Maudie Lawson, 1955-2010

Maudie A. Lawson, news librarian at the Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader, has passed away from colon cancer at the age of 55. She once worked as an obituary writer, and took the unique opportunity to write her own obit.

She asked that memorials be sent to the Hart Cemetery C/O Pattie Ayers, HC 2 Box 2794, Theodosia, Mo. 65761; Community Christian Church of Springfield, 4806 E. Cherry, Springfield, Mo. 65809 or Hospice & Palliative Care, 1538 S. Enterprise, Springfield, Mo. 65804.
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Library Profile – Sandi Fox

Tell us about where you work. Do you work mostly on a team? Solo? What are your deadlines like?
I am the Research Librarian for The PBS NewsHour, a national television and digital/online/internet news and analysis program broadcast over many PBS stations and overseas via various satellite networks. I am part of the Research and Archives Unit. My job is to provide research, reference and information services to the reporters, producers, production assistants and other staff members. Because we are a daily news show, deadlines are usually pretty quick. Sometimes, deadlines are longer for special projects — such as working on a research file for a correspondent’s future overseas trip.

What drew you to this job?
I have always been a news junkie, even as a child. I knew that I was the right fit for a news library. I wanted to work for an intelligent and serious news program, so when The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer (as it was then called) advertised for a librarian, I jumped at the chance. As for what drew me to this particular “type” of job — I like to do research. I like to find things. It is like solving a mystery or being a detective.

Is it what you expected? How so, and how not?
In some facets, it is what I expected. I knew I would be answering queries about politics, foreign affairs and current events. What I didn’t expect was not having a “lending library” where people could actually take out books. When I first joined The NewsHour I put together a basic library of books — fully expecting people to “check them out” or browse (this was in 1995). But the fact that I was in a different building than most of the reporters and that the Internet really took off around this time meant that reporters were able to get their information online. Several of the basic reference materials were online as well.

How does the medium (television) impact the work that you do?
One basic way it impacts my work are in the types of queries I may receive. For example, I may be asked to find possible guest names for a segment. Does this guest have prior tv exposure/experience? I may be asked to find when a newsmaker said something on a TV show so we can incorporate it into a set up piece. On occasion I am asked to find graphics that can be used on air. Another major impact that I can think of is the deadline — our show starts taping at 6 p.m. everyday, so all the information a reporter needs should already be in his hands.

What advice would you have for someone who sees your name in The NewsHour credits and says, “I want a job like that!”?
Be curious! Dare I even say…nosey? Read/Watch/Listen to the news and opinions in all formats. Also, be skeptical (not necessarily cynical, just skeptical). Have an open mind about what you read and hear and watch. Especially if you want my job — The NewsHour prides itself on accuracy over flash — it is more important to have the correct facts than just to have data to fill air time. On the extremely rare occasion that I can’t find a statistic, or if there are discrepancies, I will let the questioner know I don’t have a definitive answer.

How is your job going to change in the next 5 years? What would you like to change about it?
Technology will have an even bigger role than it does now. I also think (and hope!) that the intranet page we put together will be utilized more and more — especially to answer simple queries. If the simple requests are taken care of, it will allow me to concentrate on bigger and more complex requests. I also hope to one day have the flexibility to work out of my home on occasion. With all this technology it is no longer necessary to be in the same physical place as your patron. This being said, sometimes I do miss having everyone in one building (the Research Department of The PBS NewsHour is in a different building than most of the correspondents and producers). I think there is something to be gained from personal face-to-face interaction. You can pick up cues from a person’s body language and demeanor. Are you understanding what the patron needs? Does the patron feel confident that you will get the information requested? Sometimes getting requests by phone or email doesn’t give you a chance to have a real conversation with the patron.

What I hope doesn’t change (and it won’t because The NewsHour will always be a serious, thoughtful and intelligent news organization), is being able to contribute to The NewsHour’s core mission: providing people with straight-forward news reporting and analysis.

Your question about how the job is going to change in 5 years got me thinking about the future of the news librarian and news library in general: For the last few years we have been reading about news libraries ceasing operations and news librarians losing their jobs. What, if anything, can be done to stop this? I don’t know how to answer this, but perhaps we can brainstorm about it and come up with a solution. Perhaps there can be a new way to think about news librarianship — a new paradigm?

