Abstract
This is a case study chronicling the rise and fall of the newspaper library that serviced the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province daily newspapers in Canada during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This article examines a specific case of the decline of a major metropolitan newspaper company, the subsequent closure of the library that served two newsrooms, and the dissolution of its collections. A narrative inquiry approach to oral history was used to gather stories from the individuals involved in the development of the newspaper library. Reflections on the value and persistence of the collections developed by newspaper libraries are offered.
Introduction
This is a case study chronicling the rise and fall of the newspaper library that serviced the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province newspapers in Canada during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The Vancouver Sun was founded in 1912 ‘to consistently advocate the principles of Liberalism’ (Roy and Potter, 2010). At its peak in the 1970s, the Vancouver Sun reached a daily reading audience of more than 245,000. The Vancouver Province was founded as the Vancouver Daily Province in 1898 (O’Clery and Potter, 2013) and, at its peak, its circulation was a more modest 127,000 (Stephens et al., 1976). Currently, the political position of both newspapers is described as centre-right due to their editorial coverage, and they have high ratings for their fact-checking (Media Bias Fact Check, 2023a).
The genesis of the work to gather and preserve the history of a newspaper library arose following current discussions on the need to preserve the history of libraries and library associations (IFLA Library History Special Interest Group, 2023). Today, newspaper libraries, along with many of their parent newspapers, have largely disappeared either as print editions or by ceasing to operate entirely. During their histories, newspaper libraries bridged the physical publishing environment of the 20th century into the digital era of the 21st, and the collections they developed hold persistent value for historical and cultural purposes.
Specifically, this article examines the case of the decline of a major metropolitan newspaper company, the subsequent closure of the library that served two newsrooms, and the dissolution of its collections. A narrative inquiry approach was used to gather the stories of the individuals involved in the developments of the newspaper library over time. Interviews were conducted with library managers and newspaper librarians of the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province to gather the oral histories of the key personnel covering the period from 1968 through 2023.
Literature review
This literature review provides an overview of the history and context of newspaper libraries in the 20th and 21st centuries, primarily in Canada, the USA and Great Britain. In reviewing the literature on newspaper libraries, there are consistent themes that emerge related to the value and purpose of newspaper libraries from the industrial age into the digital era. In the 18th and 19th centuries, newspapers frequently held collections of reference materials for the research needs of their editorial staff. By the 1850s, a number of newspapers had fully formed libraries that not only held reference materials but were also responsible for the work of creating clipping files to support the research and information needs of their newsrooms (Hansen and Paul, 2015; Mills, 1981). Beyond the collection of clipped articles, newspaper librarians considered the creation of an index to the clippings essential as ‘insurance against the loss of the clippings’ (Mills, 1981: 476). Indexes quickly became a required tool in all news libraries, with early examples including the New York Herald’s first index to its news clippings developed in 1860 (Hansen and Paul, 2015: 291).
The Special Libraries Association, founded in 1909, provided opportunities for newspaper librarians to share their expertise and developments in library practices, such as in collecting, organizing and filing newspaper resources to provide efficient, timely and valuable service to their newsrooms. In his December 1931 year in review, Joseph Sheridan, chairman of the Special Libraries Association Newspaper Group, shared words of great optimism on the role of newspaper libraries: The newspaper library is constantly expanding. It is growing in importance each year…The other departments in a well-organized newspaper are becoming greatly dependent upon the library department for information…the newspaper plant which has an efficient reference library is far ahead of the plants which do not have reference libraries. (Sheridan, 1931: 437)
At the same time, he exhorts newspaper librarians to ‘make themselves and their departments more efficient’ because ‘[t]ime is a factor in every newspaper plant’ (437). The focus of the efficiencies in libraries became a persistent theme over the 20th century, although it was initially related to the need to improve access to clips through classification systems.
