This excerpt of their comments details some of the challenges and opportunities for news libraries as news organizations move into electronic delivery. Their ideas and concerns reveal the unique and critical role news librarians have in the development of these new news products.

The driving force: communication
What new products, beyond the text database, has your library/newspaper been developing? What has been the biggest change in your procedures in accommodating these products? What change in procedures is the most difficult to overcome?

Leming: We have been working on the Prodigy project with the other Cox papers. Each paper is approaching development differently -- some take content feeds out of the library system, others from the front-end.

The method used seems to be based on management's approach -- whether or not they see a continuity between the paper product and the electronic product. In this new frontier there are no real standards yet, no rules.

We are looking to include things in the new electronic product that we don't for the commercial vendors. One of our issues is going to be how to reflect the difference in the content between these alternative products and the printed product.

What is valuable to track? How long it was on the service? Where the story was played? Or do we just say it is the archive and not go into detail about individual run of the text?

When we go to linked documents, editing those linkages in hypertext is going to be a challenge. The news librarian will be the one to provide the hypertext links for the archive.

Leonard: We are helping to develop NandO, Raleigh's Internet-accessible BBS service. We provide the content to the service and we have put together the NandO Gopher.

We've also taken on the training role, since this is the first totally accessible end-user service in the newsroom. We've also brought our archive in-house and onto NandO; we'd been a service bureau at DataTimes until now.

It hasn't been difficult getting involved. We were hungry for the change in thinking and welcome it. We took a good chunk of time at the beginning to just play with NandO.

If there is any difficulty it's that the products are not coming from the library, they are from a different department. That requires a different kind of coordination and cooperation.

We have changed staffing a bit because of some of the UNIX expertise needed, we have done some new hiring -- and lots of training.

Geiger: We're setting up an independent system connected to Internet. I'm the coordinator of the Chronicle content; I'll figure out what should be posted.

First thing we are looking at is getting the daily paper in. We'll also develop separate databases of restaurant reviews/movie reviews, calendars of what's happening. But we really think the driving force is the communication part -- the forums, people talking to our reporters, to each other.

The main challenge to our library operations with some of these new services is already evident. The same-day news service we feed to Nexis means more deadlines for us throughout the day. We're already sending transmissions at night, a business news send to DataTimes in the early evening. Now we'll be doing a full transmission by 1 a.m. to the Gate and to Nexis.

We'll have to change the schedule probably to a 24-hour schedule. And we'll be needing to do more processing before the publication of the paper, adding subject headings to articles in the newsroom, rather than after publication.

Jansen: I'm involved with the committee looking at developing a new on-line product with Ziff-Davis. We went with Ziff-Davis because they take the approach that the customer in the local market sees the service as a local product; we like that about it.

News text will be an important feature, but will be limited to the most recent month. To get to the archive of stories will be an additional charge.

The biggest change will be the processing overnight -- that is what the database services want for the same-day services, but that is a disaster from my end. Adjusting to a graveyard shift, 11 p.m.-7 a.m., will be hard for the staff.

Another challenge is the unknown nature of these services and just how the library will fit in. Will we be an integral part of the service, or just a side feature?

Other concerns are the issues of quality control and the overhead that goes with it. If a vendor comes to me saying they want a same-day product, my first question is, "OK, let's talk about the quality control, how will corrections be posted?" If it isn't going to take us any significant amount of extra work, and we're sure we'll have that control, I say go for it.

Kenney: We need to move into a new phase of more immediate news delivery -- faster and on a more continuous basis. I think we're becoming more like a news service.

What we are doing with Nexis Top News is just a baby step -- pulling it out before it's published. The interesting challenge would be continuous update of the database throughout the day. Competitively, however, the gray area is how much do you want to reveal to the competition before publication.

The biggest problem is, there isn't enough coordination of the various news feeds we send. Some of it is done by a clerk out in the newsroom; we do other feeds from the library. If there is not someone truly in charge of information management, the lack of coordination can result in inefficiency and double work.

"Telcos will do it if we don't"
Why do you think there is such a frenzy of new product development? What has finally caught on?

Leming: Publishers have finally waded through the reams of material on their desk and they've realized that the telcos will do it if we don't. There is the worry that we don't want to give them our market -- but what kicked that fear into happening, I'm not sure.

Leonard: I think the technology has made repackaging of text possible, certainly more practical. It's easy to target the information that you already have and put it together in a different form.

Geiger: It seems the fear that newspapers have of cable TV and telephone is a real driving force. We want to be sure to keep the franchise. Readership keeps dropping -- we need to figure out ways to survive and grow.

