The opinions expressed in Deadline are not necessarily those of the AUKML.
NEW CHAIR: RICHARD NELSSON
I become AUKML Chair as the group enters young adulthood. Twenty-one years after its birth and things appear to be going very well;
membership is holding up, finances are in good shape, there's an exciting meeting programme in place including the conference in April
and Deadline is appearing once again. However, as we all know, the industry we work in is a very different beast to that of 1986.
Jobs have been lost and people have left the profession although often to do the same sort of work but with a different job title.
It is with this in mind that AUKML will soon be launching a detailed survey into the current state of media librarianship -
what sort of jobs people are doing, their job titles and where they're working. It will be carried out by
IRN Research
and we should have more details in the next few weeks.
Before I go, I must thank Katharine Schopflin, the former Chair, for her sterling work over the past couple of years.
Of course she isn't disappearing from AUKML as she's helping to organise the Manchester Conference and editing a book on
media librarianship. Hope to see you at the next meeting or the Christmas party.
ON THE OUTSIDE: LIFE AFTER MEDIA LIBRARIANSHIP by Elena Botterill
It is now almost a year since I took the much debated and decidedly difficult decision
to leave not only the world of media librarianship but also the industry as a whole.
I had been running the library at the Nottingham Evening Post for just short of a decade
and up until six months earlier had been perfectly happy, thinking that I was pretty much
settled for the duration. But this, of course, is a dangerous place to be – settled, and possibly
a little complacent about my role I was in for rather an unpleasant ride – a ride that would
ultimately lead me away from the profession I thought I had chosen for life.
The management structure at the newspaper was changing and the new regime had little disguised feelings about the low worth of the library, preferring that short sighted view that if you give the journalists Google and they no longer need a librarian! Coupled with this I was given such worthy tasks as filing, inputting letters and poems and my personal favourite – compiling the daily quiz with questions such as who is married to David Beckham (give me
strength…please!)
At first I found it all rather a laugh – if they were stupid enough to pay me a manager's salary and then use me to do tasks more suited to an editorial assistant well that was their mistake. But it gradually dawned on me that my professional confidence was waning and ultimately I knew this could not continue. I also faced a series of meetings with my line manager (a senior editor at the paper and a person with no finer feeling for the role of the librarian) that left me bruised and seriously demoralised. It was after one particularly harsh meeting that knew my time at the Post was drawing to a close.
For a time I felt a sense of inadequacy that I was not strong enough to stand up and fight my corner. But now I realise that is wasn't me that was weak, but rather that they no longer wanted a librarian and anyone would have faced the same treatment.But the nagging question of what I would do next was a tricky one. I knew there was little, if any, chance of me finding work as a media librarian without having to leave the area and this was not on option. Maybe it was time to go back to academic librarianship – a much more realistic option as Nottingham has two universities, both with large libraries.
An interview at the Careers Library of the University of Nottingham convinced me that this branch of librarianship would no longer be for me - far too staid after the noisy, fast paced and irreverent world of the newsroom.
Slowly the realisation that my future career would be away from the world I had trained for and loved for most of my working life dawned.
This was sad and not a little daunting but also oddly liberating.
Giving my notice in was wonderful – particularly as my less than pleasant line manager was convinced that I was a spineless librarian without the to survive 'on the outside'. His look of surprise will stay with me forever and never fails to make me smile when I think of it.
So now I'm the marketing director of a print company. It is a totally different world and I love it. The learning curve has been huge and I still have a long way to go, but it is all mine (well along with the other two directors) and the decisions I make are also mine. I also find that many of the skills I learnt as a librarian do transfer into the world of business and that is a distinct advantage.
I still miss the world of media librarianship – I miss the buzz of the newsroom, the rush of adrenaline on big news days, I miss doing the job I trained long and hard for and I certainly miss the press trips I was lucky enough to get (last year two weeks in Venice – this year a wet week in Scotland!) but I have no regrets.
As for the library… well that is now run by two part time assistants, they didn't replace me and the journalists now hardly frequent the place (Google rules!) It is a sad reflection of where our profession finds itself and has been a sad journey for me personally. But I look around sometimes and can't help but think that this also did me a big favour and pushed me into finding the strength to do something different and for that I am grateful.
Elena Botterill was Librarian at the Nottingham Evening Post and a former AUKML regional newspaper representative.
PRIMROSE HILL SET
Many of AUKML's founding members met up in the summer. A very good time was had by all.