Newspaper libraries, as did other corporate or special libraries, led in library innovation. Black (2011: 3) describes the developments in special libraries as ‘arenas where, like in no other, the professional identities of library and information professionals were tested and formed’. The Special Libraries Association’s journal offered newspaper librarians the opportunity to share their successes and initiatives with their colleagues. The 1931 issue of the journal contains reports from libraries in Great Britain and the USA on their information management practices. A report on the space designated for the newspaper library in the new offices of London’s Daily Telegraph, for example, explained that while there were traditional library resources, the newspaper clippings were the critical resources of the library: ‘the cuttings file constitutes the backbone of the Department’ (Macer-Wright, 1931: 440). Not only the collection but also the organization of those materials was understood to be key for both mediated and unmediated retrieval: ‘The cuttings are filed on an alphabetical-numerical system and as simply as possible, so that anyone should be able to find what he wants if there is none of the Library staff available’ (Macer-Wright, 1931: 440). Further forms of annotations or indexing meant that newspaper libraries, such as those of the London Daily Herald and Daily Mail, created card systems for the management of and access to stories: ‘Several hundred cards are written each day, and on these each name and incident is picked out, thus dealing with the news in a far more detailed way than is possible in the cuttings’ (Griffiths, 1931: 443).
Newspaper libraries served a gap in addressing information needs at a time when print and radio news was predominant, and prior to the proliferation of television in the home. For some corporate libraries, addressing this gap became part of the continuum of their work, as they recognized the value to the general public of the information that was collected for other purposes (Kozak, 2022). For example, in 1931, the information service of the Seattle Times (USA), entitled ‘Main-0300’, delivered telephone service information to up to 15,000 citizens per day, 24 hours per day: Problems touching all the school subjects are brought to the librarians of the Bureau. Later in the evening their elders may request the most recent rulings on backgammon and contract bridge. Housewives, social leaders, manufacturers and sportsmen call to save valuable time and to acquire needed information for planning future action. (Walsh, 1931: 447)
Even in 1939, at a time when much of the world was focused on war, there was an understanding of the value of information access and the service that newspaper libraries contributed to society: The newspaper library is, in brief, a collection of still pictures culled from the thrilling, and dull, romantic and prosaic, beautiful and horrible motion picture called life…the newspaper library stores away the happenings of current life as they occur. (Harr, 1939: 298)
While other libraries collected the materials that provided recollections and analysis of world events, the newspaper library’s collections were the point of view of the contemporary viewer. The value of the preservation of and access to these resources, however, was little understood by the consumers of the day: Few of the millions who read our daily newspapers realize that these accounts of current life would be only fragmentary, probably inaccurate…were it not for the resources of the library behind the men who write the news and the editorial writers who comment on it. (Harr, 1939: 298)
By 1945, some newspaper libraries were finding themselves falling behind other news departments in their access to resources and technology to enable effective research services for their journalists and editors. While clipping files and indexes were created in most libraries, there were no standards or policy across newspaper libraries, in contrast to the growth in other library classification systems (Fenimore, 1945). Over the subsequent decades of the 20th century, there was a pervasive thread of existential threat to newspaper libraries, as the newspapers themselves weathered cultural, economic and technological challenges. British journalist John M Shaftesley felt impelled to call for recognition of the importance of the press libraries in the mid 1970s: May I support wholeheartedly the plea…for the rescuing of press libraries from destruction when unfortunate a newspaper is forced to close down…concerned with the priceless research material in the cuttings collections, but I would add, even more importantly, the indexes of the newspapers themselves, so painstakingly compiled over the years. (Shaftesley, 1974: 57)
Microfilm technology was taken up by many types of libraries, including newspaper libraries (Mills, 1981), both as a means of preservation and, most pragmatically, to save physical space: ‘The Toronto Globe and Mail began filming in 1954 and calculated that it could reduce fifteen cabinets of clippings into one microfiche…According to the Globe and Mail, to not convert to microform was penny-wise but pound foolish’ (Mills, 1981: 470). In 1971, the New York Times created the first form of automated retrieval system by automating access to its indexes and clippings: ‘Within a short time, the Information Bank was one of the largest databases in the world, with an annual input of 100,000 New York Times articles’ (Mills, 1981: 478).
