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Vol. 22, No.2/Winter 2000

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Absolutely, Positively OvernightUSA Today logo

By Bruce Rosenstein

Indexing USA TODAY stories for an overnight feed to online vendors was, until recently, carried out by a library staffer working at home in the middle of the night.

Now it's being done by a computer.

The project is the brainchild of Barbara Maxwell, USA TODAY Library Director. She tapped Mike Granderson of USA TODAY's systems department to automate sending stories for the AM feed.

This transfers stories from the upcoming morning's USA TODAY to vendors to be available online to news-hungry business people at 6 AM.

Maxwell decided that this was the type of job better suited for a computer process, so the librarian could be freed to come back to the day-side shift.

Barbara Semonche, Library Director of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communications, recently observed "to my knowledge it must be a first, or at the least an impressive break through" being able to automatically capture, enhance, transmit, store, and retrieve [stories] quickly and accurately.

The project, which should be fully implemented early in 2000, involves teamwork on the part of library employees, as well as a crucial partnership with systems. Maxwell directed the creation of the new system, and Granderson implemented it with testing and feedback from three USAT librarians: Teresa Campbell, Lynette Constantinides and Jean Simpson.

There are two feeds to vendors: an AM feed with fewer stories (no wire stories, for instance) and less indexing, covering the first edition of the paper, followed later in the day by the more permanent PM feed, with the final edition and more indexing.

Maxwell remembers "what I was hoping to do was to save labor by teaching a computer system how to fill in the fields of the text archive that we're doing now."

When Maxwell approached Systems' Granderson about taking on the project, she gave him a list of criteria. She says "Mike created a test area on our server where the text archive resides and we brought Lynette in and she reviewed the filtered criteria, continually giving feedback, so the list of criteria kept building."

"Mike programmed the computer so that the byline would automatically be pulled into the byline field, the dateline to the dateline field, etc. So he's programming the computer to make sure all these fields are filled in and, at the same time, to only include specific types of stories. The reasoning is to remove the human being, to bring them back to day-side. Human intervention is no longer needed."

"This is going to be a tremendous savings for us," Maxwell says. "We lose time when the person doing the archiving is sick and can't do it or when the system breaks down in the middle of the night and we have to bring someone in. I felt that a computer should be able to do these things."

"Granderson automated how the stories were gathered into the database. Previously, indexers manually sifted through the stories, using page proofs, to decide which to include. Indexers had to type in fields like dateline and byline, but that process has also been automated. Other newly automated features for the feed are bolding, bullets and stars for movie and book reviews.

"My philosophy in life," Granderson says, "is that there is an infinite number of solutions to any problem, and I just have to find one. Plus I have Barbara's backing, which made a tremendous difference. When you have someone who really believes in you, then you really believe you can make things happen. If she would have been hesitant at all and said 'maybe we should bring in a contractor to work out the filtering criteria or the filtering code,' or 'maybe we should bring someone else in,' then I may have wavered and said, well maybe I can't do this. But she never brought that up, she really believed that I could do this."

Besides the ability to better deploy human beings, the new system has added benefits:

It will be adapted so stories for the PM feed will be indexed more quickly, possibly freeing up one more indexer to work on other duties during the day.

A modification of Granderson's code is now being used by USA TODAY's Information Network (www.usatoday.com) to enable it to run the print edition of the newspaper on the web site, something that wasn't being done previously. It would have been considerably more difficult and time consuming had Granderson not worked on the library text archive first.

"After I told Barbara I felt I could do it," Granderson remembers, "it took about a month of just thinking about it until I finally said, I think I have a plan. Between the time I told her I think I have a plan until the time I implemented it, was maybe a week. It didn't take long at all, but the key thing was I had to come up with a solution that would work. If I came up with the wrong solution, I could have hit a dead end at any point and I'd have to regroup and come up with another."

Granderson believes a project like this is rare "probably because no one else had the guts but Barbara Maxwell to decide to implement something like this. It's a very gutsy decision to make, because you have to have all of your ducks in order before you pull that switch and say, okay, I'm not having a human being monitor this any more."

Bruce Rosenstein is at librarian at USA Today. His email is Brosenstein@usatoday.com.


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