Deadline

.
.

• The Herald's archives find a new home by Ian Watson
  
• People
  
• Credits where due by Richard Nelsson
  
• My Internet: Ray French
  
• Political corner
  
• A week in the life of: Hilary Oakley
  
• Deadline Gold
  
• Google's crash by Alan Power
  
• Stuff at the end
  

   

Editorial

Deadline is produced by Richard Nelsson, Alan Power, Katy Heslop and Linda MacDonald from the Guardian Research Department. Please send news, reviews and letters to: richard.nelsson@guardian.co.uk.

The opinions expressed in Deadline are not necessarily those of the AUKML.

The Herald's archives find a new home
by Ian Watson

Glasgow's Mitchell Library has become the new home of The Herald and Evening Times' photographic and cuttings archive.

The decision to move the archive was prompted partly by space constraints following Scottish Media Group's (SMG) sale of the newspapers to Newsquest in 2003. It was also driven by a desire to open up the archive to the public.

Containing several million photographic prints, the picture archive is an unrivalled record of life within Glasgow and the west of Scotland in the 20th century and has been characterised as 'The Nation's Family Album'. An enduring problem, however, has been how to allow the nation access to the collection while meeting newspaper production needs.

With the advent of a digital picture archive, the hard copy prints are no longer a primary resource for newspaper productions. Since 1980 the archive had been moved three times, a considerable undertaking. Rather than find a new home where access would be restricted to newspaper staff, it was decided to examine the possibilities for a move that would secure the long term future of the archive and remove the spectre of another move sometime in the future.

Discussions were opened with the Mitchell Library, Europe's largest public reference library, and it became apparent that the archive would fit well with Glasgow City Council's imaginative plans for the development of the Library.

Under current arrangements we simply rent space with the Mitchell Library. We also have a member of staff based there with network connection so that pictures can be scanned and delivered on demand for newspaper editorial needs.

We are working closely with Mitchell staff to examine long term possibilities to ensure that the national heritage value of the archive is preserved and exploited.

We would hope to digitise the collection in due course so that it becomes available to all kinds of users: scholars, historians, enthusiasts and the plain curious, as well as our newspapers.

Likewise our newspaper cuttings, which date back to the early 1960s and cease in 1994, have become less vital as a source of information for daily newspaper production. As the Mitchell Library is less than one mile from the newspaper offices, cuttings can be couriered quickly when required. Like the picture archive it is envisaged that in the long run a model will be found whereby they can become part of the Mitchell Library's extensive local history collection.

http://www.mitchelllibrary.org/

People

Long-serving librarian retires

The Coventry Evening Telegraph's Maureen Keates could well be the longest serving media librarian in the country. She retires next month after spending her entire working life, 49 years, in the paper's library. Maureen said, "I have always loved news which is why, I guess, I've stayed so long." Asked by Deadline what was the biggest change she had witnessed over the years, she replied that apart from the introduction of new technology, it was the decrease in noise in the newsroom: "There used to be a real hubhub with the clanging of typewriters and people talking and shouting. You could chat to each other from behind a typewriter but it's not so easy stuck behind a computer screen. Even some of the reporters say that at times it can feel like a morgue."

Maureen has seen a number of up and coming journalists pass through the paper (and no doubt the library), including BBC Breakfast's Dermot Murnaghan and BBC environment reporter David Shukman.

Is Maureen Britain's longest serving media librarian? Please let Deadline know if you've heard of anyone who has worked longer than 49 years.

Frances Tait

Frances Tait took early retirement as regional information co-ordinator for the British Council in August. While she has enjoyed her job, Frances said, "After six years of almost constant travelling I hope to be around rather more in the UK and although I won't be officially working I hope our paths will still cross from time to time whether professionally or as I try to resuscitate my social life, sadly neglected over the last few years as I've hardly been at home". Frances is a former BBC Head Librarian and a long-time member of AUKML.

