IFLA Section on NewspapersHartmut Walravens In spite of its long and distinguished history IFLA has not focused its attention on newspapers. It was perhaps twenty years ago when a group of newspaper experts established a Round Table on Newspapers. Membership was informal, and colleagues met during the General Conferences. It was in 2002 that IFLA urged all Round Tables and discussiion groups to make up their minds whether they wanted to become a section, assuming that their work was permanent, or be disbanded after two years. Serious newspaper work is more urgent than ever, and so the decision was easy: Since then there has been a Newspaper Section, ad first ad interim, and as of 2005 as part of the normal IFLA routine. Thus Newspapers have become independent from their former parent body the Serials and Continuing Resources Section. There is a certain difficulty, however: There are few newspaper experts worldwide, and for a number of them it is impossible to attend the World Library and Information Congress, for lack of funding. So after a while it may become difficult to find suitable officers, not to speak of committee members! Scope As a new section we need membership
The Section meets during the annual IFLA General Conference (World Library and Information Congress). It organises an event at this Congress, usually three presentations, often relating to the host country. The main business meeting takes place usually in spring and is combined with an international newspaper conference in order to promote outreach and cooperation. In addition the Section
Current Activities
We hope that the contacts established with ABINIA and the University of Texas may lead to a lasting cooperation. The preparations for the 2005 Oslo event are completed: The previous Satellite Meeting took place in Berlin, and it focused on Newspapers in Central and Eastern Europe. It was an attempt to cover the whole field of newspaper development in the region, from the effect of the political and economic changes on newspaper publishing to access and digitization issues. The proceedings of the meeting were published in the IFLA Series. For 2006 an International Digitisation Conference is projected to take place at Salt Lake City in order to profit from the considerable experience collected on the subject at the University of Utah. It is also a follow-up to the WLIC 2005 in Oslo where the Section will deal with the European experience. 2006 seems good timing for such a conference because both in the UK and the US major national progammes are now under way, and so first results may be reported and discussed at Salt Lake City. Following its (recent) tradition the Section will also hold its 2006 business meeting at salt lake City. It has certainly be a funding issue for Section members to attend both the WLIC and the business meetings. On the other hand, the time slots at WLIC do not offer enough time to discuss all the current challenges and programmes. So it seems that those members who have other IFLA commitments will receive funding to attend WLIC while some other will receive support to attend the business meetings, especially when they are combined with international conferences. this has been the case in recent years, and highly successful events took place in Cape Town (South African Library) in 2003, and the Shanghai Library (Shanghai tushuguan) in 2004. The present conference is the opportunity to extend the Section's activities to Australia and Oceania, and tap the region's expert newspaper knowledge. A Hands-on Seminar on Newspaper Digitisation was conducted by the Centre for Microfilming and Digitisation of Helsinki University Library in 2003. It was a highly successful experience for eight participants to go through all the practical steps of digitisation, from the preparation of newspapers for microfilming, the filming itself, the processing of the data, the OCR application and the final steps until loading the files on the net. This unique seminar deserved to be repeated, especially as new software for text management is now being used, improved OCR software at hand. Thus major projects could be prepared more efficiently instead of leaving it to individual project managers to learn on the job first. Publications The Section's Newsletter is published once or twice a year, depending on the information officer's time and capacity. There have also been several monographic publications: Proceedings of the IFLA Symposium Managing the Preservation of Periodicals and Newspapers. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, 21-24 August, 2000. Edited by Jennifer Budd, IFLA-PAC. München: Saur, 2002. 175 p. (IFLA Publications; 103) Newspapers in International Librarianship. Papers presented by the Newspaper Section at IFLA General Conferences. Múnchen: K. G. Saur, 2003. 260 p. (IFLA Publications; 107) Newspapers in Central and Eastern Europe. Zeitungen in Mittel- und Osteuropa. Papers presented to the Newspaper Section at the IFLA Post Conference, Berlin 2003. München: K. G. Saur, 2004. 251 p. (IFLA Publications; 110) A new publication plan is to assemble the major contributions to the Section as a follow up to the 2003 volume. This would include also presentations from the Section's international conferences. Projects are important but often difficult to undertake, for lack of funding. IFLA is in no position to provide adequate funding, and the Section members, of course, also have their day jobs. Nevertheless there are some official Section projects:
Cooperation: Germany The legal deposit is with the regional libraries, not with the national library. The national library collects only major papers and those only in microform. 2005 marks the 400th anniversary of newspapers in Central Europe. A number of events are scheduled, e.g. a major conference at Mainz. The Berlin State Library is also preparing one (Nov. 2005). A major newspaper cataloguing project is going on in Munich: newspapers in Bavarian libraries and archives are catalogued and listed in the German Union Catalogue of Serials (ZDB) Finally a newspaper digitisation project is started (University of Bamberg, and Berlin State Library) - the press correspondence from Bismarck's times, a unique copy was found at the Berlin State Library. It is, however, a relatively small project and in no way comparable with the major Scandinavian, british and Austrian projects. Current newspaper work is stimulated by the Newspaper Working Group (AGZ) which meets in spring and in autumn. The last meeting took place in Dresden and focused on electronic newspapers. The next one is scheduled for May to be held in Greifswald (on the Baltic coast) and will deal with the role of regional newspapers. There will be more than 30 participants while the more topical Dresden theme drew almost 60 people. |
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