Librations

Though I’m usually more interested/involved in libraries at their intersection with the visual arts, I’ve been thinking a lot about newspapers lately.  This Thursday marks the final issue of The Ann Arbor News, and as Annarbor.com moves toward its debut through a series of publicly executed fits and starts, I’ve begun to worry about what will happen to the record of local life as we go forward.  While it seems unnerving to watch the demise of an often disparaged but admittedly venerable news source at the hands of a product that seems so desperately eager to be successful that it makes me want to zip myself into my hoodie and hide, the bigger issue in the long run is what will happen to all the information this new organization is producing.

Preview of annarbor.com

Appropriately, I found a copy of Information Today in my mailbox at work this morning. I usually consider the tabloid-size publication so hideous and boring that I quickly skim through it before stuffing it into another colleague’s box (note: their website is even worse). The major headline caught my eye, however: “Where Have All the Archives Gone? Newspaper archive aggregators face the challenge of all-digital, no-paper publications.” I consume 99% of my news online, through news sites, blogs, and the occasional Facebook link. I certainly belong to the target audience of these new all-digital news publications, and I understand that newspaper publishers have found themselves in an untenable situation at the crossroads of social change, historical convention, convenience and, of course, money. Nevertheless, when viewed from a librarian’s preservation-of-information-centric perspective, it is worrisome to consider the future: will an eighth-grader in 2019 be able to research the history of the Ann Arbor Art Fair? What will she find after 2009? Are we allowing our collective story to disappear at the hands of opportunistic corporations?

Before I work myself into a frenzy, however, it is useful to inject some historical levity. I remind myself, for example, that though the newspaper seems a sturdy, timeless institution of lofty, noble aspirations, it, too, has long been the product of for-profit corporations. And, as a former employee of the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL), I can attest that for years the archiving of and access to old edtions of The Ann Arbor News was not performed by the paper, but rather by dutiful librarians at AADL, intent on preserving the local history of our community. I fondly recall sitting beside librarian Dietmar Wagner at the Reference Desk as he diligently paged through each day’s paper, indexing its contents in a primitive database. Given all this, it’s not really surprising that Annarbor.com is more concerned with selling ad space than it is with posterity.

So who will step up to preserve this new online content? Information Today, in its aforementioned article, states that ProQuest, a purveyor of databases and other content, adds born-digital content to its Historical Newspaper collection, unbelievably, by transferring it to microfilm and then digitizing the microfilm before using OCR technology to add searchability. Information Today calls the process “Byzantine.” It reminds me of Disney’s 1954 animated short parodying the redundancy of bureaucratic operations, Pigs is Pigs. These are the people who are not only in charge of what gets saved, but we’re paying them for it? Seriously?

Ooops. I seem to have reached frenzied state again. So I’ll stop to consider the built-in archives of blogs and their searchability. Annarbor.com appears to be set up to echo blogs in format, so perhaps finding an old article will be easier than it was before, when a librarian had to index the paper (I’m leaving out the intervening years, between AADL’s clipping and then digital indexing of The Ann Arbor News, when the paper finally became available online, but not indexed, through the NewsBank InfoWeb database). But how long will that persist? And what about the advertisements and comments/opinions that contribute so much to telling the story of a time and place? Are we transitioning into a society without a traceable record?

Big questions for a Tuesday and a local paper. Welcome, readers! What do you think?