In a discussion of the history of newspaper preservation, Hansen and Paul (2015) describe the importance of maintaining print news-story files and indexes even while more efficient microfilm, bound volumes and even digital archives were being used for preserving the print newspapers. Once digital archiving was possible, however, the old collections were moved into storage or relocated to other organizations: ‘Some gave the clipping files to local historical societies or libraries, which were equally under resourced to catalog and preserve them. And some organizations simply threw them all away’ (Hansen and Paul, 2015: 292).
Archiving the digital output of a news organization was not recognized as being of importance even as recently as the late 1990s, meaning that the secondary use of the materials was not understood by newspaper owners to have persistent value as a secondary product offering (Hansen and Paul, 2015). As Hansen and Paul’s study of 10 newspapers reveals, newspaper libraries were largely dismantled in the first decade of this century: News library/research staffs have been decimated since the mid-2000s. The most stunning example saw the news library staff shrink from 20 people to three. Others typically fell from 10–15 to one or two. These staffers historically managed the newsprint archive and the photo files and then transitioned to manage the digital database of the print product. (Hansen and Paul, 2015: 293)
In many cases, the ongoing preservation of traditional newspaper articles continued through digital systems developed in the 1990s and early 21st century. However, web and other born-digital content is less likely to be preserved (Carner et al., 2014).
In today’s environment of almost unfettered access to information, it is difficult to comprehend the very different situation in the 20th century when ‘no modern metropolitan paper could operate successfully for a month without a library’ (Harr, 1939: 300). As Mills (1981) notes, however, 20th-century scholarly perspectives on the value of newspapers to the historical records were mixed. In response to the lack of perceived value due to the perception of sensationalism and bias inherent in newspaper reporting and publishing, Mills comments: These scholars…have failed to realize that the very unreliability of the newspaper is an important record of its environment. Newspapers not only record events with unique immediacy and impact, but they also preserve sociocultural attitudes and biases in their historical context. (Mills, 1981: 464)
Today, newspaper databases provide access to primary historical records for researchers, historians and policymakers in many nations. Preservation, access and increased awareness of newspaper collections were among the purposes behind a recent newspaper digitization project at the British Library: ‘The business case underlying the Newspaper Strategy underlined the urgent need for digitization of the Newspaper Archive to enable the long-term preservation of the collection with future access to the historic collection via surrogates’ (Stephens et al., 2014: 208). These themes of access and preservation can be overlaid by the rapid evolution in publishing, technology, access and dissemination of information through new and emerging media, including the rise of the Internet and social media. While today newspaper libraries have primarily disappeared, the treasures of their labours persist through the interventions of national and public libraries, archives, museums and historical societies, preserving the historical record for current and future researchers and historians.
The case study methodology: an oral history of a newspaper library
In this section, we present a case study of the history and background of the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province newspaper library through the recollections of managers and librarians who worked at the newspaper library over a 60-year period, from 1968 to the present day. A narrative inquiry (Bochner and Herrmann, 2020) approach to oral history was used to capture the recollections and reflections of library managers and librarians who led and played a part in the development of the library, its services and its products. This qualitative approach, through interviews that enabled storytelling, provided a rich understanding of the important role that the newspaper library played from those who experienced the many changes in these particular newspapers and the industry at large.
Two library managers and three librarians responsible for specific functions of the library were interviewed through in-person and Zoom meetings in October 2023. Notes were transcribed during the interviews. The questions asked were as follows: Tell us about your role at the Pacific Press newspaper library, both over time and at the time when you departed from the organization. Tell us what you believe most defined the role of that library to the two newspapers it served. What did you see as the role of the Pacific Press library to the city of Vancouver, province of British Columbia and potentially Canada at large? What in the history of the Pacific Press library stands out to you as particular inflection points or critical developments? What specifically concerned or concerns you with respect to the archiving, preservation and access to the materials collected by the library?