Credits where due
by Richard Nelsson

For years it seemed easier for a media librarian to get a wage rise than a research credit. Even if an editor agreed to one, a subeditor would usually be told to remove it. Actually things are much the same today, but Deadline has discovered that a number of AUKML members do get credits on a regular basis.

Deadline asked librarians working in both print and TV whether they ever got a printed research credit or an acknowledgement at the end of a programme. For those that did, we asked how they managed to get one in the first place. The overwhelming finding was that it was up to you to ask for one and to keep asking; no one is ever going to just offer a credit. This was borne out by the Guardian's ex-Information Manager, Helen Martin, and her experience of asking for one. The idea came to her after she attended a Nora Paul-run news librarian course in Maastricht in 1997 (see Deadline Vol.13 part 3); on returning home, she began to ask desk editors for research bylines where library staff had compiled the bulk of the work. Eventually credits began to be given on an ad hoc basis, but it took another five years of hard lobbying before it was accepted as policy (see below).

This wasn't a comprehensive or structured study but merely a ring around. However it is a subject that crops up time and time again and is certainly something that should be looked into more thorougly - perhaps as a dissertation project for a student. The topic is regularly discussed on Newslib, the US news librarians listserv, and a collection of research credit policies can be found on their website at: http://www.ibiblio.org/slanews/policies/index.htm

BBC LEEDS - Ian Bucknell
I've had a few credits since working for the BBC in Leeds. They were for archive-based TV programmes that were shown in the northern regions. I got personal credits as 'Archive Researcher' and my colleagues have had similar accreditations for their work. I spent a lot of time on these programmes, built up a good relationship with the production team and was happy to ask them for a credit when the project was nearing completion. I don't know for sure, but I don't think I'd have got the credit if I hadn't asked.

The majority of the work we do is for the local news bulletins and the only people credited are the producer and editor, so we are among the many unsung people who contribute to the programmes.

GRANADA (LONDON) - Fiona Sanson
We get credited on one programme at the moment - the Jonathan Dimbleby programme each Sunday. This has been for the last five years. The background being, we were so heavily involved with the prgramme/production team each week that I approached the Editor about the possibility of being credited. He agreed and we worked out the credit should be: Information Unit - with our names underneath.

We didn't want research in the title, as that would take away from the actual researchers - also if the title had simply been Information, it would have given the perception to the viewer that they could phone us for further information.

Since then we have been credited on some other programmes. However, more and more people now work on programmes so it can be harder. If there is a project I feel very strongly about and we have worked on it at every production stage I will approach the producer and ask if it is possible. The best advice I have ever been given by a senior executive is if you would like a credit then "ham yourself up". I quickly realised that no-one was going to knock on the library door and ask if I would like one. It is not in an information professional's remit to sing their own praises and I certainly wouldn't expect them on every project the Information Unit is part of. I do feel that if you work hard over a long period of time and are recognised as part of a team it is important to get the recognition once in a while in the form of credits.

THE GUARDIAN/OBSERVER - Richard Nelsson
The official policy (endorsed by senior editorial and management) is that research department staff should be credited for sidebars/chronologies they have written. If a few people are involved, such as for a special supplement, the department as a whole is credited. Sometimes 'additonal research' bylines appear at the end of big pieces. The policy has been running for a few years now and works reasonably well with department staff being credited on most days of the week. Bylines though are sometimes missed off and certain desk editors still need regular reminders of the policy.

NEWS INTERNATIONAL - Lynda Iley
Lynda Iley explained that they never get a credit - even when News International publications copy the library's chronologies. Not that it is official policy, just that journalists wouldn't think of it.

NEWSWEEK - Mick Brunton
The situation on credits for researchers is a little bit blurry here. For a start, our researchers are called reporters and for the most part their work checking stories prior to publication is not acknowledged with a credit. However, where appropriate, they will write or report stories - particulary shorter items in which case they will get a byline - i.e. if researchers or library staff (ie Hugh Porter an; myself) produce say an info heavy item like a timeline then a credit would be in order.

