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Serials - Vol. 5, No 3, November 1992 on CD-ROM Newspapers on CD-ROM

Introduction

This paper concentrates on British newspapers available in CD-ROM form. from the point-of-view looks at the characteristics of this form of publication of newspapers in comparison with the alternatives of hard-copy, To producers and most readers of microfilm and online, and discusses the newspapers a newspaper is primarily benefits and limitations of the something bought on the day of from the point of view of libraries and end- publication, providing, on a daily or weekly users. It does not provide a detailed basis, reporting and comment on current decription or evaluation of the individual events, backed by features, listings and products, since this is available elsewhere other 'recreational' material. For both the (), and since the products themselves are normal expectation is that the newspaper still evolving, nor does it cover overseas will be discarded after use. titles or indexes to and abstracts of To librarians and to researchers, however, newspapers available on CD-ROM. newspapers have long been recognised as valuable tools and information sources many years after their initial publication. The and later the British At the of writing five CD-ROMs of UK Library have systematically collected newspaper titles are publicly available, some newspapers for the last 150 years and runs containing the text of more than one of local newspapers are among the most newspaper. The titles and the years of highly valued parts of public library local publication covered, together with history collections. publisher/distributor details are: Initially the only form in which newspapers could be kept for long term use / 1990- was as hard copy or originals, usually by Times Network Systems/Chadwyck-Healey binding the collected issues of a title into 1990- volumes a month or year at a time. After Chadwyck-Healey World War I1 microfilm copies of newspapers became recognised as an /The Independent on acceptable surrogate for the originals Sunday 1989- offering the possibility, through the FT Profile/Chadwyck-Healey controlled storage of master negatives, of archival quality film of long term The 1990- preservation beyond that likely to be feasible FT Profile/Chadwyck-Healey (at least economically) of the originals. The last decade has seen the growing The Northern Echo 1989- availability of the text content of certain The Northern Echo newspapers in electronic database form on With the exception of the Northern Echo online hosts such as FT PROFILE, bringing the data from each year of a title is usually to those users able to afford it access to very contained on a separate disk. large amounts of newspaper information Serials - Vol. 5, No 3, November 1992 Newspapers on CD-ROM through the power of information retrieval prices are those of the cover-price of the software. The capability of CD-ROM to individual issues and do not include the cost handle large full-text databases has enabled of binding or other form of keeping the the publication of newspaper text copies fit for long term use. information in this medium and in the last In the case of The Guardian and The sixteen months has made electronic access Times these prices have been to it available for a more general audience. significantly since their original launch, Given the availability of newspaper while for all of the titles discounts are information in these four media, the choice available to public sector educational for libraries and for users is dependent on a organisations which reduces the price mixture of organisational or user needs and further for those users. on economic and technical considerations. I have not attempted to compare the costs Historically, national and public libraries of online use since these are variable, being have concentrated on collecting and , based on connect time, display charges and preserving for use the original newspapers telecommunciations costs, with searching or microfilm copies, with subject access across multiple titles and years the norm. limited to the availability of published or in- house produced indexes, while commercial Characteristics of CD-ROM in and other users, for whom the information Relation to Original Newspapers content of stories is the primary concern, have opted either to build collections of The first and obvious thing to say about newspaper cuttings or to use online CD-ROM versions of newspapers is that databases where the data range and title they are not a substitute medium for the coverage available meet their needs. primary purpose of newspapers identified above, i.e. the current provision of daily or weekly reporting of current events and the associated editorial, feature and leisure Where then do newspaper on CD-ROM fit material that accompanies it. Nor, like in the spectrum of choice and what benefits online files, do they provide a full archival and disadvantages do they offer compared electronic equivalent of the published to the alternatives? newspaper. Instead they provide an electronic archive Costs of the main information content of newspapers, the news stories, feature A comparison of the costs of annual articles, editorial and other matter but subscription prices for CD-ROMs with excluding a great deal of the material that those of microfilm or hard copy plus contributes to the identity of individual printed index shows the products to be newspaper titles and which is of interest to competitively priced. both current readers and future researchers. CD-ROM Microfilm Hard copy Index Times/SundayTimes£595 £700 £165 £450 Exclusions Guardian £495 £330 £145 £470 Independent/ Independent on Sunday £499 £610 £170 Material excluded from CD-ROMs varies Financial Times £900 £585 £170 £570 from product to product, although some Northern Echo £100 exclusions are common across all titles. The prices shown are for 1992 subscriptions In most cases photographs and other (some index prices based on conversions image and graphic material are currently from dollar prices at the time our excluded. This is likely to change as the subscriptions were