The following sections provides a narrative of the contributions to the development of the newspaper library and its technological and digital evolution in tandem with its parent newspapers.
At its height in the 1990s, the library team comprised a departmental manager and two librarians (a photograph/negatives manager and a text-database manager), 23 library assistants, and operated on a 24-hour, 7-days-a-week schedule. The physical library closed in 2012 and the newspapers themselves persist in print and online to this day. The two newspapers were combined into one newsroom following a move by the parent organization in 2017, and the combined physical newsroom was then closed in 2023. All reporting, editing and other aspects of the two newspapers’ work continues remotely. In 2023, there is no library, although one librarian remains, working for the newsrooms and managing reprints/permissions aspects of the original library work as well as other non-library-related activities. Table 1, below, details the interviews conducted.
Interviews.
Mergers and technological progress, 1963–1991: Shirley Mooney
Shirley Mooney was hired as the Library Manager for Pacific Press in 1968. Shortly before her hiring, the merger of the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province newspapers was approved by the Canadian Competition Bureau, enabling the creation of a new parent entity for the two newspaper companies. Following a review to determine the impact of the merger on the Canadian newspaper industry and local market, the newspapers became a single entity known as Pacific Press. Under this unified parent company, the newspapers continued to operate as two distinct and competing newspapers.
There was no functional library when Mooney was appointed to the role of manager: ‘When I was hired, the library was about two years old and had functioned without an acting head for most of the past year. When the first librarian resigned to marry, her job was advertised’. From the merger, 26 staff members, who cut and filed the clippings for their respective newspapers, came together in the new shared library, but the merger created a divisive culture in the library. Further, a fundamental belief in the competitive nature of the two newspapers persisted, even when they became a single business entity. Due to this competitive culture, the editors for each of the newspapers instructed Mooney to keep their clippings separate and not let the other newsroom use their content. This sense of competition would continue to characterize the ongoing relationship between the two newspapers for many decades. The result of these directives by senior editors was that the library was required to create separate keywording and indexing by separate sets of clerks for the respective newspaper clipping files.
Roles of the library as viewed by the newsrooms
This ‘two-headed monster’ was squashed when Mooney persuaded the directors to remove the library from editorial control and instead create an independent department. This paved the way for the resource intensity of information management and retrieval; the development of more of a shared purpose of the library towards the two newsrooms and other departments; and library to be gradually freed from the strict restrictions on which library staff worked for which newspaper. Keep in mind the somewhat unique circumstances, as PacPress [Pacific Press] was created to provide new printing premises to Vancouver’s two major newspapers. Among other services, it was decided certain ‘services’ could be amalgamated, one being ‘the library’. At that time, I guess with the blessing of the competition board hearings, it was decided that the papers’ clipping libraries must be strictly separated and used only by journalists from their own paper. In retrospect all of that was so unnecessary, and trying to correct it was so much more costly.
In the late 1970s, Mooney, along with the librarian for the Seattle Times, was invited by the Special Libraries Association to form a task force to develop guidelines for automating news libraries through developing full-text databases. This effort came to the attention of the American Press Institute, which recommended Mooney as one of the first news librarians to present sessions at the annual American Newspaper Publishers Association conference on this topic.
Roles of the library to the city, province and country
During her tenure as manager, Mooney determined that it would be valuable for the community at large to provide photocopies of articles to the public for the cost of copying. This type of access was invaluable at a time when access to primary newspaper source materials was difficult. Over the years, Mooney also ensured that authors and researchers were granted permission to come into the private library to use the collections. Table 2 provides a timeline of the library practices, milestones and other developments in the newspaper library from 1968 to 2023.
Timeline of the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province newspaper library, 1968–2023.