NOTTINGHAM EVENING POST - Elena Hayward
We are never credited for any research work we do with regard to text, but do sometimes get a mention for picture research. We sometimes produce supplements of poetry and pictures sent in by our readers and we often get a mention in these (for what it is worth). I do book reviews and sometimes travel pieces for the paper and I am allowed a byline for the stuff I write which I guess is something.

My Internet: Ray French

Ray French was born in south Wales to Irish parents. His novel, All This Is Mine ('A highly engaging and vivid debut novel, which perfectly captures the wild emotions of childhood' - Daily Telegraph; 'At long last, Wales might just have an author who can do for our indigenous literature what Roddy Doyle did for Irish writing - fuse heritage and hilarity in a thoroughly modern but utterly true voice' - Western Mail Magazine) is published by Vintage and has been translated into Dutch and Italian. His first book, The Red Jag and Other Stories, was published by Planet. He now lives in Leeds, where he teaches creative writing and has a part time post as a librarian. http://www.rayfrench.com

CAN YOU REMEMBER WHEN YOU FIRST USED THE INTERNET?
It was about six years ago, when I was still living in London and working in Camden Town Library. The library staff were sent for an intorductory training session, and we were pretty overwhelmed by what we saw. I remember the Library Manager being reduced to tears when she found a live webcam of O'Connell Street Bridge in Dublin. She had left Dublin 15 years before, and was overwhelmed by homesickness. I think that was the turning point - she moved back to Ireland within a year.

HOW OFTEN DO YOU GO ONLINE?
I try to limit it to once an hour (I actually have a kitchen timer next to my computer, ticking away) - it's my reward for keeping my nose to the grindstone and carrying on with my second novel, or finishing an article, or marking my student's work (I teach creative writing for the Open College Of The Arts:http://www.oca-uk.com/, and run writing workshops). Writers whinge to anyone who will listen that they never have time enough to write. But put them in that room on their own with a PC, and within a few minutes they're gazing out of the window at a neighbour washing their car, or wondering if it's time for a coffee break yet or, most insidious of all, wondering if they should check to see if they have any new emails.

WHICH SEARCH ENGINE DO YOU USUALLY USE?
Google, naturally, just like everyone else.

CAN YOU NAME ANY OTHER SEARCH ENGINES?
Askjeeves, Alta Vista, Lycos

NOW THAT YOU CAN SEARCH THE INTERNET YOURSELF, DO YOU THINK THERE IS STILL A ROLE FOR LIBRARIANS/INFORMATION PROFESSIONALS?
Absolutely! I went on an IT awareness training course for library staff a few years ago and the woman who ran it summed it up beautifully. She said the internet is like the most wonderfully stocked library you can possibly imagine. However, when you come to work one Monday morning you discover that someone has broken in over the weekend. Nothing has been stolen but absolutely everything has been snatched off the shelves, hurled up into the air, and allowed to crash onto the floor in a huge, chaotic pile. That's what the internet is like - everything you need is probably there, but how do you go about finding it? Of course we will always need librarians and information specialists to guide us through the chaos.

NAME YOUR THREE FAVOURITE SITES
They change frequently, but at the moment they are http://www.motherjones.com, http://www.saveourshortstory.org.uk and http://www.globalideasbank.org. MotherJones is the website of the radical US magazine, a timely reminder that not all Americans are blinded by Bush's rhetoric (in a Guardian report on the Republican convention recently I read that someone at a mass anti-Bush demo had worn a tee shirt which read "Think. It's patriotic." I like to think that that person was a Mother Jones reader). Save our short story is a campaigning website to save that underrated and endangered art form (I once heard Rose Tremaine on the radio saying that in her opinion it was actually more difficult to write short stories than novels), and well worth supporting. Global Ideas Bank is a database of nearly 4,000 ideas that come under the category of social invention. Some of them are very good indeed, some are not so good, and others are just plain weird. Two recent favourites are Rationality Agents who will prevent you from doing illogical things, and Drive Thru Voting to encourage greater turn outs at elections.

