The Vanderbilt Television News Archive has been recording, preserving, and providing access to television news broadcasts of the national networks since August 5, 1968. There are currently over 1.1 million broadcast records in the system, and all are searchable via the VTNA website.
In recent years, a persistent theme in user feedback has been slow search result retrieval times, which impedes a user’s ability to conduct research and find the information they need, leading to a frustrating experience. Recently, we were able to improve the architecture of the search portion of the website. By querying a different data set and utilizing search indexes, we were able to improve search result retrieval times for the majority of searches. In most cases, retrieval time has been reduced by roughly 70%, sometimes more! We were also able to improve the relevancy ranking sort option, helping users find relevant broadcast clips faster.
The Television News Archive website is one of many systems the LTDS team supports.