Inflection points in the history of the library
In 1970, Pacific Press experienced a lengthy strike (three months), which essentially set the stage for dramatic changes at the newspapers, including significant changes to the newspaper library. Mooney and the only other non-union librarian at the library during that period took the opportunity to merge the subject heading lists of the two newspapers’ separate clipping files into one thesaurus. At the same time, Pacific Press’s Data Processing Department had received the company’s first computer and, being unsure of what to do with it, agreed to allow the librarians to use it. The librarians developed a computerized thesaurus for the clippings and generated colour-coded labels to affix to the newly sorted clipping files.
Another of Mooney’s major assignments was to introduce computers to the newsrooms, supporting the automation of production for both daily newspapers. It then became the role of the library to train journalists in the use of the computers, setting the pattern of responsibility in subsequent newsroom-technology changes.
In 1986, the Library Manager’s title changed to Manager of Editorial Services due to the incorporation of the two newspapers’ film labs and the associated responsibility for the storage and retrieval of the negatives for the library. The Manager of Editorial Services also oversaw the building of a new film lab, which opened on the first day of one of the most transformative events in British Columbia – the World Exposition on Transportation and Communication, Expo 86, held in Vancouver. I realize so much of what I implemented was so coloured by what went before, but I believe some of the steps we did take helped provide a platform for the modernizing my successors must take credit for. But I blow my own horn in that it was me who managed to create professional library positions in Pacific Press library and it was me who had the brilliance to see them filled by Millward, Bird, Schachter and a number of enthusiastic staff.
Changes in the newspapers’ ownership created inflection points over the years when Mooney was manager (see Table 2), and she found the Special Libraries Association’s Newspaper Division important to the development of the newspaper library, particularly through conference programming: ‘I was bringing many innovations back to PacPress, was the second Canadian to chair the International News Division…and also the second Kwapil Award-winner’. 1
In the late 1980s, the creation of the Infomart text database began the transition from clipping files to electronic retention and dissemination. First the Vancouver Sun, in 1987, and then the Vancouver Province, in 1989, led to the newspaper library converting activities from physical indexing, clipping, photocopying and filing to capturing and enhancing electronic news stories for publishing in the Infomart system.
Leadership transitions and technological developments, 1988–2012: Debbie Millward
Debbie Millward was first hired in 1988 as a librarian after completing her Master of Library Science (MLS) degree at the University of British Columbia, during which time she had worked on call as a library assistant after doing a practicum at the Pacific Press library: ‘I was hired to manage the new text database transition, which would replace indexing and filing clippings with submitting full-text article content, that we enhanced with keywords and other descriptors, to Infomart’. In 1995, Millward was appointed Manager of Editorial Services – a position she held until 2012 when the library was closed.
Roles of the library as viewed by the newsrooms
During this period, the library’s profile was increased by having librarians attend daily news meetings and file freedom-of-information requests on behalf of the Vancouver Sun, and the Graphics Librarian managing the Merlin photo archive and training newsroom staff to use it. Millward pushed for library researchers’ credits to be published, as the librarians worked more closely with editorial staff on large projects.
In an article for the Vancouver Sun’s centenary edition in February 2012, Millward wrote: The Vancouver Sun has had the support of a department to serve this [research support] role for most of its history, definitely since the 1940s. It has answered to [the name of] morgue, press library and news research library – sometimes all three in the same week.…The Sun’s library today is a hive of activity that has less to do with the custody and cataloguing of what was published yesterday, and more to do with collaboration on what will be published today. The daily wrangling of Sun content that has been printed or posted online is mostly automated now, with human intervention only for corrections and troubleshooting. The days of a 24/7 library operation to manually clip, index and file every story and photo ended 20-odd years ago (Millward, 2012).
That legacy continues to deliver, however, as a point of entry into a trove of Vancouver memories, both silly and solemn – from swooning Beatles fans at the Forum to the tragedies of harbour explosions and collapsing bridges. New roles for the press library evolved while retaining the archiving and organizing core of the past.
