The modern news library

A 1960s news library

The current issue of Refer, journal of the Information Services Group, looks at library services for writers and journalists. As well as articles about the British Library's Newsroom and a look at how scribes are using social media, it includes a piece by me about the Guardian's Research & Information team. Archive picture on the left rather more interesting than the modern open-plan office.

Nostalgia for press cuttings

Despite the prevalence of full-text databases, digital archives and other electronic sources, old-fashioned press cuttings can still be a valuable research tool for journalists. I wrote about this, along with the nostalgia for the scrappy files, for the Guardian's Open door column.

The response was predictably misty-eyed, with the piece providing an excuse for people to reminisce about the good old days of Fleet Street. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it was interesting to discover that a campaign has been started by a group of journalists in Leeds to try and preserve cuttings libraries. Presserve aims to identity titles which still have such collections, with a view to estimating the amount of work (and the costs) necessary to digitise the material and make it publicly available online.

More details can be found on their website and a letter about the group appeared in the Guardian.

The Spoiler

My holiday reading included Annalena McAfee's novel, The Spoiler. Set in 1997, the book follows young reporter Tamara Sim as she profiles the much-feted aging war correspondent Honor Tait in the hope of landing a staff job on a national newspaper. A satire on what used to be called Fleet Street, the book includes very funny descriptions of life on both broadsheets and tabloids, as well as exposing all the backstabbing, lying and cheating that goes on. 

Having said that, students of journalism may well want to read it in the hope of picking up some tips - particularly on how/how not to carry out an interview. Also, a recurring theme throughout the book is how the media is on the cusp of technological revolutions - and the resistance of many of the characters to the internet shows just how far we have come over the past 15 years. 

That includes the library. McAfee's description of the old cuttings collection is almost spot on:

'the busiest department in the building, a maze of tightly packed, floor-to-ceiling metal shelves crammed with hanging files containing envelopes of photographs and wads of cuttings on everyone who had ever appeared in a newspaper'.

And as a senior editor explains its purpose to Tamara, 

'Here is the compost...which nourishes our freshest bloom; the poop behind the scoop. '

Very good. One minor quibble though is the use of 'the Morgue' as a name for the newspaper library. Perfectly fine for a North American archive but in Britain it's nearly always 'cuts' or just 'the library'. Of course this is something that any self-respecting fact-checker would have spotted...

Knights of the scissors

The life of the news librarian used to revolve around a pile of newspapers, a pair of scissors and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the organisation's classification system. I was reminded of those long gone days when I came across an 1827 Manchester Guardian article about French censors chopping out offending passages from newspapers. The piece is an interesting read but it's the description of 'knights of the scissors' fulfilling 'thought-clipping functions' that caught my eye - a perfect description for all those people who used to gut the papers for their news archives.

Read the article here.

Guardian 190: 1821-2011

The first issue of the Guardian appeared on 5 May 1821. To mark the occasion, @guardianlibrary is tweeting articles from the Guardian and important moments in the paper’s history throughout the month – one per year, starting with 1821 and coming right up to the present. Even the dullest years, 1835 for instance, will get a mention in this rapid run-through of the past couple of centuries. Each tweet will link to an article or image on the Guardian’s new From the archive blog. We’ll tweet several times a day between now and May 30, providing by the end of the month 190 fascinating insights into the way the Guardian has evolved.

See more on the Guardian 190 site.

All Facts Considered

In an age when fact-checking often goes little further than a quick glance at Wikipedia (good resource that it is though), it's heartening to hear about a book that is not only full of facts, but is written by a professional whose job it is to ensure they are all correct. All Facts Considered: The Essential Library of Inessential Knowledge is a compendium of information about history, science and the arts written by Kee Malesky, librarian at NPR (National Public Radio).

See here for an article about the book. This includes excerpts plus a few of Kee's favourite questions such as:

- The first e-book was the Declaration of Independence, typed into a computer in 1971 by the founder of Project Gutenberg.

- Red hair, the rarest human color (less than 2 percent of the population), is caused by a variation in what is called the "Celtic" gene.

All sounds fascinating and I'm about to order a copy for the Guardian library (where we double check everything). Wonder if it's going to be made available online...

Calculating column inches

Calculating the number of column inches, or words, a publication has devoted to a particular subject is a popular journalistic tool. It's a rough and ready way of showing interesting trends in coverage and it's just the kind of job that lands on the news librarian's desk.

In days of yore a ruler would be used to measure each column. In more recently times the job has involved doing a search in a newspaper text archive such as LexisNexis, or Factiva, noting the word count for each relevant story, and then adding them up. It may sound like an imprecise science but if done properly it can throw up interesting results. For example, a few years ago, there was surprise over the fact that the Guardian had devoted so much attention to Celebrity Big Brother (click to enlarge).

