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Good News/ Bad News - A talk given at the launch of 'A Handbook for Media Librarians'
by Katharine Schopflin
This talk starts with the bad news. We know that times are hard for those of us doing information work for media organisations. Information units continue to close, indeed, the recipient of AUKML's inaugural 2007 award closed six months after receiving their award, despite innovative work which proved their value and seemed to guarantee their future. I myself work for a news organisation which employs no-one for their expertise in finding news information or sourcing information products. In many archives, the pressure is on for metadata to be added by the creator of the media asset, to eliminate the need for cataloguing, despite most journalistic and production staff's limited understanding of language control, information management and archiving.
We know that companies save money by having media librarians carry these tasks out rather than journalists and programme-makers. We're better at it because it is what we are trained and experienced in, it draws on our skills-base and vocation, we care about the bigger picture and long-term issues in addition to today's deadline, and we do the work for less money. However, it is incredibly hard to convince managers that employing information specialists to do work that journalists are supposedly already doing is a good use of headcount. And managers like nothing better than being the person who, in a single financial year anyway, made a huge saving by closing the information unit.
The main reasons are familiar, but I will list them here. Disintermediation - whereby the librarians stopped being the gatekeepers to the sources of information and research - meant many managers had an excuse to close posts. I think that many media librarians took their skills for granted and perhaps did not shout loudly enough that their skills included more than guarding physical items, that they were also experts in research, evaluation, classification and, of course, holders of librarian elephantine memories. Even where the value of the people was well known, many managers had no choice but to make people redundant if the funding for new technology, for example the development of a news database, were contingent on losing posts.
A second reason is industry collywobbles. Before I worked in the commercial sector, I used to point to falling profits in media as a reason why companies were less happy to invest in their information units. It is only now that I have come to realise that most media companies make vast profits, and their chief executives earn huge salaries and bonuses, they just choose to spend the money in different ways. Nick Davies' recently-published 'Flat Earth News' offers a depressing view of a media industry run by 'The Grocers' interested only in maximum profits, rather than the pursuit of better quality news reporting. Whether or not his view is entirely justified, there is no doubt that an increased emphasis on making profits makes media libraries more vulnerable. Newspaper circulation too, is falling (and has been since the end of the Second world War) and the hugely increased numbers of television channels and emergence of new media, inevitably mean a fragmentation of the audience across the channels and into new activities. However, it should be pointed out that most of these new channels and media outlets are owned, profitably, by the same people that make the 'old media' and the new platforms require both research and management.
The third reason for this bad news is us, media librarians themselves. I believe we are our own worst enemies in three particular areas. First, we are too modest about our achievements. In fact, we have a tendency to revel in our secret knowledge of our superiority. Here is an example from my own work cataloguing news bulletins. It is vital that all footage is assigned the correct copyright, as material we can sell is published to the open web. A management decision assigned this copyright sourcing task to the journalists themselves as a way of eliminating 'double handling'. Needless to say, the reporters have better things to do with their time, have a poor grasp of the issues and tend to make mistakes. We are asked to give our feedback on their sourcing and most of my colleagues will say 'Well they've done it wrong, but I haven't mentioned it as you can't expect them to understand that, they're only journalists'. Meanwhile, the manager who introduced it is trumpeting his fantastic efficiency measure far and wide.
A second area where our bad news is our own fault, is that we are too chummy with our users. Most of the units which have shut down in the last 15 years have been busy until the last day of operation and have had excellent relationships with their users and even their managers. I particularly remember an information manager who spoke about how great her new line manager was and how much she seemed to value their work, but could not explain why she would not offer a permanent job to her colleague, who had been on a rolling three-month contract for 2 years. We should not be naive. Even if our users love us, they couldn't save us if things became tight and, frankly wouldn't if they could. Our poor self-image doesn't help here either. When media librarians work upstream in production and journalistic areas they tend to 'go native' and hide the reason why they are so efficient, productive and knowledgeable from their colleagues, because mentioning their librarian training might hurt their careers.
