MEDIA ARCHIVING: Question and Answer

May 26, 2001

By Barbara P. Semonche, Director of The Park Library
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
School of Journalism and Mass Communication

    Among the several questions following my presentation in Copenhagen May 16 was one that received only a partial answer. It was a very good question and it deserved a more thorough response. When Hans Henrik Kragh-Nielsen contacted me via email a few days later, he repeated the question and asked if I could respond in greater detail. I'm pleased to have the opportunity. However, I hope that this response prompts even more discussion from the Danish media archivists. It is essential to present a clear picture of the current and complex state of media archiving facing all of us.

AASE'S QUESTION

    Aase Andresen, chief media archivist for Politiken newspaper, commented that hearing about success stories of "investigative super searchers" was very interesting, but what she wanted to know (and presumably others among the 30 + attending the meeting) was more about the "nitty gritty" aspects of media archiving. Indeed, the focus of my presentation had been mostly about the managers of media archives whose responsibilities had expanded into investigative news research.

GINNY'S RESPONSE

    The first response to Aase's question came from Ginny Everett, director of Atlanta Journal-Constitution's News Research Services. Ginny was invited to participate in the Danish media archivists' meeting after it was known that she would be in Copenhagen on her return trip from a conference in Sweden. Ginny described a personal example from her experience as a manager struggling to keep able, talented staff interested in working the late night shift updating electronic archives. These archives represented the core of AJC's full-text database. They were sent to commercial database vendors on a daily basis for their subscribers. Ginny reported that this work became much more appealing when AJC decided to offer a special "cruise-ship" edition. Producing a daily news product for the exciting, glamorous world of cruise ships and travel became most attractive to the database staff and interest increased.

    Not every manager of media archives has such a rewarding opportunity to offer.

    Archiving, either in electronic or paper format, represents the overwhelming burden of post-production media responsibilities. It is time consuming, demanding, detailed, routine, and not particularly exciting work. But it must be done and done well and on time. The stress of meeting daily deadlines, coping with overwhelming details, and maintaining high quality and accuracy is just as critical. The challenge of hiring, training, and keeping enough skilled archival staff is daunting. It is not unusual for some media archivists to carry the burden of filling in for absent colleagues. Shortages of staff, space, and equipment are typical. Finding valuable time to plan for critical tasks of converting older, deteriorating, less accessible archival materials to newer formats is most difficult. Finding alternative space for storing overflowing files or finding the time to "weed" older collections to ease crowded conditions is nearly impossible. Finding precious time to preparing regular reports for top management on the "state of the archives" (including the number, variety, condition, cost, quality, and potential value of the archives) seems elusive. There are simply too many daily demands associated with the construction, maintenance, and distribution of the archives to afford enough time to incorporate these vital planning responsibilities. In the short term, perhaps such unavoidable neglect is understandable, but overlooking strategic archival planning in the long term can result in future problems for media archives.

    I don't want to overlook examples of the successful efforts of media archivists news librarians. Examples of their stories can be found at this URL http://www.ibiblio.org/journalism/awnwslib.html

BARBARA'S PAST EXPERIENCE

    When I look back on my experience managing a medium-sized circulation newspaper library in North Carolina, I feel that it was something like the care and feeding of a "giant tyrant." There was no media archive when I started working in 1976 as the paper's only librarian. I began the first clipping and filing newspaper articles from our papers five daily editions. What seemed simple and uncomplicated changed over time. The clippings grew from a few dozen to over several hundred a day. After a few years, subject headings reached nearly 100,000 and personal names reach 50,000. Our thesaurus was huge; cross-references abounded. Metal engravings ("mug shots") had to be collected daily and filed. Later photos, 100-200 a day had to be processed and filed. Our archives now included:

  • thousands of metal engravings,
  • tens of thousands of photos and negatives,
  • hundreds of thousands of clippings,
  • several thousand reference books and serials,
  • thousands of background files (government and corporate reports),
  • hundreds of reels of newspaper microfilm,
  • and thousands of microfiche of our clipping files.

    In addition we collected and organized countless maps, graphics, and corporate logos. Our library also became the repository of the newspaper's corporate archives. A card index was started of reporter bylines. A few part-time library staffers (mostly university students) were employed for the night and weekend shifts to make certain that the archives were current and correctly filed. Dialog and Lexis-Nexis online databases were added to our research services. Library reports and journalism training materials were prepared. I launched an initiative for indexing our entire paper and the publisher agreed. We arranged for IBM to write the software indexing code to run on a PDP 11 with a high-speed printer to generate monthly and yearly print indexes for our paying customers. Indexing staff was hired. We went through four equipment and software indexing upgrades in nine years.

