PRESERVING OUR NEWSPAPER HERITAGE

scanned version, there may be errors

Newspapers in Great Britain have been receiving a 'bad press' over the last decade or so. An intensive circulation war, brought about by the appearance of brash new titles at the more popular end of the national newspaper market, has had the effect of lowering standards throughout. The term 'tabloid journalism', which once referred to accurate and reliable writing, albeit in a popular style, now rather carries connotations of prurience, sensationalism, and a lack of respect for the privacy or the feelings of individuals. Whereas a decade ago calls for greater regulation of the actions of the press, and a right of redress for aggrieved individuals were barely audible, they are now becoming somewhat more insistent. Several official investigations into the conduct of the popular press, and unsuccessful attempts to impose some effective form of self-regulation on the conduct of journalists have not satisfied critics, and the outcome may well involve greater restrictions on the press and thereby the curtailment of its ability to investigate matters in the public interest.

Even some of the more serious 'broadsheet' titles, which for generations have maintained enviable reputations for the quality and accuracy of their journalism, have succumbed to commercial pressures either from proprietors or advertisers, with a consequent diminution of standards. No national title can now claim to be a true 'paper of record' reporting the news with complete accuracy and impartiality. Recent public opinion surveys show that national newspaper journalists are beginning to forfeit the trust and respect of their readers.

There have also been worrying changes in the range and quality of local and regional newspapers. This is due in part to commercial pressures from proprietors, from the competition of local broadcasting, and the advent of new production technology. Many famous local newspapers, which have existed for a century or more, have recently ceased publication, merged with other papers, or else have been transformed into emasculated 'free sheets' containing little news and a great deal of advertising. This is an enormous shame, for although Britain still perhaps can claim a few very good national newspapers, it also has many disreputable titles and the general standard of newspaper journalism is in marked decline.

Yet in spite of the above, newspapers remain one of the most pervasive, and yet underrated sources of printed information that we use in our lives. Whether it is aimed at a national, regional or local audience, or whether popular or serious in its treatment of news, a good newspaper will provide much more than a daily account of noteworthy or unusual events. It will also give both pictures and text as a means of relating a news story vividly and effectively, providing background information to place it into an understandable context. Newspapers also provide entertainment, gossip, social comment, together with a wide range of factual and statistical information, and are an important vehicle for advertising a wide range of products and services. Even a sensational, newspaper nevertheless serves to paint a portrait of some aspects of contemporary society . its attitudes and concerns. Thus, newspapers serve not only to keep their readers informed and entertained everyday, but they can also provide a priceless store of retrospective information on all subjects. They provide many of the raw materials for future histories of our times.

Although there is a mass of potentially useful information published each day in our national and local newspapers, they are not well suited as library materials. The newspaper has evolved as an ephemeral product, produced quickly and cheaply, and then discarded, whereas the library is concerned with preserving materials and making them available to readers at some future date. A newspaper, whether broadsheet or tabloid, is designed to be attractive, portable and easy to use as a single issue, but lit tle thought is given by the publishers to providing it with any form of retrieval apparatus, or to securing its preservation once read. After all, the vast majority of newspapers sold will be kept for a few days only. Files of newspapers are therefore bulky and difficult to store, printed on low grade materials which are subject to rapid deterioration in any but the most care fully controlled conditions. Unless the potential user happens to know the exact date upon which an event was reported, they are difficult to consult. Nevertheless, in spite of the difficulties involved many academic, public and special libraries seek to preserve them, either as hard copy, or else in a micro graphic form, and to exploit the wealth of information that is contained with in them.

The traditional way of getting over the information retrieval problem, has been either to compile an index or else to reduce each issue to its basic component articles by means of cutting and then filling several copies of each according to the subjects covered. Newspaper cuttings libraries will quickly build up hundreds or even thousands of folders or pockets, each of which contains cuttings on the same subject. Both of these processes are time consuming and expensive. Newspapers are also notoriously difficult to index effectively, for it is impossible to predict how a developing story will end, or what minor figure appear ing in the press for the first time will one day be a world leader. With cut tings libraries there has to be a balance between covering every individual or subject mentioned in an article, and providing so many duplicate cuttings that the library grows to unmanageable proportions. There is also bound to be a loss of associated information by not knowing what else was reported at the same time, and what prominence a particular story was given on the printed page.

