Technological change, audience fragmentation and the explosion of new media mean tough times for the media. But media librarians are fighting cuts by diversifying, says Katharine Schopflin on the eve of AUKML’s September conference.
Despite the best efforts of many media library1 managers to convince their paymasters of the value of skilled professional staff, a depressing number of units have closed in the last 10 years. Downsizing is still on the agenda, with libraries at Associated Newspapers, the Jewish Chronicle and the Herald and Evening Times all facing serious cuts, if not outright closure this year.
Media libraries had their origins in the ‘morgues’ of newspapers – cuttings collections filed by subject and personality by clerical staff, where reluctant trainee journalists often had to spend a few months before being allowed to write their first stories.
In the 1980s, pioneers such as the late Justin Arundale2 were early adopters of online news sources and sought to professionalise the sector by promoting its librarians’ searching skills. When end-user access to these (and other sources) arrived in the 1990s, many information units were keen to diversify into managing subscription databases and training their users on them.
This often resulted in a rise in their profile and in enquiry numbers.3 However, the fact that journalists and programme-makers could access research tools without using the library convinced many managers and budget-owners that they were expendable.
The media industry
Most workplace libraries are subject to changes affecting their industries, as any commercial librarian made redundant after the 11 September attacks in the US will know. The media has been particularly hard-pressed by deregulation, the challenges of maintaining advertising income in a time of proliferation of new media, media conglomeration and cuts to the public sector.
In the early years of this decade, commercial media organisations talked about a crisis, following ‘the worst advertising recession in 30 years’.4 Things were no better in the BBC, where audience fragmentation was making it difficult to justify funding from a compulsory licence fee.
Newspaper circulation has been in long-term decline5 and, today, publications fear competition from the web: ‘As the amount of information available online explodes, papers will inevitably face a losing fight to hold on to readers’.6 Conglomeration, particularly among regional newspapers and commercial broadcasting, has created further opportunities for staff cuts, and the library is often the easiest target.
Disintermediation
Most media libraries moved from being managers of collections of newspaper cuttings to research information services during the 1990s. For many libraries, proving that they are more than cuttings repositories has been a huge challenge. The author worked in a unit between 2000 and 2001 which saw a massive fall in enquiries once hardcopy newspaper cuttings were no longer collected, as many users simply felt the library did not exist without its physical manifestation. Moreover, media library researchers often find it harder than other sectors to prove they have distinctive skills, as many journalists and programme-makers characterise themselves as ‘good at research’.
This has possibly been exacerbated by the lack of professional identity within the sector, where, traditionally, media librarians, despite their skills, never acquired qualifications.
It pays to diversify
Many libraries have risen to this challenge by diversifying. As in most workplace libraries, responsibility for purchasing and maintaining online subscriptions most often lies with the library – in one unit to the extent that the Information Manager is entitled to contact the line manager of any journalist over-using a database and insist on further training.
At the Guardian, some detailed analysis of the newspaper’s activity resulted in the Research & Information Unit being deemed an ‘essential component in the creation of quality journalism’.7 And, following its recommendation, researchers began to sit with journalists, attend news conferences and receive proper credit bylines for their work.
Following the introduction of end-user news databases, Colin Hunt, librarian at the Liverpool Echo/Daily Post library, moved the library activity from news research to exploitation of their unique collections and local knowledge to provide content for special supplements and compilations.
At another publication, the current awareness service is tailored to upcoming editorial features, a service too specific to be outsourced. All these activities are vital to convince parent organisations that information staff offer unique and valuable skills.
Marketing library services
Most surviving media libraries have maintained their enquiry numbers through promotion. Classic methods, such as posters and leaflets, becoming part of the company induction and holding ‘brown bag lunches’, have all been useful. However, journalists and programme-makers sometimes need more subtle methods, such as using training sessions as a showcase for library skills.
Show them what they're missing
In her keynote speech at the last AUKML conference, News International’s Judith Dunn remarked that ‘journalists are prepared to wade through pages of drivel rather than ask for help’.8 Many have found that the best way to convince a journalist that they are not as accomplished in online searching as they think is to show them the advanced search screen of their favourite search engine, indicate that others exist and demonstrate the sharp recall and precision which can be achieved from searching databases using nested boolean combinations.
This can also be the way to let end-users know what they are failing to find from their search. When they introduced a news database at IPC magazines in 2003, according to figures held by their Information Manager Joanne Playfoot, enquiry numbers actually increased, partly because staff used database induction sessions to promote the range of their other services and hardcopy holdings, of which many journalists were unaware.
Newspaper archives
A key role for many newspaper libraries from the 1980s has been the task of archiving or ‘cleaning-up’ newspaper articles’ text so they can be sold on to online database providers. This includes ensuring headlines and bylines are correctly placed and in some cases adding keyword metadata. Some libraries have begun to question whether they should be spending time and energy on this time-consuming, low-skill, manual process when it must eventually become automated.
Ian Watson, departing Head of Rights and Information at the Herald, has said: ‘Archiving is a millstone that will always be seen as an overhead to be cut or out-sourced.’ A few libraries have done this, but most have kept it in house, usually citing reasons that third parties are slower and less accurate.
A more recent development has been the appearance of newspaper and magazine digital image archives. The first of these was the Times Literary Supplement centenary archive which offered facscimile images of the publication with manual field indexing retrieval.
More recent digitisation projects have included the British Library’s, which concentrates on out-of-copyright material9 and the massive Times Digital Archive. These pioneer projects have tackled huge problems of scanning from old bound copies and attempting to gain accurate retrieval from optical character recognition.10 There remain unexplored issues of copyright held in items such as advertisements appearing on the page. However, as many media librarians have become custodians of in-house archives (for example of Quark Express files or PDFs) they will have a vital role to play in any future exploitation.