To view photos
NEWS
New York Times content previously available through its paid, TimesSelect subscription service is now free; the subscription service will be replaced by an advertising-based model. TimesSelect content includes 23 news and opinion columns and access to archives.
TimesSelect
Rupert Murdoch has also appeared to indicate strongly a planned shift to free content on the Wall Street Journal, saying "we'd get much more than [$30 million subscriber fees] back in ad dollars" (which prompts the question of how long the FT can maintain its strict subscription policy).
As well as attracting far greater ad revenues there could be scope for gaining attention and further profit via social network sites.
WSJ Article
The walls really are coming down: FT.com responds with a plan from mid- October to allow free access to 30 stories per month, including premium content that is currently behind a pay wall.
FT.com
From the Washington Post: the paper has launched a fact checking website so that speeches and sound bites given off by US presidential hopefuls can be scrutinised. The US presidential election is scheduled for 4 November 2008.
Washington Post
BBC Online is to experiment with a wiki project that allows users to edit and update its parliamentary constituency pages. The project will go live as soon as Gordon Brown calls an election.
The British Library is imminently to launch access to a 43 titles, or a million pages, of C19th national and regional newspapers together with some specialist newspapers on particular historical themes such as reform and politics.
The Economist's complete facsimile run from 1843 to 2000, is available fully searchable online from September 2007.
The Guardian will launch a fully searchable digital archive of its content from 1821 - 1975, to be followed by Observer material at a later date.
GREEN WITH ENVY by Graeme Boyd
My cousin used to work for a charity in London; she hated it. I could never understand why. I always thought a charity would be one of the most relaxed types of organizations to work for. In my mind it was like the Cancer Research shop compared to Woolworths. In the Cancer Research shop you can have a cup of tea at the counter, play your own music, catch your own shoplifters and have first pick on the daily stock. Woolworths – though I love it – is much more businesslike.
So Greenpeace (http://www.greenpeace.org/international/) is groovy.
No doubt about it. That doesn't mean that everyone who works or volunteers for it is groovy, but it definitely has its own groovy thing going on.
I love the Robinson Crusoe side of it. The mixed dorm feel. The vegan canteen and the green bar nights. If I regret anything about my past 10 years in the library world it's that I was always choked to death by people. Greenpeace gives you a chance to bring your own ideas to the table, no matter how zany. Your own working method.
Your own confidence. You can create your own wee Greenpeace. You can contribute to any area or campaign and not feel like a substitute for Partick Thistle. Most of the staff here are experts in their field; from marine biologists and nuclear energy physicists to boat drivers and climbers. Most of them have led the high life for a while in the private sector only to decide to turn their lives around for half the pay and double the hours.
It's quite reaffirming to work with so many volunteers. I'm a great fan of work experience or work placements but at Greenpeace they really interact with the team and become part of it. I only found out a friend of mine had been volunteering for three months after he told me at the bar that he couldn't buy me another drink. Obviously I demanded an explanation! I don't get paid much – no one does – but you learn loads. Tree climbing, shark mating, oil reserves exploitation, tuna breeding. Did I say sharks? I love sharks. They only kill humans if they get in their way, and even then it's because they are scared and don’t know what else to do. A bit like the dragon in the cave scenario. So I watch footage of shark finning – fisherman catch shark, cut off fins, throw shark back in water and watch shark sink and drown – pretty feeble stuff. Why? So the hoi polloi can feel some sort of spiritual affinity and have shark fin soup at $200 a bowl. I have to take myself outside and have a walk around the block and think of a Scottish peat marsh. Or a dolphin bycatch. Or a whale trap. Or the flattening of 50 football pitches of untouched Amazon forest by huge petrol pouring lorries driven by kids with their feet on the wheel, drinking a coke, listening to Busta Rhymes.
The day to day running of the video archive involves dealing with internal requests (from any of the 43 national regional offices
worldwide) and external requests from broadcasters, production companies.
We also deal with the public, students and educational based institutions.
I work with a video cataloguer (who catalogues new content) and a production team including producers, editors and video technicians who all help shape the process of making a documentary or news feature.
Some of the footage I charge for, some I don't (in some cases we have valuable footage which is not available elsewhere). It all depends who is requesting it, what they want the footage for and how long for. I always write a licence to send out with footage clarifying our terms and conditions. The main thing – in my opinion – is for the footage
to be seen and for Greenpeace to get a credit.