Most of the early start-up projects didn't work, so why the interest now? Good question.

Jansen: I think they finally realize we can't sit by and count on our paper product to get us into the next 10 to 20 years. Heads of newspapers see this frenzy of finding partners and teaming up.

The notion of selling information came out of the library, but these new products are coming from the big decision makers. I just don't know if we'll make money on them, I do know that we need to do them.

Kenney: It's a market that's being driven by financiers, not by reality. They see it beyond what it actually is -- basing it on the speed in changes in technology up to this point.

The financial analysts say there is going to be a dramatic shift and newspapers will not be the viable products they are today. This is driving a lot of the product development.

Newspapers are not the only outlet for advertising or news delivery anymore. These types of products may help us protect the franchise.

"I wish there was standardization"
As a searcher of news text, what would you like to see happen? What is the optimum service? What would it be able to do?

Leming: I would like to see more thesaurus-building in text retrieval. I'd like intelligent agents, synonym lists. I want lots of options in searching: case sensitive searching, Boolean or menu, relevancy rankings.

I would like to see text retrieval software for internal databases that uses knowledge bases, that can learn about what kind of search you do, what kind of information you need. Log-on specific profiles would know what kinds of information you look for and help you get to it again.

Leonard: I wish there was standardization so you could search easily across databases. The trend toward newspapers setting up their separate systems will make it seem like we're going backward for a while, having to call around to search different sites, but the retrieval tools necessary to search across sites are being developed.

My biggest concern about these huge databases has been, and continues to be, quality control and the accuracy of the data.

Geiger: My dream is that newspapers could get together and make a standard subject heading list. At the very least I wish there was some mapping of terms and how they are used across databases.

My other dream is that artificial intelligence will be developed so that news stories could be indexed by a program.

Jansen: I don't search much any more, our researchers do. Generally, though, Mead getting rid of Nexis makes me think they must see the whole information delivery market as getting pretty cutthroat -- the profit margin won't be as great.

Kenney: I want to see a fully paginated page, I want to see everything exactly the way it looked. I don't want to see any more text looking like a printout. I want natural language searching that works perfectly, highly intuitive.

"Spend time on the future"
What has been your role in your company's new product development? How have you been effective at being part of the development; what barriers have there been to your being more effective? What advice would you give to other news librarians, or other librarians who are in companies looking at alternative ways to deliver their news or information products?

Leming: I think you have to be able to visualize that what you do is really the core of the information business you are in. We really are the recycling center -- we provide information into the machine as well as bringing it out.

Once you see yourself as integral to the development of these products you will have some power in your presentation of yourself. You have to have a sense that what you do and what you know is important.

I've been successful because I see my role as keeping them enlightened about things. I started an internal newsletter using a Dialog Dial Search to download articles about converging technology and who's aligning with whom, and I send it to the executives.

Selecting the information most relevant to these readers is important. It's done a lot for my visibility and their sense that I know what's happening.

Leonard: I think the attitude we all have, that we are here at the beginning, helping as it is happening, has made us effective. There aren't any guidebooks -- we're figuring it out as we go, together.

Whenever I get a little worried about the pace of change I recall what someone said to me. He works in the computer room and he said, "I haven't seen this kind of upheaval since the early 1980s, when we were trying to figure out a new platform to use." And that makes me realize that major change has happened before and it does finally settle down again.

Geiger: Content coordination is my main contribution. I got involved because I showed a lot of interest since the earliest days of the service's development.

My advice to people wanting to be involved in the development of new services? Make the time. If you are absolutely swamped in daily work you won't be able to be involved. I've always tried to keep a chunk of time available to be entrepreneurial.

In the last year I've spent most of my discretionary time on bulletin boards, learning about them. You've got to spend time on the future.

Jansen: The library is a critical part of the new service, since the printed product will be a part and we have been a player in the marketing of our text for a long time.

What I bring to the committee is my knowledge of full-text -- the on-line product is going to have full text but they don't know that much about it.

Kenney: I've mainly been an advocate for looking at new products. Newsrooms do not look kindly on advocacy, so it has been a hard role to play. The people who are making the decisions don't always understand what our unique roles and skills are and how they can be brought to the project.

It is a natural role for news librarians as aggressive coordinators of technology to contribute to the development of interactive multimedia products.

So, right now our role as the traditional info handler is to help ease the transition, similar to the role many of us are accustomed to playing in our newsrooms already -- keeping up with the trends, talking about them relentlessly, showing and training.

I'm not sure the effective point of connection can be made between interactive media and newspapers without us.

-- Nora Paul

From THE COLE PAPERS, November 1994, Copyright (c) 1994, All Rights Reserved.