(Guardian, February 6, 2006)

However, changes in the way in which newspaper content is archived has made the job a lot harder to do. With the duplication of articles, archiving of picture captions, trailers, adverts etc, it is nigh on impossible to get a true picture of coverage. It was with some interest then that I noticed that outfits like Journalisted can do the job automatically. Just type in a subject and results spill out. To continue with the Big Brother theme, the site revealed that over the past week or so there have been more articles about the contestant Chantelle Houghton, than those about the Pakistan Floods. As explained on the site:

"All the information on Journalisted is collected automatically from the websites of 21 British news outlets (altogether, this means 14 news websites, since many daily papers share a website with their sister Sunday paper). Articles are indexed by journalist, based on the byline to the article. Keywords and statistics are automatically generated, and the site searches for any blogs or social bookmarking sites linking to each article"

Of course it's not actually searching what appeared in paper copies of news organisations so results could be slightly skewed, especially on a site which carries lots of blog coverage. But as the whole point is to get a snapshot of how something is being reported, it's a great resource. There are several other sites offering such a service. Now, if someone could just work a clever way of doing the same thing with printed columns in newspapers...

World Cup coverage in The Guardian

Martin Belam writes on Currybetdotnet about a display of Guardian World Cup coverage, compiled by the paper's Research & Information team. The pieces, ranging from 1950 to 2006, include Cup final reports as well all the usual stories - Hand of God, murdered goalkeepers, Gazza's tears etc, etc.

Until a couple of years ago, the task of finding these articles would have involved a nausea-inducing session at the microfilm reader. Thankfully, such projects can now be carried out using the Guardian/Observer digital archive.

Survival lessons for news libraries

Searcher magazine features an in-depth article about the fate of news libraries: Survival Lessons for Libraries looks at the current situation and pointers to where we go next. It's a detailed piece of work, and includes Michelle Quigley's News Library Layoffs and Buyouts, a table of all the changes in US news libraries over the past couple of years.

In one section Dan Kennedy, professor of journalism at Northeastern University, states that news librarians have been "made utterly obsolete by technology." It may well be true and its certainly a point that's crying out to be debated, but there again, so does a statement like "carpenters have been made utterly obsolete by flat-packs". Anyway, I'd recommend all those with an interest in news libraries to read the piece.

Also worth taking a look at is 200 Moments that Transformed Journalism, 2000-2009 on the Poyner site. Compiled by David Shedden, its library director, the moments were selected from his New Media Timeline (1969-2010).

New roles

To counter the oft-reported stories about the 'death' of media libraries, take a look at Katy Stoddard's Writing ourselves new roles in the May issue of Library & Information Update. As I've mentioned before, Cilip have shoved all their content behind a paywall, but there's a shorter version on the Librarian of Tomorrow blog.

Handbook for Media Librarians

The Winter 2010 issue of News Library News, the quarterly bulletin of the Special Libraries Association News Division, features a review of a Handbook for Media Librarians, edited by Katharine Schopflin. Through chapters written by leading practioners, the book explores the issues of central importance facing media librarians, archivists, researchers etc. Subjects include managing intranets, picture libraries and legal issues for news databases and archives.

The book came out in March 2008, so some of the information will be out of date. However, this is a good and honest review, with a recommendation that the handbook should be on the reading list of all aspiring news librarians. Read more here.

Evolution lesson

Despite the rather sensationalist headline Endangered Species: News librarians are a dying breed, an article on the Columbia Journalism Review site puts a strong case for keeping information professionals in the newsroom. As the writer, Craig Silverman, sees it:

"Now that every reporter and editor has access to Google and a wide range of search technologies and online databases, the thinking is that they don’t need to call upon the Boolean expertise of librarians. You can see how it makes sense - except then the facts start to get in the way. In fact, the modern news librarian seems in many ways more important than ever. Even those old clipping files still come in handy."

Of course this means little to the many news organisations across the globe who have closed their information centres. According to statistics compiled by Michele Quigley, a researcher at the Palm Beach Post, over 250 news librarian jobs have been lost in the US since 2007. No such data exists for the UK but I would guess that at least 30 posts have been lost over the past year or so. The media libraries that survive do so in part because their management still believe in the value of the employing researchers, plus, as Amy Disch, library director of the Columbus Dispatch, explains, they have adapted their skills and knowledge to meet the needs of a modern newsroom.

To return to the title, it's true that the days of armies of people filing cuttings are well and truly over. But, without wishing to get too Darwinian, news librarianship starting evolving with the advent of online information, way back in the mid-1980s. News groups who recognised this are now reaping the benefits of having skilled librarian/researchers on their staff.

It's a vexed issue

What better way to start a blog about news librarianship than to report a victory. Last night saw a team comprising of librarians from The Daily Telegraph, Times and The Guardian come a very close second in the annual SLA Europe Winter Warmer pub quiz.

Big deal, you may say. But the simple point I want to make is that news librarians still exist. There might not be so many of us around, but a few serious media organisations still believe that employing information professionals is integral to creation of quality journalism.

Anyway, vexed issue is going to be thoughts and ramblings of a news librarian as he makes his way through an ever changing media landscape.