One idea that has been floating in my head is to have a News Library Consortium. This would be One Big Central Library– located, say, in downtown D.C. The library would house all the physical materials needed for a good, well-stocked news library, including computers and other electronic resources. News librarians could have offices there. When a news organization needs someone to conduct research for them they could call and make a request — then they would either get a librarian exclusively for the day, or contract with that person for a longer period of time. Once the time period is decided, the librarian would then be under exclusive contract with a specific news organization.

Another idea would be to have librarians grouped according to specialty. A news organization could call and request help from a business librarian or from the foreign affairs librarian. There are problems with this idea to be addressed. For example, news organizations, especially commercial ones, may have stories they are working on that are exclusive. But librarians are known for being discreet and respecting the privacy of their patrons; public librarians do this all the time. They don’t tell one patron the requests they receive from other patrons. Perhaps another way to approach this is to make it an online News Library Consortium with access to various news databases, business databases, health databases, etc. News librarians from around the country (or world) could access it and use the information for their clients.

–Hannah Sommers

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Toronto Star librarian wins award

Toronto Star librarian Peggy Mackenzie won an Online Journalism Award for best online video journalism (large site) for her work with Star colleagues on William Kamkwamba, a Malawian man who used junkyard finds to harness the wind for energy.

The original story is here.

Congratulations, Peggy!
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Tech Tip: DocumentCloud for Librarians

Documents – and the information they contain – are the lifeblood of news organizations. We read them, write about them, discuss them. And, every so often, we do the right thing and let our readers and listeners do the same. DocumentCloud is a project that could change the way that newsrooms deal with primary source materials such as government reports or court decisions. And news researchers should take full advantage of it.

First, a disclosure: DocumentCloud is run by a group that includes my current boss, Aron Pilhofer, and when I’m in New York I sit near the site’s developers. So I’ve got a bias. But I think that when you look at what other journalists have been able to do with it, and consider the internal newsroom uses as well, you’ll agree that it’s a valuable tool.
One of DocumentCloud’s great strengths is freeing information from file formats like the PDF, allowing it to be read and searched as you would almost any Web page. In this way, documents become a seamless part of the story, not a distracting trip away from it. The Memphis Commercial-Appeal recently used DocumentCloud to help present its project on civil rights era photographer Ernest Withers, who was also an FBI informant.
DocumentCloud made it easy not just to view the FBI reports, but also simple for reporters to draw readers’ attention to the important bits via its annotation feature (it’s the part in yellow here). That static PDF can now be a more interactive document, more Webby, if you will. The Arizona Republic used it to help explain SB1070 and the impact of a federal judge’s ruling on it, inviting two attorneys to add their expertise.
These are two examples of public projects, but DocumentCloud can also be used to store documents that newsrooms might not want to share externally (yet). It’s a great way to maintain a set of files that anyone from the newsroom can access and annotate, making it a good candidate for long-term project work. And when you’re reading to show that work to the world, you can make any or all of the files public.
So how does it work? If you have, say, a PDF, you can upload it to DocumentCloud’s servers, where it will be scanned and have the text extracted (electronic PDFs yield a better result, but DocumentCloud tries its best for images using Optical Character Recognition software). Then you can annotate the finished document. For more details, check out the FAQ.
DocumentCloud is free to use, so there’s not much stopping you from giving it a try. Contact the folks there to get an invite; they love working with news organizations.

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Notes from the Chair

I can hardly believe summer is coming to an end and that the SLA annual conference was over two months ago.

In addition to the conference, my summer was consumed with a huge project at work: the simultaneous migration of our text and photo archive to a new system. I was however able to get in a 10-day vacation back home in Wisconsin, where I celebrated the “big birthday” I mentioned in my initial chair column, with family and friends.

In a past chair column and messages posted to NewsLib, I mentioned that the News Division was facing some serious challenges to its future, namely a marked decrease in our membership.

At the division’s annual board meeting in New Orleans, I introduced the idea of exploring an alignment with IRE (Investigative Reporters and Editors). I had a conversation with IRE’s executive director, Mark Horvit, prior to the conference, and he was very excited about the possibility of working with our membership in either a formal or informal partnership. An enthusiastic conversation with one of our paper’s projects reporters, a long-standing member of IRE, made me even more excited about the idea.

Like many of you, I hold membership in both SLA and IRE and find both to be an equally important part of my professional development goals. One of the things about IRE that I found particularly appealing is the many workshops held across the country throughout the year and the organization’s increased emphasis on Web-based training, both attractive ideas for those of us who rarely get the opportunity to attend the SLA annual conference or are able to take advantage of training opportunities.

