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Vol. 24, No. 3/Spring 2002

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Vormelker-Thomas Essay Winner

The Vormelker-Thomas Student Award, cosponsored by the SLA News Division and ProQuest Information & Learning, offers a $1,500 stipend enabling a graduate student interested in news librarianship to attend the 2002 SLA annual conference. The award name honors the memory and division work of Rose Vormelker and Lou Thomas. Applicants are judged on the basis of an essay that addresses an issue in news librarianship.

This year's Vormelker-Thomas award recipient is Hannah Sommers. Hannah is a student at the University of Texas at Austin Graduate School of Library & Information Science. She'll be completing her MLIS degree in May 2002.


FROM TASINI TO GOODWIN: IT'S ALL ABOUT CREDIT
By Hannah Sommers

Since I started graduate school and joined SLA, I’ve had the opportunity to meet, be mentored by, and work with several news librarians between Texas and Washington, D.C. In these interactions I’ve discovered that news librarians are a colorful bunch, but more importantly they are sincere individuals with high professional standards. And one issue where these standards come to bear, no matter whether one specializes in research, indexing, or managing overall operations, is the issue of "managing credit."

Of course, I don’t mean "credit" in the accounting sense – though credit may be bestowed in monetary terms – but rather as acknowledgment of contribution. By managing credit, I mean that in our daily work, keeping track of who contributed what – whether recording bylines in the indexing process, taking credit for compiling timelines and graphics, or researching whom to credit for quotations or ideas – is central to what news librarians do. And we pride ourselves on the accuracy and completeness of our credit management. In the past year the NewsLib topics that engendered the most rigorous discussion and some of the lengthier threads concerned, at the core, the issue of credit. These topics included the Tasini v. New York Times decision, bylines and graphics credit for librarians, and most recently, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s management of credit in her writing.

But even more interesting to me is that, while we could probably agree that these issues are about credit, as a group we do not necessarily agree on how the controversies should be (or have been) resolved. Some argued on the list that exposure in electronic databases is adequate credit for freelance journalists. Others argued that exposure is not enough – that rights and monies are the credit deserved. Some feel that Goodwin’s mismanagement of credit amounts to plagiarism, while others see a violation of a potentially grayer nature. But the fact that we can’t agree should not overshadow the quality or substance of our debate. We debate because we care, because this matters to our profession.

Both the Tasini and Goodwin controversies represent changes in crediting policies motivated by courts and settlements. Fortunately, legal action is not the only way to bring about change. Sometimes debate itself can lead to change. At least one example of a NewsLib discussion leading to more equitable management of credit comes to mind – I’m thinking of Leigh Montgomery’s exuberant post regarding the award of credit to a researcher at the Christian Science Monitor soon after the discussion started. The discussion also led to a new policies page on the Division’s site documenting the credit policies of different organizations. In her summary of these policies Jackie Chamberlain commented that if we keep "cultivating the garden" of proper credit management in our organizations we’ll see the rewards, and I think she’s exactly right.

Managing credit well can only be good for our profession. In this regard, I think news librarians are leading the way for other branches of our profession – as illustrated by the fact that news librarians are best aware of, and are seeking ways to compensate for, gaps in commercial databases in the aftermath of Tasini. We are acutely aware of what such voids in the historical record will mean for other researchers and librarians in the future. Secondly, pushing for and accepting credit for our work might also be a means of attracting others to the profession. I know that hearing NPR’s librarians credited on-air introduced me to the fact that librarians work in media agencies. This realization heavily influenced my decision to become a librarian.

Of course, news librarians do so much more than manage credit – we create intranets and portals, we extract information from obscure sources, we are sophisticated and efficient searchers, and many of us use more than one language in our work. But whether we’re locating the best translation of Citius, Altius, Fortius, or an interpretation of an IRS rule, the credit management issues never disappear – since all sources are not equal, crediting the right source will always be important. Managing credit is fundamental to what we do, and librarians do it best in the organizations we serve. It’s not just part of our training; it’s an ethic.