Just now it is a bit of a mix 'n' match as to how we catalogue. We are trying to create our own DAMS (Digital Asset Management system) - called Godot - via our in-house indexing system for digital content held on a separate server. That's going okay but it can become a bit of a headache when we have deal with the rushes tapes or different versions, languages or edits. In my mind it is quite a small archive, maybe 20,000 tapes, from the late 1970s to today. Therefore it is very much do-able that we can have the entire archive digitised and ready for external viewing/sharing. I think that other archives that cannot support digital media will increasingly find that they are working out of step with the broadcast industry and be considered archaic.
Even the smallest archives are purchasing DAMS systems and embarking on the chock-a-block road to digitisation. Still, should I concentrate on digitising and managing our current archive or on the abundance of footage on 1 Inch tape, U-Matic, 16mm film which needs to be transferred - at high cost – to a more suitable viewing format?
So you meet people and they tell you they would loooovvvveeee to have a job that means something, that's worth something. Sure, join Greenpeace. It's a good information resource if nothing else.
Very factual, always researched to the nines. But I always say, just try and think outside the box. Take a step back and have a look around. This world is beautiful. Even more so, when you realise what's in it. You don't have to join anything for that.
Graeme Boyd is Video Access Librarian, Greenpeace International, Amsterdam.
GEORGE JOHNSON
It was with great sadness that we learned that George Johnson had died, in June. George, a former librarian at Associated News and an AUKML stalwart in the early days, was a larger than life character and great company. He will probably be best remembered though for his forthright views, especially on the development of the profession (although he wouldn't dream of using such a word) At the 1991 Darlington Conference, I think, after a heated discussion about online, changing roles of media librarians etc, George stood up and told us to forget what we'd just heard; all journalists wanted from a press library was a cuttings file and somewhere for a quick chat and a skive. George expanded upon these views in his regular Deadline column which ran from 1987 until 1993 when he retired. It was rare though for a piece to appear without something having been chopped on account of its non-PC content.
Here are a couple of the less-offensive examples:
Please Sir, my arm hurts...
Deadline IV (4) October 1990
I feel I must say something about the latest In-Disease- RSI. It appears to me to be a load of codswallop when you think what RSI should stand for:
R (ather) S(tupid) I (nertia)
R (igid) S (tampers) I (ndex) F (inger)
R (eal) S (cissors) I(naction)
You know I can't remember anyone suffering from the above who wasn't cured by a warning. The refusal of people to accept change without fuss seems to fetch on these strange maladies. Mind you, a friend of mine went to the doctor about stiffness in the limbs and the doctor diagnosed RSI. My friend said "Thank you, I'll use a condom in future."
Temptations for librarians
Deadline Spring 1988
Some thoughts on the temptations when a new journalist enters our domain for the first time. You should ask yourself:
WHO is this nice young man; how can I help him?
NOT what does this berk want? He looks an evil cove.
WHAT is the best and quickest way to send him away satisfied?
NOT get rid of him quickly, my tea is getting cold
WHY does he need this? Is there anything relevant to the subject I can help him with?
NOT the Newsdesk had this stuff half an hour ago; why can't the fools get their act together?
WHERE had he come from? He must be good
NOT where in the world do they get these prunes from?
(enough.ed)
SNIPPETS
Phone a friend
After last year's 20th birthday celebrations, Deadline decided that the collective urge to wallow in nostalgia was over and it was time to start looking to the future. However, a little gem in Grey Cardigan's column in a recent Press Gazette (September 28) was just too good to ignore. Commenting on Piers Morgan picking Larry, a former Daily Mirror librarian, as his "phone a friend" on Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, Grey harks back to the days when every paper in the land had a good library. These were populated by "very special people unfortunately now discarded by managements who failed miserably to recognise their value to our newspapers.
Because if the long-serving sub was the fount of all knowledge, the librarian was the one with the trump card. They knew everything, and I mean everything...Their empires were magnificent..."
And so it goes on. He even describes doing a bit of thieving in a bid to save his library's collection. For anyone familiar with the Grey oeuvre (), they will know that be praised by him is praise indeed.
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All in a day's work: the Standard mentioned a rivalry between two Graham Greene scholars who frequently had occasion to visit his materials at the library of Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas - noting that the librarians frequently had to employ tactics to keep the two out of each other's sight.
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Could this be a first? It might be thought that 'The Great Facebook Debate'
is starting to shift a rung or two down the ladder of Hot Topics du jour, but Linda MacDonald at the Guardian, an avid and diligent user of Facebook was exhilarated to receive an actual information enquiry from a correspondent on holiday via the revered networking site, in the absence of the Guardian network.