ARE THERE ANY SITES THAT YOU FIND REALLY IRRITATING?
http://www.Barbie.com, which my daughter was addicted to last year.

HAVE YOU EVEN BEEN SO BORED THAT YOU'VE 'GOOGLED' YOURSELF?
Of course. Unfortunately I have the same name as a famous Rugby League commentator, so when I first did it my initial excitement was soon punctured. The first site I looked at was full of headings like 'Hardest Players' and 'Memorable Tries'. However, in the last couple of years I have risen to the top of the Ray French pile - hooray!

DO YOU STILL USE OLD MEDIA?
How could a writer ever tire of printed matter? As well as Favourites on my PC, I have a filing cabinet stuffed full of cuttings from newspapers, interviews from magazines, snippets of information I have heard on the radio and written down on scraps of paper, etc etc.

WHAT HAS BEEN YOUR MOST PLEASURABLE EXPERIENCE WHILST SEARCHING ONLINE?
Actually, strictly speaking it was Sjaak Commandeur, who translated my novel into Dutch, who probably provided that. My novel is narrated by a 10-year-old boy, Liam, and he sometimes tags along to the local games of his home town football team, who are permanently stuck at the bottom of the Fourth Division, as it was in those days. Sjaak was quite taken with these descriptions - to him, it sounded like something from the stone age. 'What is a tea hut?' was one of his questions, 'I never knew things had been so bad in Britain,' his reply when I explained. When I told him that these descriptions were based on my memories of going to watch my home town club, Newport County - long since dropped out of the league, alas - he sent me a link to a site which devoted itself with quite incredible passion to detailing the long and almost entirely unsuccessful history of The County (http://www.newport-county.co.uk/archives/county_past/county_past_page.html). This, to me, was the internet at it's quirky best - a site probably put together by some obsessive in his bedroom, about a defunct and very obscure football team, discovered by a translator of literary fiction in Holland, and sent to an ex Newport County fan in Leeds.

Political corner

With the US elections due in November, politically active librarians have been making their voices heard on the internet. The http://www.librariansagainstbush.org/ site is self-explanatory while there was an interesting article in the recent Wired about librarians and the Patriot Act: http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,64945,00.html

A week in the life: Hilary Oakley
The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) is the worldwide property organisation, with over 110,000 members globally, dedicated to promoting excellence and safeguarding public interest in all property related matters. Hilary Oakley works as Team Leader - User Services with a team of nine staff for a twin-site library service of 20 staff.

July 26
Emails received 26; emails sent 17; number of cappuccinos 1; fruit tea 1; green tea 1; water 0.5 litre

Each day begins with a cup of fruit tea and a dive into the email box. Every day I read bulletins from the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and Estates Gazette Interactive http://www.egi.co.uk for the Property news. This morning's unusual as my email box says it's overloaded and I have to start by deleting my in-tray items! I've got an enquiry hanging over from my Friday phone session from a member of the public on forms for service charges for managing agents of flats. I've checked all the websites and our publication doesn't include one either so I'm pleased my colleague in the Professional Information team can confirm this is a dead end. Monday morning also spells recording the previous week's statistics on loans, reservations and renewals. We track these to measure what we do and promote our services to the membership and our organisation. Later on in the morning I parcel up the remaining Fortune Cookies used at our Start the Year @ne event which were used to promote what we do. Last week I distributed the remainders amongst our London staff and these ones are heading for our Edinburgh Library. I get an enquiry from one of our staff who's writing an MSc dissertation on Corporate Social Responsibility and the Environment and sussing out what kind of services we offer. As Investors in People we're encouraged to develop ourselves continuously. In the afternoon I do some preparation for interviews tomorrow for an Information Services Co-ordinator maternity leave cover with our Head of Department. Every Monday we have a management team meeting and at this one we discuss revamping our news bulletin subscription service. I'm tasked to write some Frequently Asked Questions on the changes for our staff so I start on this. I also do some troubleshooting, entering our news headline bulletin onto the Content Management System for loading onto the intranet. Then the day rounds off with some editorial checking material for Weekly Briefing, one of our twin subscription-based news bulletins.