I appreciate the attendees at our business meeting letting me present my idea and sharing their thoughts. Concerns were voiced about an arrangement with IRE, namely the feeling that the organization would fail to meet the needs of some of our division members who work as full-time text or photo archivists or who work outside news organizations. I appreciate those concerns, but I also think some type of collaboration with IRE would be beneficial for us and provide growth opportunities.

A suggestion was made to survey our membership about their chosen professional memberships and about the IRE idea. I intended to create an online survey for that purpose after the conference, but as I’m sure you can appreciate, things got crazy at work with vacations and the migration project and my best intentions went awry. Look for the survey soon, I promise.

* * * *

In the meantime, our Chair-Elect-Elect and SLA 2011 conference planner Eli Edwards has been hard at work planning division programming for next year. Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend the conference, which leads me to a request. Since I won’t be in Philadelphia, I would deeply appreciate a volunteer to take over the role of planning the News Division’s Awards Reception. If you’re interested, please send me a message at adisch[at]dispatch.com. Thanks.

–Amy Disch
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Extra Aside Bar — From the editor

The immediacy of a blog makes the subject of this post seem a little outdated, but we’d normally be addressing the SLA conference in New Orleans in the Summer issue and I didn’t want it to go unmentioned.

My SLA experience was largely colored by the fact that I was wheelchair-bound thanks not to a parachuting accident but sheer clumsiness the week before. A special thanks to Amy Disch for helping me get around, as well as the random librarians I met along the way who volunteered to help push me here and there.

This year, the sessions to me seemed more informative than full of whiz-bang ideas to take back to your shop. Not that this is a bad thing; I still learned a lot.

The conference really started up Sunday night with the annual News Division Silent Auction and Networking Reception — if you could find it. Just like rumors on the internet, news researchers had to separate tales of the real room number from the false reports. We thought we could just follow the noise, but with fewer of us present than in years past, we had to get to the right floor first. Then, the fun began and the goodies were bidded upon and won.

Bright and early on Monday, at Reality Check: Adapting to changes in media and dissemination, Angie Holan told us about Politifact.com and then Marcus Zillman told us about his bots and deep web research. Later, Tom Corbett, executive director of Cushing Academy’s library, discussed how his facility went all-electronic at The All-Digital School Library: Managing Electronic Resources.

I moderated Evolving Roles: Conversations in the Round, a session co-sponsored with the Knowledge Management Division. Karen Huffman of the National Geographic Society, Cindy Hill of Hill Information Consulting Group, Jessica Baumgart (lately of Needle) and I all discussed how the role of librarian has changed over time and what we see for its future. We also took questions from the audience and had a great discussion. Thanks to Jane Dysart and Donna Scheeder for helping get the conversation started.

Despite the rain Monday afternoon, we were still able to celebrate our award winners that night at the News Division Banquet in the beautiful atrium of the St. Louis French Quarter Hotel. We enjoyed fabulous food and drink, networked with our colleagues and heard great speeches and stories about Linda Henderson, winner of the 2010 Joseph F. Kwapil Memorial Award, and Justin Scroggs and Jennifer Evert, winners of the 2010 Agnes Henebry Roll of Honor Award.

Tuesday morning, Brian Hamman of the New York Times taught us a little about programming and APIs at the mini-CE course, Introduction for Computer Programming for Info Pros. I would have loved to have had more time on this topic.

Next was a discussion of a newspaper digitization project at Louisiana State University in the Louisiana Newspapers: Microfilm Digitization Project session. Then, famed presenter Mary Ellen Bates shared ideas and strategies for Enabling Inherent Knowledge. I loved her descriptions of wikielves (general maintenance), wikifairies (make things pretty) and wikignomes (keep things tidy). But how about wikitrolls, who just like to post negative things?

Making us all feel old, the enthusiastic Ben Ilfield and Geoff Samek, co-founders of Sacramento Press, an all-local and all-electronic news organization, discussed how their site came to be and their methods of news-gathering. Their community presence is to be commended, even if it is a little more casual than our corporate parents would probably prefer.

New Orleans was a welcoming city, even if it rained a lot (but that is June for you). If you weren’t able to attend SLA, I still suggest you visit New Orleans. I was there about a year after Katrina, and given that it’s the fifth anniversary, I can tell you that the condition of the city has greatly improved. The tourist areas are fine and everyone is so friendly and happy to see you.

–Julie Domel
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