ARCHIVAL OBSOLESCENCE and LOSS

    For a relatively small newspaper, our archives had grown in 14 years to enormous proportions. It was truly like a "giant tyrant" requiring never-ending 24-hour feeding and seven-day-a-week grooming in order for it to function when needed. I wish I could say that I managed it all well. I'm certain that I didn't. The archives multiplied and diversified too fast. Controlling that growth was difficult, perhaps impossible.

    In time most of these older archives were relegated to remote storage, quickly forgotten; a few archives (metal engravings) were destroyed. Another example of archives falling into obsolescence is photographic glass plates. What media archive has that type of material now? Were any of these archaic materials sent to museums? Admittedly media archives cannot keep everything. Still, perhaps a few examples could have been salvaged for historical benefit. Several U.S. newspaper archives have found homes for their older clippings and photographs in public libraries, university libraries, and museums. However, more than a few newspapers that were closed or merged in the 1960s and 1970s simply discarded most of their clippings and photos. There appeared to be no need for old news.

    And what happens when media archives or news libraries are unexpectedly closed, merged or eliminated? With little or no time to make appropriate alternative arrangements, valuable material from these media repositories were purloined, lost, stored in inaccessible sites, or even destroyed. Forewarned, media archivists can, and should, anticipate the likelihood of these unfortunate events and prepare to shift the archives to other proper custodians.

ARCHIVAL INVENTORIES

    The daily grind, the "nitty gritty" of media archiving mitigates against careful record keeping. Inventories of remote and no longer used materials seem pointless to some, but others recognize the value of finding time to keep up with what is in our archives now as well as what materials were discarded or donated. A full archival audit might be beyond reasonable expectations, but a realistic inventory should be possible. Imagine a chief editor asking for his archivist to do the following: "Get me a report on what you have in the archives, how long have you had the materials, what different kinds of formats do you have, how much did it cost to build the archive, how much does it cost to maintain it, and finally, how much of the archives are really used." If media archivists already have the information available they will be able to cope more effectively and efficiently with the "nitty gritty" economic aspects of media archiving.

THE NEXT LEVELS OF ARCHIVING

    Media archiving continues to evolve. Technological developments bring new challenged for archivists. We are learning how to manage these new formats that digital and Internet technologies bring us. Many of these types of archiving, potential software applications, and management strategies have been discussed on NewsLib. If you are interested in any of the "threads" addressing these topics, please contact me, Barbara Semonche, at this email semonch@metalab.unc.edu.

    Add to these current and future responsibilities the concerns and issues and trends involving media archival preservation ad conservation as well as the preparation of disaster plans and what to do with gifts and donations offered to media archives. And let’s not forget what the mergers & acquisitions of media organizations can do to media archives and news research libraries: they can be reduced, restructured or eliminated entirely! It is a marvel that so much media archival material is maintained so well for so long for so many. Apparently there is more "nitty gritty" effort ahead for all of us! And that includes:

  • determining basic media archive management and maintenance policies and procedures
  • collaborative content management and connectivity issues with other archives (public and academic)
  • outsourcing selected archival tasks and projects
  • determining reasonable preservation standards for media archives
  • intellectual property rights and access management for "repackaged" editorial content
  • media archival content access and distribution (converting from one format to another, e.g. paper or microform to digital)
  • managing multimedia archives
  • redefining media archive business models (involving in-house media intranets and portals)
  • establishing the value of media archives as corporate assets
  • professional development for media archivists (specialization vs. generalization?)

CONCLUSION

    Permit me to conclude with an example of archiving messages from the electronic discussion list, NewsLib. When I launched the list in September 1993, I had no idea about the growth of the number of subscribers (now currently almost 1,300 from 23 countries) or the volume of traffic on NewsLib (75-100 messages per week). Originally, there was no way to archive the email messages by subject, and since I anticipated that there would be a demand for such capability, I started "caching" (saving on my computer hard disk) the popular or particularly informative "threads" that appeared over time on NewsLib. I have accumulated several hundred NewsLib topics and I've had occasion to retrieve some of them for subscribers who recalled a discussion that was important to them to revisit In December 1999, a sixth upgrade in list software offered searching capabilities (by key words). Well, I thought, I no longer have to save these messages on my server; my former archiving chore will be managed by the new email software! A year later, that search option was no longer functional. Apparently, searching the NewsLib email archives was too much of a strain on the software. I have returned to "caching" NewsLib "threads" on my computer. Time consuming, yes, but still reliable. Perhaps there is a message in this experience for my colleagues in media archiving. At least I've discovered that technology offers some help in the archival chores, but not every archival task can be adequately managed over time by technology. At least for the present. Who knows about the future?

    Aase, I hope I've answered at least part of your question. I look forward to hearing from you about your experiences (and those of your Danish colleagues) involved in the "nitty gritty" of media archiving. Perhaps a reasonable, if somewhat humorous example of the "nitty gritty" of media archiving can be found in the mythical labors of Sysiphus. I have come to the opinion that he fits the image of much of our routine work. What do you think, Asse?