July 27
Emails received 16; emails sent 11; number of cappuccinos 0; fruit tea 1; water 1 litre

Today kicks off with two interviews for the Information Services Coordinator role. This is one of the parts I most enjoy as a librarian - getting into the human psychology of prospective employees! Then I finish off the FAQs on the new news bulletin process and share this with the management team for comments. My brainstorming in-house training course scheduled for Thursday has been cancelled. We're lucky to have a great range of corporate training on offer which is a great chance to meet colleagues you've never met before as well as learn! I also respond to two enquiries, one from a member in Kuwait who's ordered journal articles from our document delivery service and another from two professors who are making a second trip to research auction sales from the early 20th century. These two were delighted they were invited to the onscreen European cup match during their last visit! We find lots of enquirers will come back to us individually where they get good service. All our thanks we save to share with the team in our staff meetings to celebrate our achievements. I finish the afternoon by starting the batch of August timetables for our team on the enquiry desk and phone lines so we all know what we're doing for the next month (time rationalisation!). Next month's got a two-week closure which (unlike the popular misconception that we all go on holiday together) involves an annual stocktake and a team building day on behaviour styles so we can all understand each other better!

July 28
Emails received 12; emails sent 33; number of cappuccinos 0; green tea 1; fruit tea 1; water 2 litres!

Began day finishing timetables to cover our enquiry desk and phone slots for August. After which I also book in 1:1 slots for my team in rooms around RICS. In the afternoon I have my fortnightly 1:1 meeting with my Head of Department and discuss my development review and the choice of Information Services Coordinator maternity leave cover. Then go back to my desk and add some extra points and comments to my review record. I sort out the basement material for the visiting professors. Do another round of editorial checking for Abstracts and Reviews and Weekly Briefing. My CPD colleague in Coventry sends me an email inviting me to do a presentation on the library services at next week's Advantage West Midlands meeting for trainee surveyors at Great George Street which I accept.

July 29
Emails received 13; emails sent 33; number of cappuccinos 1; green tea 2; water 1.5 litres

Finish reading Unconstrained Organisations by Higgins on the train coming in, which is an interesting look at ways of talking through blocks in making change happen. Today's the day for receiving reminders from Resourceshelf http://www.resourceshelf.com; Freepint http://www.freepint.co.uk; and the Internet Resource Newsletter: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/irn/irn.html. Any good links from these I pass around my team. Freepint's got a special on money laundering, one of the topics affecting the surveying industry. We produced a hot topic list on this earlier in the year. I continue making progress by contacting the Copyright Licensing Agency concerning how we can supply scanned copies of articles through our document delivery service. We need an Adobe extra piece of software to comply with the security. Each month I promote our services to the members by sending out a story to our regional and international offices for inclusion into their e-bulletins and journals as well as our members' magazine RICS Business. This morning I'm sending out a story on our new hot topics. Then I get a call from one of my colleagues in marketing and we meet in the cafe to discuss some of the services which they're going to write up for a new quarterly members bulletin on key services. This is linked with our annual membership survey. I then follow this up by sending some statistics on our loans, searches and logins to the catalogue. I stop off to visit my colleagues in the Bookshop to discuss the Institute of Customer Service Awards http://www.instituteofcustomerservice.com (I'm currently about to work on becoming a coach) and email them into the National Customer Service Week website: http://www.nationalcustomerserviceweek.co.uk so we can do some joint activities. We're also teaming up with our Contact Centre colleagues in Coventry. Then I draft some ideas for my development objectives on a strategy to market our services to our staff.