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Also: Facebook has a new community,'Media Librarians and proud of it' , instigated of course by your favourite organisation, billed as 'social networking for probably the most fun group of librarians there is', and currently comprising 17 members. An incentive for we recalcitrant types who prefer real faces and books to grit teeth and join up, I guess...
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Yet more: The American Journalism Review looks at journalists using social networking sites - like FaceBook and MySpace - to glean background information on people, particularly young people.
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Catherine Watson of the Herald (Glasgow) joins a tradition of media librarians having been featured in the CILIP Gazette column My Week, September 21 - October 4 edition.
REVIEWS
AUKML AGM and Summer Party
August 7 2007
The 2006/07 year was wrapped up with a fairly brief meeting at the Guardian, with the enviable position of Chair handed over from Katharine Schopflin to Richard Nelsson. A couple of other key jobs were announced as still seeking willing victi-, um, postholders for the positions of Chair Elect (for 2009) and Magazines Representative. This was followed by a lovely meal at The Ambassador in Farringdon, where Matthew Mezey from CILIP Update joined us on the pretext of covering the presentation of the AUKML's first ever award. From the two finalist teams at Guardian News & Media Ltd, and Newsquest (Herald & Times) Ltd in Glasgow, the award went to the Glaswegians for their extremely successful survival and conquest of a period of upheaval including relocation, rebranding and an impressive intranet launch.
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City Information Group quiz night
July 18 2007
Held at Alibi Bar in the City, a victorious night for AUKML who fielded the winning team in the City Information Group's inaugural Summer Quiz. The eight members of 'Team Gav' trounced their opposition with their knowledge of current affairs, African geography, TV theme tunes and, er, Whitesnake.
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Will technology replace the resource centre: How will the corporate librarian's role change? - a City Information Group oraganised discussion June 13 2007 by Hilary Oakley
This was a panel discussion with Euan Semple, formerly Head of Knowledge Management at the BBC, and Mike Angle, Co-founder, President and Chief Operating Officer of Alacra, with Mark Chillingworth, Editor of Information World Review, as questioner.
The discussion kicked off with both Euan Semple and Mike Angle talking about Web 2.0 resulting in the need for adding value. Instead of Web 2.0 being seen as a threat it should be embraced as an opportunity to add value by providing material that people did not know they needed.
Semple said that initially it had been important to put up information quickly but now there was a need for navigating it which was why blogging was so important. He saw information professionals gathering information and forming trails to find good material rather than as in the past acting as a factory/farmer gathering and keeping information.
What was interesting in the discussion was the audience; some of whom needed explaining what Web 2.0 was and none of whom had written a blog.
The panel recommended information professionals get out there, see and understand what users are exposed to on the web, write a blog and tag it - because if it is not tagged it cannot be trusted. Semple underlined the usefulness of blog roll ('if you like this you should look at…'). An audience member said using a blog would not be enough in a business environment and they would need to use authoritative sources to validate the data. Semple countered this with an example where wikis and blogs had information on the London bombings up quicker than news online services and were more authoritative.
Semple said librarians had built some of the best blogs he had seen.
Angle thought information professionals should get their users to use blogs and wikis to share information as creating and sharing documents builds a more effective organisation. Semple and Angle saw the information professional’s role as an educator rather than the audience’s suggested facilitator role.
What I learnt most from this discussion was information professionals need to pick up the web 2.0 tools, experiment and run with them. What struck me most was the age-old importance of adding value and the need for information professionals to visualise and create their own future.
We need to do it to stop ourselves becoming tomorrow’s dinosaurs.
Hilary Oakley is librarian at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS)
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From catalogues to asset management systems by Lindsey Sellors April 19 2007
There was a good turn out for a panel discussion called 'From catalogues to asset management systems - 21st Century film and video research'.
The event got off to a brisk start with Martin Blackburn from
Autonomy , sponsors of the event, giving a short talk about the growth of the need for automatic indexing tools as more footage is put on the internet.
First to speak was Stephen McConnache from Archives Resources ITN Source and the title of his talk was 'The Future belongs to Shot Listing'. He gave a run down on how the DAM system works and is fully automated apart from the Cataloguing. On the minus side were redundances in the vaults and research areas but on the plus side was the growth in cataloguing.