paid). The hard copy technology develops. The 1991 end of year Serials - Vol. 5, No 3, November 1992 Newspapers on CD-ROM disk from The Times contains several Benefits and Limitations of hundred photograhs but these represent CD-ROM only a small proportion of those published in the year and so far these are not well Benefits integrated with the articles which they The benefits of CD-ROM as a medium for illustrate. The announcement of the the publication of, and access to, newspaper forthcoming CD-ROM version of The material are similar to those of CD-ROM in Economist says that it will include 'graphics, general. charts, maps and tables where they are To the individual end-user they offer: thought to be important to the article'. the power of searching with information Advertisements are excluded in all cases, retrieval software, including Boolean logic, including the births, deathdmarriages adjacency searching, truncation etc, and the announcements of major interest to future ability to define searches by newspaper generations of family history researchers. specific information such as , Most "recreational" material is excluded, bylines and issue dates. While taken for including puzzles, , cartoons, TV granted by the experienced online user the availability of this power to search large and sports fixture listings, recipes, and amounts of full-text data is a major advance weather reports. Many of these are features for the user accustomed to two step access which beyond their immediate appeal to the via a printed index and searching of hard purchaser of the original newspaper are of copy or microfilm newspapers. value and interest to future researchers. The power and sophistication of modern In other cases individual titles have microcomputers and related software in the adopted differing exclusion policies, often access to, and presentation of, information. based on differing interpretations of Examples include the use of colour, the copyright issues. Thus readers' letters are ability to display graphics, and the use of excluded from The Guardian but included in the Windows operating environment to the others. Where individual writers retain allow sophisticated presentation and copyright their articles may be excluded. interaction. stories are often excluded, To the organisation they offer: the while tabular material such as advantages of a known fixed cost, providing prices is generally excluded, even from The many of the benefits of on-line searching Financial Times. without connect time, display or In general the exclusions are similar to telecommunication charges. those in online files, almost certainly A facility suitable in most cases for direct because the online and CD-ROM files are end-user access without the need for trained intermediaries or the cost of administrative created from a common source. There may systems for monitoring and, where also be an underlying assumption that the appropriate, charging the costs of online information needs of CD-ROM users will be use. the same as those of the commercial and Compared to microfilm or hard copy similar users of on-line systems, that is newspapers CD-ROM offers significant primarily factual information from recent space saving. A year of the contents of one years and from the 'quality' newspapers. national newspaper will fit on a single CD- Experience at the Newspaper Library shows ROM compared to 24 reels of 35mm that the long term historical research use of microfilm or 12 bound volumes of hard newspapers is often different from, and copy. In volume terms the microfilm much more varied than, this. equivalent takes up 70 times the space of the Serials - Vol. 5, No 3, November 1992 Newspapers on CD-ROM

CD-ROM, and the bound volumes 1500 files in computerised newspaper production times the space. Probably no other library systems, the relatively recent introduction of matches the 18 linear miles of shelving these, and the unsuitability of tabloid needed to house the Newspaper Library's newspaper material for text only hard copy and microfilm collections but the presentation - the long-term historical attractions of space saving to anyone research use of, and interest in, newspapers holding substantial runs of back copies or is much wider than this. A recent analysis of microfilm of the titles concerned are Newspaper Library use showed only a tenth evident. to be concerned with UK national The abilility to hold information from newspapers post 1980, two-fifths of which multiple variant editions of newspapers, not was for those titles available on just the single edition held by most libraries. CD-ROM. The major collective drawback of current Limitations UK newspaper CD-ROMs is the lack of standardisation of user interface which There are, however, a numberof limitations range from the relatively simple to use to the inherent in the medium which prospective complex and sophisticated, so that while subscribers need to consider. The Times and The Guardian can both be Each newspaper title (or group of titles) is learned and used quickly by untrained published separately, and in most cases each users, the interface to The Independent and year of information is held on a seperate The Financial Times, which both use the disk. This means that searching of multiple same 'Personal Librarian' software, is such years of a given title or of multiple titles is that the first time user needs either training cumbersome compared to online searching or to work through a tutorial to gain the (though still many times faster than knowledge to use the system successfully. In searching via printed indexes and hard copy addition the type of interface determines the or microfilm of the newspapers themselves). hardware requirements of the system on Once multiple titles and years are held it is which the CD-ROMs are to be used. While necessary to devise a system for controlling The Times, The Guardian and The Northern the disks and for making them accessible. Echo all work on a standard PC XT or AT Options include local area networks for type machine with 640K memory, for multiple user access and jukeboxes or effective performance The Independent and