Some of these storage and access problems will no doubt disappear in due course as more titles also become available in electronic formats. A large number of national and international titles are now available either as CD ROM products or else via online news information databases such as NEXIS or F. T. Profile. Sophisticated 'free text' search software, with a range of tools enables searchers to locate virtually any combination of words that might appear in the headline or the body of a story. However, although the electronic products currently available, provide excellent finding aids for events during the last decade or so, they do not provide an adequate alter native to the traditional printed news paper for many purposes.

All such products are rather selective in what they contain. restrict ing their coverage to news stories and features, and ignoring the large quantities of other information published each day. Online services are also incapable of providing the associated pictures and graphics which are such an important feature of the overall message conveyed by the newspaper page. CD-ROM newspapers are just beginning to face the problem of providing a graphic image, with varying degrees of success. Also, whereas it is economically viable for important nation al titles to be marketed also as electronic products, this is most unlikely to be the case for local or very spe cialized titles, with a more limited potential market. Alternatively, there have been a number of recent attempts by libraries to use optical disc technology to scan newspaper pages or cuttings collections, and store the con tents on WORM (Write Once Read Many) Discs. These would provide both the graphic image and enable the text to be searched. However this technology is also in its infancy, and it appears that librarians in all types of libraries will be wrestling with the problem of storing and making avail able information from back copies of newspapers for many years to come.

The physical preservation of old newspapers is one of the most pressing conservation issues for many librarians, particularly with respect to those titles published since the late nineteenth century. It was at this time that new techniques for producing paper using either mechanical wood pulp or esparto grass began to be used. These provided a cheaper, but far less durable product than traditional techniques. The low price of newsprint, compared with other printing papers. was a major factor in the explosion in British newspaper publishing in the late nineteenth century , but is also the reason why such newspapers will not last unless kept in ideal conditions.

For generations, librarians have witnessed the gradual deterioration of their holdings caused by exposure to daylight and atmospheric pollution. This has been coupled with a general increase in the level of their use, and recognition of their usefulness by library users. Local and provincial titles are particularly at risk, since files may only be held by one or two libraries in the country. Unfortunately some librarians have not seen news paper conservation as a priority issue and have taken no action in the belief that files will be preserved by either the newspaper proprietors themselves or else by The British Library, Newspaper Library, at Colindale. There are how ever many risks associated with this policy. Local newspapers have a great tendency to come and go, and to change publishers. Increasingly the maintenance of bulky back files, and the provision of public access to them has been seen as an unnecessary expense by newspaper publishers. Also there are already many gaps in the Colindale collections 10 000 bound volumes of local newspapers were lost in a bombing raid during the Second World War. Today with the fundamental changes in the pattern of local newspaper publishing, the British Library is finding it increas ingly difficult to keep track of local publications.

At the same time however, many public and academic librarians have recognized their own long-term responsibilities in this field and taken appropriate remedial action to con serve unique collections. Originally this was done by binding them, but microfilming is now widely used since it is cheaper and copies may be provided to other libraries. However. until the 1980s all such remedial action was at a local level and largely un-co-ordinated. Nobody even had a clear idea of the extent of the problem of preserving Britain's local newspapers and how much work had already been done. In some cases effort was wasted in micro filming titles for a second time. This situation might have continued had it not been for a group of librarians in the South West Library Regional Library System (SWRLS) who recognized that the various collections of local newspapers in their area were at risk and decided to do take some action. SWRLS applied to the British Library for a grant for a pilot project to inves ti ate newspaper holdings in libraries, 9 1 museums, record offices, newspaper offices and other collections within their area, and establish a priority for microfilming.