Roles of the library to the wider society
Millward continued to allow vetted authors to come in to do research in the collections, and oversaw the development of the public fee-based service, named Infoline, to sell photograph reprints and page reproductions, and provide permissions. The library staff continued to prepare newspaper print editions for microfilming, which were distributed by subscription to various academic and other libraries, and earned royalties for the newspaper company.
Inflection points in the history of the library
Digital archiving was one of the most significant impacts to the newspaper library. First was the creation of the full-text metadata-enhanced Infomart text database – for the Vancouver Sun in 1987 and the Vancouver Province in 1989 – which was followed by the development of a separate digital photography and electronic archive.
During this period, the library moved to a significant new space when the newspapers moved in 1997 to a prominent location in downtown Vancouver. As an indicator of the perceived importance of the service, the library was given a large footprint in a prime location, although separated for the first time from its previous location between the two newsrooms. To remain more connected to the journalists and editors, librarians were also embedded in the newsrooms for a period of time. Over time, the library space contracted as the newspapers themselves did, moving to a smaller space within the building in 2010.
Innovation in services continued throughout this time period, including the development of a revenue-generating service: Infoline. For the first time, the library was moving from being solely a cost centre to a revenue-generating and cost-recovery department. This approach broadened relationships with the Promotions Department of the newspapers in their shared interest in generating revenue outside of the traditional newspaper streams.
Along with newsroom-technology changes came opportunities to develop training roles for the librarians, particularly when the World Wide Web was in its infancy, and also when newsrooms switched to Macintosh computers, and then from Macintosh to person computers and into new pagination systems. The library finally closed as a separate department in 2012.
Concerns regarding the collections’ archiving, preservation and access
While happy that many of the library-created and -indexed collections (negatives, photographs, microfilm) had found a new home, Millward hoped that the remaining collections would also find locations that would continue to make them accessible for research – especially the unique microfiche collections of the newspapers’ pre-database subject-indexed news articles. The newspaper print clippings processes ended soon after the advent of the Infomart databases in the late 1980s, and the clippings were later microfilmed and processed into biography or subject fiche formats.
Digital image developments, 1990–2015: Kate Bird
Kate Bird began her work at the Pacific Press library in 1990, in a new position as a Graphics Librarian: ‘My first role was to create a database to index the newspapers’ negatives for [their] 20,000 photographic assignments each year’. This was a period of significant technological innovation, which was supported by the initiatives and evolving expertise of the newspaper librarians. In 1994, the newspapers were at the leading edge of digital photography and digital transmissions when they experimented with digital cameras at the Commonwealth Games held in Victoria, British Columbia. Then, in 1995, the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province became the first newspapers in North America to go all digital – a huge challenge to the traditional trades, systems and processes at the newspapers. Through these initiatives, the emerging skill of project management became a new part of the job of Bird and other librarians within the Pacific Press library.
Within the company, the library demonstrated leadership in new technology both through the use of tools and software to create databases and in expertise developed during the early years of online research. Bird became a trainer in both new technology and technology upgrades for the newsroom and other staff. She also conducted training across the Postmedia chain for hundreds of employees in the use of the digital image archiving system, led by its adoption at the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province newspapers.
Primary role of the library
According to Bird, research was the primary role of the library – identifying and retrieving background stories, photographs, maps, documents and other information, and especially statistics, to augment reporters’ stories. Library staff created chronologies, timelines, fact boxes, quizzes and other valuable content, often in advance of specific requests for such information. Librarians were also the newsroom-technology trainers, who understood the work of reporters and other employees and were able to design training programmes to better meet staff needs than outside trainers could, particularly in that the librarians, as is true of many special librarians, tended to be at the front edge of technology and library services to meet the needs of their specific communities.
Roles of the library to society at large
The library’s public-fee service, Infoline, demonstrated that the library could generate income from both ad hoc research and the resources developed as part of the work it did for the newspapers and the newspaper chain. The Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province were the newspapers of record for Vancouver and the province of British Columbia, and the library staff provided newspaper-article indexing before this function was automated, while other resources, such as indexed notations related to crimes and criminals and other specific events, as well as photographic assignments, were developed for internal purposes, which could be useful today if they were accessible. For now, the published collections that the library formerly managed continue to be used to illustrate articles and books about the city’s and the province’s past, either through the newspaper itself or through the current holders of the collections at Vancouver Public Library and the City of Vancouver Archives.