Managing digital television collections
At the start of this century, radio and television programmes began to be ‘born digital’, that is recorded on digital formats and edited online. This has implications for long-term film library storage, previously concerned with the preservation of physical objects.
At the BBC, digital transmission and production systems have been introduced to some departments, representing a challenge for the archive to meet the needs of staff who have changed the way they work. In fact, these systems were introduced with little consultation of archive staff, and one system, because of limited server space, requires news material to be downloaded on to analogue tape for long-term storage.
The big challenge for broadcasting organisations therefore is to ensure that the specifications for any digital production and transmission systems include scope for archiving and retrieval of their media assets, something about which production departments themselves care very little.
Cataloguing and indexing
It has been to television libraries’ advantage that, while it is possible to make research catalogues available to end-users,11 professional staff are still needed to catalogue and index the material in the first place. However, while it is a feature of broadcasting’s digital age that channels and untransmitted material proliferate, few television libraries have been able to increase their staff to capture this expanded output.
Technological solutions on the horizon include speech-recognition and computer-assisted indexing software. This technology translates the audio from radio and television into text, which can then be catalogued automatically. However, such technology is at an early stage and it is expected that professionals will be needed to train the software, correct indexing and manage taxonomies. In the US head office of one commercial news station, the technology has been introduced to allow a greater range of cataloguing, without any contingent staff cuts.12
Picture libraries
Some of the earliest end-user accessible media asset management systems have stored and retrieved pictures, which require far less online storage space than moving images. Commercial archives have been selling images online since the start of the decade, and the BBC introduced an in-house system in 1998. A librarian at the Scotsman newspaper commented on its online archive in 1999 that ‘the biggest pleasure is that the end-users now have direct access to the archive from their own desktops… If an image is well-captioned and keyworded it can be accurately retrieved for use in many different situations within seconds’.13
Another advantage of such systems is the ability to control the copyright of images which might belong to the organisation using it, to an agency allowing limited use through a commercial licence or to a library which has allowed a single use. The BBC’s system offers colour-coded retrieval, within which only BBC-copyright images may be downloaded by all users.
Pictures are in demand
Picture libraries are among the most flourishing of media libraries. One publication reported a rise in enquiries after their end-user system was introduced and, as with television material, professional staff are vital to ensure that the image is correctly captioned and retrievable through indexing. Many libraries have found that saving their organisations money by controlling copyright and access to agency prints has raised their prestige. Others have been able to sell copyright images commercially, thus converting the library from an overhead to an income-generating unit.
However, there remain challenges. Veteran picture researcher Diana Korchien spoke in 2003 of how her role had been devalued by the appearance of commercial online databases. Whereas journalists and authors had previously relied on her knowledge of picture libraries to obtain the very best images, now many were satisfied with whatever they could download cheaply from sites such as Corbis and Getty Images.
These online collections contain tiny percentages of their complete holdings, and many famous collections have not been digitised, meaning a far smaller range of photographs now makes it to publication. Even the curators of in-house collections struggle to remind journalists that an image that is not available online may still exist. And, as consultant Michael Brown told AUKML in 2002, anyone embarking on a digitisation project knows that five years later they could complete it more cheaply and at a higher resolution.
Conclusion
It is without doubt an interesting time for media librarians. However, despite the challenges the profession faces in convincing broadcasters and publishers that their skills are vital to the authority, depth and quality of their output, repeated predictions of the death of the media library have been exaggerated. Media channels use many interactive and portable formats few of us have yet dealt with professionally. That they will need both to be populated with well-researched material and made accessible in the long term indicates media librarians’ importance. What is clear is that no one in the sector can afford to be complacent – and here, more than anywhere, training, networking and continuing professional development are essential.
References
1 For this article, media libraries are defined as libraries and information units in media organisations, that is, newspapers, magazines, broadcasting organisations and other types of hard-copy and online publishing, rather than multimedia collections in academic libraries.
2 Harry Woodroof. ‘Justin Arundale: apostle of information science and former librarian of the Independent.’ Independent, September 25 2002, p. 22.
3 Various examples are given in Katharine Schopflin and Richard Nelsson ‘Media libraries.’ Survey of British Library and Information Work 2001-5 (ed. John Bowman), to be published autumn 2006.
4 John Cassey. ‘Where’s the cash?’ Guardian, 19 August 2002.
5 Roy Greenslade. ‘The shape of things to come?’ Guardian, 10 November 2003.
6 James Robinson. ‘Mind the gap: the press must follow readers online.’ Observer, 28 May 2006.
7 Findings, Conclusions and Recommendations of the Process Review. Guardian Newspapers Ltd internal document, December 2001.
8 Judith Dunn. ‘If media libraries didn’t exist we would have to invent them.’ Essential Skills for Information, 12 March 2005.
9www.bl.uk/collections/britishnewspapers1800to1900.html
10 Matt Holland’s account of the TV Times digitisation project covers these issues in detail (www.aukml.org.uk/TV_Times.htm).
11 Although one commercial news librarian said that research enquiries increased by 100 per cent after it was introduced.
12 Personal communication with Library Manager, commercial news station, 2 May 2006.
13 Fiona Boyd. ‘Electronic picture archiving: pleasure or pain?’ Deadline, August 1999.
Katharine Schopflin is Chair of the UK Association of Media Librarians (katharine.schopflin@gmail.com).
Updated: 23 August 2006