Speakers:
Steve Rubin, Sharon Clairemont, Chris Hardesty, and Kathy Drewke
![]() The AJC's top-selling page reprint is this tribute page to the late NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt. Other sports-related pages are also popular. See the AJC's gallery of pages available for sale. |
|
|
Moderator: Jennifer Small Evert
Reported by Michael Jesse
During the past few years it has become commonplace for news libraries to save at least some pages in PDF format -- and some news libraries have developed huge databases in which they save every published page as a PDF.
Everyone loves PDFs. They're handy for contest entries, and readers happily buy PDF prints as keepsakes. Image quality is vastly better than microfilm and, of course, the color is preserved. Heck, maybe we should just make PDFs and forget about microfilming?
Now, wait a minute -- don't get carried away. At the SLA News Division 2002 program, "PDF Archiving," four speakers shared their experience in taking advantage of this marvelous file format -- but none would recommend that you cancel your microfilm contract.
Sharon Clairemont, of the Orange County Register, and Chris Hardesty, of Newsday, demonstrated very similar PDF-archiving operations at their newspapers. Both routinely archive virtually every page printed by their newspapers -- which for Newday averages 400 per day when all editions are counted.
At the Register, the library's archiving system links text, images and PDFs in one interface so reporters can search for a story, then click an option to display the page. In both cases the operation is largely automated, but the library performs quality control checks. But with hundreds of pages per day being archived it is not possible to manually check each page. Chris said his staff opens the most important pages each day to spotcheck for errors such as missing text or gray boxes where photos should be. Such errors are generally caused by page designers deviating from the established workflow.
As wonderful as PDFs are, however, Chris said it would be "absurd" to think of them as a replacement for microfilm. We know the longevity of microfilm, he said, while PDFs are still a new technology. He refered to Vicky McCargar's presentation on the challenges and risks of electronic media preservation.
Sharon and Chris both addressed the questions of copyright and corrections. They sell reprints of pages which sometimes contain stories not copyrighted by their newspapers. But because they are selling the entire page it is considered similar to microfilm sales -- a representation of the "collected work" of the newspaper and not subject to the copyright limitations established in the Tasini case. The issue of corrections is based on the fact that the page does not get corrected the way a story in the archive does. Is that a problem? Both Sharon and Chris said no. Again, the example is microfilm. Like microfilm, the PDF is a representation of what the newspaper printed on that day, including the errors. Neither news archive encourages research against the PDF. The text archive is where you search for accurate information. The page is just a record of what came off the press on a particular day.
In her presentation, Kathy Drewke of the Atlanta Journal & Constitution, emphasized the revenue potential of PDFs. Each day she posts the front page of the AJC and the Sports cover, which visitors to the newspaper's website may purchase for $29.95. Other pages are also available on request, with an additional $5 charge for preparation.
Kathy said Sports pages are the most popular. People still buy the cover from when the Atlanta Braves won the World Series and the single most-popular page has been the AJC's commemorative page on NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, who died in a crash at the 2001 Daytona 500. The page reprints and other re-sale options can be found at the ajc.info, the information store managed by the Library.
Steve Rubin, of IBM, also spoke at the session. Steve said the PDF format has emerged as the defacto standard for archiving pages. No other standard has come close to it for archiving or electronic document delivery.
Other developments have helped PDFs become so ubiquitous. Bandwith has grown to make it feasible for someone to buy the entire New York Times as a PDF document and download it across the Internet. Also, storage has become cheap, so it is no longer a major challenge to stockpile thousands of PDF pages. Based on his own company's prices, Steve estimated that it costs about 3 cents per page to save high-resolution PDFs.
Steve recommended that librarians become more involved in the standards bodies that govern the development of file formats and file types. Few vendors work with proprietary file types nowadays. In fact, vendors follow the standards bodies, he said, so if librarians work with those panels they can influence how PDFs and other file formats develop over time.