Thirdly, we are too defeatist. There has been frequent and furtive mutterings even among AUKML people that it is time to 'throw in the towel', that media librarianship is dead and it's not worth keeping going. But it's simply not true that there is no longer any media librarianship practice. One member rang me up recently, opening his conversation by saying 'I'm not really doing media librarianship anymore', but then proceeding to ask me advise about digitising their newspaper archive. I somehow managed to give him the names of three AUKML colleagues who had been involved in similar projects, leaving us both with the conundrum that he gained value out of a professional network when he claimed not to be in that profession anymore.
I suspect that much defeatism derives from years of being punch-drunk from one reorganisation, restructure, downsizing and relocation after an other. There has been written testimony - for example from Carole Bursack in the last chapter of my book, and from a recent article by former AUMKL committee member Elena Hayward - that carrying out media library work in an atmosphere of no respect and straitened budgets is not much fun. I can't blame anyone for taking a substantial sum of redundancy money in exchange for not having to turn up to work and be miserable anymore. But every time they do, another job marked out as information specialist disappears.
So, I promised some good news, and here it is. First of all we know that, a few technological efficiencies aside, jobs are not lost in media libraries because information and archiving work is no longer needed. It is, more than ever! Most media companies are producing more content on more different platforms than ever before. How do they fill those platforms? How do they find that content again? They risk being sued if journalists fail to check facts properly or misuse s ubscription sources or copyright material. They risk losing their media assets forever every time somebody saves a file under a meaningless name in a personal drive or because the only archival copy is held in a third party aggregator's database and they've just gone bust. There is no doubt that our work is necessary.
If I had had defeatist feelings before I embarked on 'A Handbook for Media Librarians', I was shamed out of them by the time I had completed reading my contributors chapters. The sophistication of the modern media librarian's skills, the knowledge they bring, the responsibilities they carry are all extraordinary and in full evidence in the book. What we do now is far more at the heart of what our employers are trying to achieve than in the days when we cut and filed press clippings. We are hugely technologically aware and, as we always have been, usually a generation ahead of most journalists who are hampered by not being part of a profession with a strong emphasis on continuing development and learning. We use sophisticated searching techniques and know obscure corners of the web about which our end-users can only dream (which I'm afraid includes the Google advanced search page or the simple search page of any other search engine).
Certainly, we have a hard time getting people to listen to us. Creative types, as I have said elsewhere, don't like to hear both sides of the story. So, if we see the downside of a situation and point out, for example, that the availability of multimedia online doesn't mean it's free to use, or that nobody puts information on the web for free without a reason (even if that reason is because they are unemployed postgraduate who wants the world to see how much they know about particle physics), we aren't congratulated for our canny analytical skills, but are condemned for being luddite nay-sayers. But we should enter every argument in the knowledge that information professionals are working at the highest level all over the media while short-memoried journalists keep making mistakes.
So, now we've heard the news, what do we do?
First, stop moaning to each other and start shouting at our funders and managers. Have you ever noticed what happens to your most annoying, whingey and difficult colleague? They get everything they want and never have to do anything they don't. We can be the annoying splinter in the finger of our finance manager or CEO. We should stop being nice to their faces while complaining behind their backs.
Secondly, we should use and value our professional networks. We know a huge amount which is of value to each other which can make us stronger collectively. In fact, although we are scared of breaking company confidences, we should remember that AUKML cares more about our development and our careers more than our employers.
Thirdly, we have to stay up to date. One of the most depressing experiences of my life was working with news information researchers who used only google and their news database. It was no wonder there were redundancies in the department although it was sad that it was not these people who left, but their more talented and knowledgeable colleagues who knew they could be employed elsewhere.
Fourthly, don't be complacent, ever. Be prepared for change and be one step ahead of what's happening in both the media and information industries. This applies to your organisation as well - keep up to date with corporate changes and nurture every new manager, even if it's a pain when they leave after six months and you have to start again.
Fifthly, use AUKML and tell them what they should do and what you want out of them. Personally, I think an article or talk given by the manager of the AUMKL Award-winning unit which was closed down last year, telling us how and why it happened, would be a hugely profitable learning experience for us all.
This brings me to my final point which, I suppose has been the current running through this talk. We shouldn't shy away from bad news, we should face up to it so we can learn from it and be ready for the f uture. Editing 'A Handbook for Media Librarians' taught me that our profession is thriving and achieving great things. We can take bad news, and we can survive as a profession.
Katharine Schöpflin