July 30
Emails received 7; emails sent - a lot; number of cappuccinos 1; americano 1; green tea 1; water 1 litre

Friday morning is my usual slot for scanning the UK broadsheets to produce our headlines news bulletin which gets loaded onto our intranet. I'm standing in for my colleague to cover our weekly RICS News email service which gets sent to over 55,000 members. This is my chance to star in a Mary Tyler Moore news gathering exercise, except I look more like Rhoda than Mary but this is showing my age! One of my story writers is on holiday so there's something which never happened on the TV show… My colleague in marketing has asked me to find out figures for the number of members who are logging onto our online catalogue for the newsletter feature so I liaise with our Systems Librarian. I've got an email enquiry from RICS Espana who wants to build up their resources on Spain resulting from the story I sent earlier this week. Then it's deadline day for Weekly Briefing which involves checking the printed version before it gets sent to the printers. And more abstracts to check. The London Regional Communications Executive emails me to get a picture of our hot topics to include in their newsletter. In the end we go for cascading screen shots. 15.30 is my regular two-hour phone slot where I get back in touch with the enquiry line. As usual I have two callers who are new to the services and get my 'wonders of our services' spiel and go away excited about placing orders and using the online catalogue. 17.30 and time to do some yoga to return to inner calm!

http://www.rics.org/ (this diary was written in August)

Deadline gold

We go back to those halcyon days of July 1995 for our dip into the Deadline archive. There were reports from the succesful Cardiff conference where Richard Withey gave a talk about the 'multiple digital resource' that will be indexed, fully searchable and driven by consumers. Likewise Gerry Thurson from BBC Wales talked about a digital newsroom in which journalists could have access to live footage, cuttings and pictures - all from one workstation. Whatever happened to those ideas? Elsewhere, Dave Webb writes an interesting piece about the great News International move to Wapping. While much has been written about the effect of the move on the lives of journalists and printers, there is precious little about staff such as librarians. Dave provides a moving account of the daily abuse and dodgy packages that he and the other librarians had to suffer. Obviously there are some who would say that they deserved it, but whatever your views on the Wapping dispute, it makes for a valuable bit of newspaper history.

The emergence of the internet seems to dominate this issue, but there's an article by Adrian Hunt about where to get information about football that only lists books. On the same page though, there's an advert for a brilliant new electronic noticeboard called NewsLib. Finally, just to show that some things don't change, there's an appeal from a student for people to participate in a journalists and the internet study.

Google's crash
by Alan Power

Remember this date: July 26 2004 - though it may not go down in history as the web's 9/11 it will nonetheless be remembered as a catastrophic time for many of its users: shock horror - Google was unavailable for a few hours.

The meltdown happened when the MyDoom.0 virus struck the world's most popular search engine. It rendered it useless and sent users scrabbling around for alternatives, screaming out for the web addresses to long since abandoned search engines such as Lycos, AltaVista and Yahoo (little did they know that these sites were also affected, albeit less seriously). Coincidentally it was also the same day that Google announced details of its flotation offer. Both the share offer and the virus attack illustrated Google's omnipotence. It also showed, all too clearly, that perhaps internet users have an over reliance on Google for its searching needs.

When Google went down users were baffled by the error message it threw back. "Service error 27" it said. I heard one person asking: "How the hell can I search for other search engines if Google isn't working?" I was also told about a journalist on one paper who was greeted by a wall of silence when he asked his colleagues if there were any alternatives to Google? It wasn't that no one could believe he didn't know another search engine - it was as if the silence meant that no one else in the room knew of another one either.

So what are the alternatives? What are we to do the next time we get a "service error 27" message and can't search for another search engine using Google? Here are some suggestions of what else is out there. May they also serve as a reminder for users to keep an openbed when it comes to internet searching:

http://www.yahoo.com
Started out life as a "directory" (collated by human indexers) in 1994 and in 2002, using Google technology, shifted to a crawler-based engine. Yahoo dropped Google earlier this year and started using its own technology. Produces excellent search results and like Google has image, news and shopping searches, and has the added benefit of incorporating the web's oldest directory in its armoury.

