explains how opening the Vanderbilt archive to the web population has helped to keep the archive afloat. Its status as a non-profit necessarily depends on a constant revenue stream to recoup costs, and OpenWeb’s growing financial success is providing Vanderbilt with the much-needed income requisite to maintain the archive in its precarious state – and to continue serving the public with access to its content.

Other archives serving the public have followed similar digital paths. The Prelinger Archive, which houses a collection of over 4,000 videos of early 20th century corporate advertisements and promotional films, has put its content online and made it searchable through the popular engines as well. The National Archives of the United States has also provided access to its digital records through its web site and its records are now available through search engine query.

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