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Vol. 22, No.2/Winter 2000

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Notes from the Chair
Ginny EverettBy Ginny Everett

Information Services for the 21st Century

By Ginny Everett

If you have been in this business for a while, you may feel as amazed as I do at how much your job has changed. Our core mission still is to make sure our reporters and editors have the information they need to make our news content accurate, timely and complete.

As always, we accomplish this in part through research and through archiving. And, at a small library, just keeping up can be a major challenge. But, as the tools for delivering information have become more sophisticated, our roles have evolved and expanded significantly and they will continue to change in ways that we can't even imagine now.

For example, how many of you who have been around for a while ever said, "Oh, no. I don't trust our news staff to search online services on their own. How would we know they are finding everything they need?" Many of us felt in the past that our role as intermediaries in drilling through information for our users was part of the value we brought to our newsrooms. In many instances that is still true - especially when using non-user-friendly or difficult resources.

But now that many comprehensive user-friendly Web or online services are here, isn't our knowledge of these resources invaluable in determining how to empower news staff to find the information they need for themselves? Beyond selecting resources and putting information at desktops, a larger and larger part of our job is training.

No matter how large a library staff is, we all have to make choices and set new priorities as we embrace new technologies. And, what does this new landscape mean for the competencies that we look for in the next generation? What are the skills that we need? Where do we look for new staff? How do we influence what they learn before they come to us?

Recently, three of us from the AJC News Research staff spent several days at the University of Georgia as part of the journalism school's Newspapers in Residence program. We taught several sessions on basic Internet research and on people-finding resources. (And we left a page of links on the j-school intranet.) We were struck by the level of savviness of the students we met. They were smart and eager to learn more about finding information on their own and a few asked us "How do we learn to do what you do?"

Well, that's a good question. What is the career path for the future? Do we develop reporter-researcher hybrids? Where do these new information professionals acquire the skills they need? Journalism schools? Library schools? In "Starting Up: Prepping for that Pulitzer-winning Career..." Editor and Publisher, November 13, 1999, Kathleen Hansen of the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism and Mass Communication says that today's students, "...don't take many statistics or research methods classes."

In SLA's December 1999 Information Outlook, Marion Paris of the University of Alabama College of Communication and Information Science writes in "Beyond Competencies: A Trendspotter's Guide to Library Education," that "In some programs students' only exposure to special librarianship is through the generous invitations, year after year, of SLA members."

Sounds to me like it's up to us to take an active role in the educational process. Make connections with the professional schools, offer internships, offer to help man the recruitment booths at college fairs and professional conferences. There are many ways that we can try to lure the best and the brightest into one of the most exciting professions I know.

As we look to the future of our division, our Nominations Committee, led by Sharon Reeves, has put forward an impressive slate of candidates for News Division officers 2000/2001. And speaking of education, Chair-elect Debra Bade is preparing a week's worth of programs for the annual conference in Philadelphia that will help all of us shape our vision of the future, and learn how to do what we do even better in the here and now.

Ginny Everett is the head of the library at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Her email is geverett@ajc.com


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