multiple drive systems for access to a The Financial Times require a 386 based number of disks at the same workstation. machine with at least 2Mb of memory and At Colindale we have just installed a the Windows operating environment. While multiple drive system which allows the user the different interfaces are designed for access to any one of eight different disks different user groups and each has its own stored in the system by selection from a strengths and weaknesses the lack of menu. standardisation is confusing and unhelpful Compared to overnight updating of on- to users having access to more than one of line files or the same day availablity of the products. original hard-copy, newspapers on CD- Information is limited largely to text only ROM are not up-to-date. Most of the UK presentation, so that photographs and titles mentioned are updated quarterly. explanatory graphics are omitted together So far only /quality newspaper with the typographic and layout features of titles are available, while the date range the original article which defined its content covered is limited to the last few years. and in some cases its significance when first While there are obvious and valid reasons published. for this - their shared origins with online From the point of view of historical Serials - Vol. 5, No 3, November 1992 Newspapers on CD-ROM collections such as the Newspaper Library Northern Echo in December 1990) many there are significant concerns about the changes in the products have already archival life of CD-ROM compared to occurred, a process which will continue. I microfilm. While this may be less important have already mentioned the significant price to other organisations, we have worries cuts since the original launch of The Times about a medium whose physical life span and The Guardian. The Times has already may only be 10 years (2) and for which, eliminated its major weakness, the absence given the rate of technological change, it of adjacency searching and now offers a may not be to get reading simple-to-use but powerful facility for this. equipment in the future. Greater standardisation of user interfaces must be addressed and offered, despite the General Conclusions competitive pressures for each product to remain different and distinct. One Because of the limitations described it is my alternative would be for multiple interfaces view that CD-ROM versions of newspapers to be supplied with the same database complement rather than replace existing allowing the option of ease of use or hard copy, microfilm or online versions and increased sophistication. A technical option we will not use them as a direct replacement would be to split the interface from the data for either our hard copy or microfilm sets of and search engine to allow users to have newspapers concerned. their own common front-end across CD-ROMs do not provide a replacement different databases, though commercial for microfilm as the long-term storage and factors may prevent this coming about. archive medium of complete newspapers, Technical developments may lead to though they offer an attractive alternative to increased storage density, allowing multiple libraries which currently need to keep years of data per disk or the more several years of back copies of the titles with systematic storage of graphics. In time this all the problems of storage and retrieval that may allow the facsimile approach to the brings and for whose users access to the storage of newspaper information, either by primary information content of the the digitisation of page images or through newspapers is the main need. the storage of page make-up information For organisations which cannot on allowing the recreation of page images at budgetary or policy grounds provide the time of use. searching of online files for users, CD- The world of electronic is still ROMs offer a fixed cost alternative, relatively in its infancy. Alternative enabling the provision to end-users of the electronic publishing media are certain to be direct benefits of self-service electronic developed, whether variants on CD formats searching, while for educational institutions or other optical or electronic storage media. they allow the opportunity to offer access to Because of this and the limitations valuable primary research material which in discussed above it seems likely that CD- the past may have been difficult to exploit ROM is only an intermediate stage in the I because of space considerations and the electronic publishing & delivery of problems of subject access to the content of newspaper information. Given the choice, the hard copy or microfilm versions of the many users would like the power of text newspapers concerned. retrieval as seen in current CD-ROMs but to be able to on screen and output a The Future facsimile of the article, page and issue as originally published to produce a true In the months since the availability of the electronic surrogate of the original first UK newspaper on CD-ROM (The newspapers. Such capability is a prerequisite Serials - Vol. 5, No 3, November 1992 Newspapers on CD-ROM for the electronic publishing of the popular on CD-ROM. Program, Vol25, No. 4, tabloid press for which text only October 1991, pp 319-337. presentation is inadequate. 2. The archival permanence of CD-ROM It is only a matter of time before the and other optical disk media is unclear. technology provides this kind of capability. Manufacturers estimate a lifetime of ten What the timescale will be and whether years and often more for their disks, libraries, other organisations and users of though guarantees are usually limited. newspaper information will provide a market For a useful discussion of some of the of sufficient size for such products to be problems and issues see: developed and sustained remains to be seen. Marshall, Mary E. and Voedisch, Ginni. Compact disks: permanence and Notes and References irretrievability may be synonymous in Libraries as well as in Roget's. 1. Ryan, Frank. Searching 'The Times',' National Online Meeting, Proceedings 'The Guardian' and 'The Independent' 1990, pp 249-254

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