http://www.teoma.com
A crawler-based search engine that launched in 2000 and was bought by Ask Jeeves in September 2001. Though it has a much smaller index than the likes of Google and Yahoo it still manages to satisfy popular search queries. Added features include a "Refine" function and "Resources" link that lead to pages from experts and enthusiasts.

http://www.gigablast.com
Even smaller than Temoa and a dwarf compared to Google (Gigablast has 475 million indexed pages, Google has 4.29 billion), this crawler-based search engine has been described as "experimental yet dependable". Has some extra features and a handy end of page link that allows you to carry out your search on a choice of seven other search engines with one mouse-click.

http://www.lycos.com
Launched in 1994 as a crawler-based search engine, using its own technology. In 1999 began using LookSmart for its human-indexed pages and Yahoo and others for crawled results. Additional features include "Fast Forward", which allows results and pages to be displayed on different screens simultaneously, and the "Open Directory" giving separate access to the human-generated results.

http://www.dogpile.com
Launched in 1996, Dogpile is now one of the most popular meta search engines. Meta search engines allow users to search a number of engines and directories at the same time. Dogpile fetches results using Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, Teoma and many others and aggregates the results into an integrated list. Advanced features include "refine search" and the ability to view hits by relevance or by search engine. Has been owned and operated by Infoseek Inc since 2000. The "funny bone joke of the day" at the bottom of the search page should be avoided at all costs.

http://www.mamma.com
Created in 1996, Mamma, or "The Mother of all Search Engines", is one of the oldest meta search engines on the web. Draws from a host of directories including about.com and the LookSmart directory and crawlers such as Google, Teoma and Gigablast. Searches can be refined and there is an option to use the "Power Search" function for more detailed searches. Wholly owned by Intasys Corp since 2001, Mamma now boasts over 10 million unique users per month.

Stuff at the end

The exciting movie news is that Noah Wyle (an ER hunk apparently) has signed to play the title role in The Librarian, a dramatic action adventure. The film tells the story of a repository for humanity's greatest secrets, all hidden beneath the monolithic New York Public Library. And it's up to Wyle to keep them safe from the forces of evil. THE LIBRIARIAN is due to premiere in the US later on in the year.

I was going to say that this link, http://www.careerdevelopmentgroup.org.uk/impact/archives/abrewerton.htm#2, should be the final word on the librarian and their image debate. However it's five years old so I guess we'll just have to keep on reporting them. Yes, reporting groovy old sites like The Moviegoer's Guide to Ethics - Old flicks about journalism (http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=36&aid=68078 )

We've also found a classic newspaper library reference in literature. In Raymond Chandler's 1936 story, Guns at Cyrano's, private detective Ted Malvern goes up to the Tribune's 'City Room' and says, "How's a glance at your clips on a guy named Courtway? State Senator John Myerson Courtway, to be precise." Adams, the librarian, takes a pipe out of his mouth, spits into the bin and then jerks out a thick wad of cuttings. Malvern then asks, "Got a print I could sneeze?" to which Adams happily obliges in return for a few swigs of something a little stronger than tea. Ahh, the old days. Guns at Cyrano's is one of five stories that can be found in Trouble Is My Business (http://digbig.com/4btjb)

Faster Pussycat! To the library. Steady now - that's just one of the songs (Sam Phillips just in case you were wondering) listed on http://www.blisspix.net/library/songs.html. All the old favourites such as Library Girl by Boyzvoice; Dewey Decimal stichcore by Spazz and of course Jimmy Buffet's Love in the Library are listed along with lyrics. There is also a section on songs with book in the title although all you really need to know about this is that Belle and Sebastian dominate the list.

Just in case you're the only librarian in the country not to have seen the University Challenge - the Professionals final between the British Library and the Oxford University Press, here's a little reminder of that glorious showdown: http://www.bl.uk/cgi-bin/press.cgi?story=1446. Anyone interested in a media librarian team next year? Yeah, right - the Design Your Own librarian competition ( http://njla.org/programs/design.pdf) is probably more AUKML.