Inflection points and critical developments
In the 1990s, the transition of the Photography Department from using 20,000 rolls of film a year to all digital was a huge step forward both technologically and environmentally. Access, use and reuse became much more the norm when images were easily identified through the digital image archiving system. On the other hand, when the indexing functions for the print archive were automated and the library staff were no longer required to mediate, there was a significant loss of quality in the records, which made searching less precise and meant the loss of some content.
Implications for the materials’ archiving, preservation and access
The collection of photographic negatives has become more inaccessible now that it is housed at the City of Vancouver Archives. It was planned that, over time, the collection would gradually become more accessible, but after several years the Archives have not yet released many newly scanned images from the collection. Access to the photograph collection at the Pacific Newspaper Group is severely limited as there is only one remaining staff member in the library, who no longer works on the premises since the closure of the newsroom. Since Bird’s retirement, the digital photograph archive is no longer monitored, much content has been lost between the assigned and published photographs, and the preservation of the newspaper content has degraded. The text archive, lnfomart, is automated and there is no audit of the articles ingested into the system compared to those that have been published, making full retrieval uncertain.
Librarian roles in a declining library, 2012–2023: Sandra Boutilier
Sandra Boutilier worked in several roles at Pacific Press in the 1990s and, in 2001, following the achievement of her Master of Library and Information Studies (MLIS), she was hired as a librarian in the newspaper library. Boutilier’s primary role was in supporting reporters by doing research for the next edition of the newspapers. Over time, Boutilier also became involved in content creation for the newspapers. Compilations for the newsrooms’ websites increased as the newspapers understood the importance of other platforms, including ‘This Day in History’ – historical photographs of the day as social media posts. She then took on additional roles as an archivist, creating databases and photograph files, and saving physical materials. As with many newspapers, reprints were a source of income, and Boutilier took on the role of Copyright Librarian. In this role, she oversaw permissions for the reuse of newspaper content in the context of selling and providing commercial reprints of articles and images, and liaising with the public, other news outlets, book publishers and the film industry.
Prior to Boutilier’s departure in June 2017, and with an imminent newsroom move to a different site in the city of Vancouver, she was focused on finding a home for the content of the newspaper library. This work included cold-calling other libraries to find homes for books from their small collection that might be considered of value to others, or to ensure the preservation of critical materials for future researchers and historians. Boutilier worked with the one remaining librarian to curate and reduce the collection, and to argue for the value of saving these collections with senior editors and executives of the organization. As primary source materials of value to the city and province, negatives and their indexes were donated to the City of Vancouver Archives, taking advantage of the Archive’s newly acquired cold-storage space for this collection of over a million photographic negatives.
Inflection points in the history of the library
When the manager of Editorial Services left in 2012, Boutilier noted: the library no longer had anyone to advocate for it, to liaise with management. [The l]ibrary was not a priority for management, not only the staff but the collections. It felt like the beginning of the end of the library, and put the library into survival mode.
The remaining staff were moved into the two newsrooms, and work focused more on content creation.
Implications for the collections’ archiving, preservation and access
The most significant implication is that there is no longer any physical space for the collections. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, all staff have worked remotely. All that is left on-site in the former newsrooms is one Lektriever (vertical filing carousel) containing photograph files and index cards, plus a small number of books. As the newsrooms will not return to a physical site, these collections will have to be relocated or donated. Before Boutilier left, she approached many organizations, such as Vancouver Public Library and Library and Archives Canada. The sense of frustration was at its height when it came to the survival of the collections beyond the closure of the library.