The Newsplan project eventual~ ly began in 1983, John Beard, the County Librarian of Hampshire was the Project Director and Rosemary Wells was appointed the Project Officer. Her report, covering the south west, was published in 1986 (Wells), and serves as a blueprint for future studies. She sought both to investigate the whole field. of newspaper storage and microfilming techniques as well as to compile lists of the newspaper holdings. Her recommendations principally concerned the location of newspaper files, the collecting of information about microfilming already undertaken, establishing priorities, maintaining liaison with the British Library, and investigating sources of funding for this work. Following the publication of her report by the British Library, the libraries in the region set up a Committee to implement the recommendations, sometimes by continuing an existing programme, or else were encouraged to begin new programmes, but in the knowledge that they were taking part in a concerted. microfilming activity of potential benefit to all.

Newsplan is an excellent example of a relatively small scale under taking, with limited aims, but which has been able to achieve a great deal, by harnessing the goodwill and co operation of a variety of librarians. The success of the pilot project, has led to the adoption of the idea through out the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, usually under the aegis of the regional library interlending bureau. There have been a succession of reports compiled, several of which have been published (Cowley, 1990, Gordon, 1988, O'Toole, 1992, Parkes, 1990, Parry, 1989, and Watkins, 1990) and most are in process of implementation. Each one has been com piled with the co-operation of local librarians.

The Library and Information Co operation Council (LINC) has a Newsplan Panel which has recomm~ended that one per cent of materials budgets should be devoted to news paper microfilming, and a great deal of publicity has been given to the problem of newspaper conservation. At the time of writing the tenth and final Newsplan report, covering London and the South Eastern region, is approaching completion (Eagle, 1993). This is the largest and most complex of them all, due to the density of news paper coverage within the area. Thus within a single decade the newspaper holdings of the whole country have been surveyed and many of the areas have begun to implement their recommendations.

However, there are disadvantages associated with undertaking such a project on a local basis with a mini mum of funding. One such is in the diversity in the methods and formats used for reporting newspaper holdings. Some groups have compiled the information of local newspaper titles in a machine readable form prior to printing, whereas others have not, but in any event there was no standard for mat agreed in advance the report from the Yorkshire region was com piled somewhat eccentrically using only capital letters. Similarly, whilst most of the lists of newspapers are published in hard copy, the original one for the south west is on micro- fiche. Thus it has not been possible to integrate all of these surveys into a single machine readable database of newspaper holdings. However it would be invidious to criticize those involved for a lack of foresight in this area, because 1 doubt whether anyone realised the project would be so successful on a national scale. Had the original proponents sought a more ambitious project, involving a larger area or requiring more funding, then the Newsplan project may never have got off the ground.

The preservation of our valuable newspaper heritage is the responsibility of librarians, rather than journalists or newspaper proprietors. Perhaps the national titles may be left to the British Library, but there will always be a need for a contribution from libraries at a local level. Those involved with the various Newsplan projects have already done a great deal to rescue much valuable material from oblivion, and preserve it for the use of our own and future generations. The news- papers of the past are well worth pre- serving. Is it reasonable to expect from the journalists and newspaper proprietors working today that their work will once again reflect the standards of accuracy and objectivity achieved in the past, and be worthy of preservation?

David Stoker

May 1993

(With thanks to Selwyn Eagle)

REFERENCES

1. Cowley, Ruth (1990) Newsplan: report of the Newsplan project in the North Western Region. British Library

2. Eagle, Selwyn and Hamilton, Geoffrey (1993) Preserving the perishing papers: Newsplan and your local newspaper. Local History Magazine, 37, 8-11.

3. Gordon, Ruth (1989) Newsplan: report of the Newsplan project in the East Midlands. British Library

4. O'Toole, James (1992) Newsplan: report of the Newsplan project in Ireland. British Library

5. Parkes, David (1990) Newsplan: report of the Newsplan project in Yorkshire and Humberside. British Library

6. Parry, David (1989) Newsplan: report of the Newsplan project in the Northern Region. British Library

7. Watkins, Tracey (1990) Newsplan: report of the Newsplan project in the West Midlands. British Library

8. Wells, Rosemary (1986) Newsplan: report of the pilot project in the South-West. British Library