Vol. 5, No. 4, April 1994

The big picture

Grappling with photo archives puts publishing systems into focus

Digital ’94 -- this year’s iteration of the fine institution of putting photographers, editors and systems people in a big hotel to let them hassle out the issues of moving to digital news photography -- came off without a hitch.

Well, Consultant Neil Chase’s PowerBook got stolen -- but elsewise it was OK.

The folks from the Miami Herald put on a great program and found a great hotel. The National Press Photographers Association should be proud of the continuing series of news photographers and executives who volunteer their time to assemble the program and tackle the logistics of such a big event.

As I relate inside, the heady days of breakneck change are pretty much past, leaving us with incremental change rather than the institutional chaos that publications have gone through in the last couple of years.

As I flew from Miami home to San Francisco, I thought that not much had happened at this year’s conference. But then it struck me: I had heard two words that pretty much sum up publishing in the future.

Recycling Center.

They were coined by Nora Paul, the former chief librarian of the Miami Herald who is now at the newspaper think tank, the Poynter Institute (and is a contributor to this fine publication).

Paul’s premise is that when we move to on-line, fax-on-demand or CD-ROM publishing, we'll need all our material -- including photo outtakes and reporters' notes -- to be able to make these new kinds of publications.

And the place from which all these elements will be retrieved will be the Recycling Center.

You'll be hearing more about this concept in the months to come, but another thought occurred to me shortly after I took my first tour of the Recycling Center:

We spent years dealing with text, and text archives, without formulating any true notion about the future of publishing -- but when we took up photo archiving, the rules changed.

It has been the development of picture archives that has broken down the door to new publishing.

The counterpoint to that revelation is this: In a Digital ’94 panel on picture archiving systems, only three suppliers were represented -- the Associated Press, Mead Data Central and T/One.

Where were the traditional suppliers of newspaper text archiving? Where were the traditional suppliers of our publishing systems? I saw a demo of a very slick system off the floor and a few weeks later saw another slick system, but right now you only have three choices.

Not much on which to build our industry’s future.