The last of the newspaper librarians: Carolyn Soltau
Since 2017, Carolyn Soltau, who joined the library in 2005, has been the sole librarian at the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province. Further, she remains the only news librarian within the Postmedia newspaper chain, and is one of only three in Canada when including the other major Canadian newspapers – the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. Soltau continues to manage corrections for the newspaper text database in solely a reactive approach to content errors. The common thread that persists in Soltau’s work, and continues through the history of the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province newspaper library, is the provision of news research.
Soltau defined her role as ‘half archivist, half private investigator’, which connects her work with that of her predecessors in the field. Soltau’s other roles include content creation related to posting information on the newspapers’ websites; training employees in the use of internal systems; and transferring old stories onto websites, such as major criminal or award-winning news features. Because of the diminished newsroom personnel, Soltau’s work has expanded from traditional news support to include scanning and procuring photographs as a liaison between the newsroom and photograph agencies; selecting letters to the editor for publication; fact-checking; and posting on social media platforms on behalf of the newspapers. In a continuation of the more traditional expertise of newspaper librarians, Soltau is responsible for copyright education.
Continuing role beyond the newsrooms
The newspaper library’s strength has been its connection to the local communities of British Columbia through its archiving and preservation of the stories and lives of its citizens. That news content may have been considered incidental at the time, perhaps, but it still gets reused by the newspapers. The stories and photographs capture the historical periods through fashions and personal or cultural moments. For example, a 1970s news photograph was taken of a couple in a nightclub and was recently republished in the Vancouver Sun newspaper. Soltau related the story of this same couple contacting the newsroom to let the editors know that the picture was of their first date and they had been married for more than 30 years. When old images are republished, connections are made with people globally. The final preservation tasks for the closed library include finding homes for unique collections and ephemera, such as the Vancouver Sun Test Kitchen’s files of recipe cards and scrapbooks.
Inflection points in the 21st century
What stands out for Soltau is what she terms ‘journalism in crisis’, which has had seismic impacts on the existence of the newspaper library. In 2012, the decision to close the library led to the need for the remaining three librarians to self-manage and ‘keep the faith’. The support of the reporters helped the librarians in their transition, and they became embedded in the merged newsroom. The positive of being embedded in the newsroom was that these librarians were fully integrated into the newsroom team. Sitting at the Vancouver Sun newspaper’s City Desk hub meant that they knew what was going on, could offer to help and be part of the buzz of the newsroom. Copywriters also discovered that they could make use of the librarians’ expertise.
Implications of archiving, preservation and access to the collections
With respect to preserving the historical work of the library, Soltau referred to the specialized clipping files known as the Microfiche Collection. Since the closure of the newsroom, all work is done remotely and the physical storage space must be vacated, so the need to dispose of the remaining physical collections has reached peak urgency. This means that these unique, non-digitized microfiche story records are one of the most pressing collections remaining to be relocated or donated to a willing organization. As the ‘last librarian standing’, Soltau underlined her responsibility to the collections and described it as a privilege to shepherd them into safe homes.
Conclusion
The library of the Vancouver Sun and Vancouver Province daily newspapers, united under Pacific Press and later the Postmedia Network, was central to preserving the newspapers’ content. The library evolved to perform the additional role of creating content, including contributing to award-winning journalism features. The librarians’ and staff’s expertise and labour-intensive work, produced over many decades for the journalists and editors, created searchable collections of local and regional history as a specific valuable product. The library’s managers pushed the department to become an innovator in technology adoption for the newspaper company – from the 1970s use of the first computer to create a thesaurus for the news clippings, through using dial-up modems to access the first databases in the 1980s, to training reporters on the new hardware and programmes adopted by the newsrooms in the 2000s. The library created revenue streams for the newspapers through the fee-based Infoline’s sales of reprints and permissions, and by preparing physical copies of the newspapers for microfilming and sales, thereby generating royalties. The librarians were key to protecting the newspapers’ copyright and ensured that photographers were compensated when their photographs were provided to other publications with permissions for reuse. This library is essentially gone but its work persists for the benefit of future researchers, historians and the broader community.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