What Stephen was stressing was that cataloguing was changing and cataloguers are now the gatekeepers of copyright and now tag for ascetics such as good clear shot. As there is less descriptive detail cataloguing to do as the footage is now online, the current news is quicker to do allowing time to search and re-catalogue the archive and put it out on to ITN source.
Next was Ant Miller - BBC Preservation and the title of his talk was Sin in haste... Ant pointed out that every trial does not lead to a full time service. His starting point was Greg Dyke's McTaggart lecture in 2003 where he announced what was to become the BBC Creative Archive. The trial included content from 500 programmes that allowed non commercial users to remix their own footage but it is no longer running.
The BBC Motion Gallery was the next trail with 5 million feet of film 600,000 hours of video and the holdings are not digital. This allows commercial users to buy footage and it is still running very successfully.
The BBC Catalogue Online
was next.This trial turn out a mixed blessing as threats of legal action and programme 'anoraks' had a field day over any mistakes, requests for old programmes that held appearances of Mum, Dad or Great Auntie Betty mushroomed. This trial is still running.
While it does not have information on every single programme ever made by the BBC and there are mistakes we are very proud of it.
What's Next?
The Open Archive trial with 1,000 hours of content is available, at the moment, only to the 20,000 volunteers across the UK, it includes 50 hours of archive footage for customers to download and reuse for non commercial uses.
June 17/182007 was Hackday a joint venture with Yahoo and the BBC Archive to see what could happen and could be a very interesting experiment.
The future.
Search – when TV and the web meet. The BBC is looking at this with Autonomy using an automatic aggregator for speech. We need to digitise the legacy archive anyway regardless of whether it goes online or not.
Do we need different levels of Onlineness?
Backstage podcast on DRM and copyright
is well worth a listen as it is about copyright and podcasts.
Libby Gregory is a freelance Researcher from Shine Limited and her talk was from the user point of view.
Digital is great to see but there is still a problem with getting something that is of broadcast quality to edit in an edit studio, tapeless production yet ready. Research will change; clearing copyright is growth area while actual research is declining. Online has made research jobs more difficult as not everything is online despite what producers believe. The cost of clearing copyright for putting footage online is a big stumbling block and Archives are putting their prices up to cover this. Most legacy footage cannot be used for online sources because of the problems involved in clearing the copyright.
Self searching Producers go for the easy find option and this leads to the same few clips being overused because they are easy to find.
Online searching is always seen as the easy option until an expensive mistake is made, just because it is online does not mean you do not need to check it out.
There was a short panel discussion about such things as fair dealing and reusing footage from such places as YouTube.All in all a very interesting evening for anyone who works in Broadcasting or on a newspaper website and I certainly went home with plenty of food for thought.
Lindsey Sellors is Research Guide, BBC Information & Archives
From catalogues to asset management systems by Joanne Chapman April 19 2007.
Stephen McConnachie from ITN Source is the team leader responsible for the shotlisting of ITV and Channel 4 news bulletins and rushes. He explained how the introduction of a DAM (Digital Asset Management) system, which stores video content that can be viewed online by end users, has affected how ITN content is catalogued.
The DAM system allows newsroom staff to watch clips on their desktops and then restore the material they want to use straight to their production servers. It also allows external users, through the ITN Source website, to view and buy clips online through an e-commerce system. Often the only human involvement with the online clips is through the team of cataloguers who archive them to the DAM system and then shotlist them.
Stephen described the impact that the introduction of the DAM system has had on cataloguing methods. As clips can now be viewed online by end users, certain descriptive elements (e.g. camera movements) have been removed from the shotlist text – although it is still vital that enough subject detail is included to retain searchability. The DAM system has also added a new element called keyframing to the cataloguing process, whereby representative images known as keyframes are selected for each clip. These keyframes then appear as thumbnails alongside the shotlist text.
Stephen also spoke of how the DAM system has transformed cataloguers into ‘gatekeepers’ of ITN content, responsible for making decisions about which material should be published to the external website. For example, some video content needs to be prevented from appearing on the Internet due to taste and decency or anonymity concerns. The DAM system has also meant that cataloguers are expected to take on a more proactive role, researching which legacy material should be ingested into the DAM system as well as shotlisting current news bulletins and rushes. Furthermore, cataloguers are expected to carry out technical tasks, working closely with server and DAM clip archiving technology. Overall, Stephen emphasised that cataloguing is vital to the success of the DAM system, as until clips are catalogued they are completely inaccessible to end-users.
Joanne Chapman is a Cataloguer, ITN Source
