EXAMPLES OF TOP NEWS RESEARCH EFFORTS

LIBRARY HELPS GAIN PULITZER

Note: this article appeared on the front page of the June 1990 issue of the SpeciaList.

By: Doris Batliner, Chief Librarian, The (Louisville, KY) Courier-Journal

[In 1989 a bus crash claimed the lives of 27 children. What follows is an account of how a team of special librarians, including SLA member Sharon Bidwell, worked together to inform the public of the tragedy.]

It was a lovely May morning in Kentucky. I had just arrived home after 8 o'clock Mass when the Phone rang. It wad Ed Bennett, our city editor. After apologizing for disturbing me, he said, "There has been a terrible accident near Carrollton and we need so me research to get ready for tomorrow's early edition." That was how it began.

The Pulitzer was not on our minds. Our aim was to assist the newsroom in telling the grim story of a bus tragedy which claimed 27 young lives.

Within 25 minutes, I was in the Courier-Journal (C-J) Library searching the (newspaper clipping) archives to ascertain whether or not this was the worst school bus crash in Kentucky history. It was.

I also started to compile a list of all school bus accidents reported in our files. It was necessary to pull and duplicate clips on these accidents. If you read our coverage the next day, you saw a listing of the worst bus crashes in the nation. I located this information for the newsroom using NEXIS and our electronic Info-Key (newspaper automated) system.

I left the library at 8 p.m. Jerry Kern, our regular Sunday technician, came on at 3 p.m. He was asked to find information about the church the bus belonged to, the city of Radcliff where the church was, and any previous disasters that the city had encoun tered. There were a lot of spelling, title, and location checks that night also. Most of this information came from our archives and the Info-Key system. We have been online electronically since 1976 and our (paper clipping) files extend back to 1937.

There are five members of the reference staff including the photo reference staff and they were all involved. Further research required reading the Kentucky Revised Statutes to find the current driving while intoxicated laws, then using Dialog's Legal Ind ex and the National Criminal Justice Database to see how these offenses were handles in other states. Pat Chapman and Sharon Bidwell were heavily involved in this and in NEXIS searches for statistical data.

Judy Russell repeatedly searched the archival photo files for pictures of earlier bus crashes, Kentucky school children being trained to evacuate school buses, as well as of bus drivers and their buses. Sharon Howell and Angela Boone handled the inquiries related to the design of buses and lawsuits against motor companies as a result of accidents. Both in-house and national sources were used as well as the libraries of the University of Louisville, Bellamine College and the Louisville Historical Society, with whom we have good relations.

I jumped back in when the question of the octane content of the gasoline and the location of the gas tank was being investigated. My background includes 17 years as a chemical librarian and five years as a chemist so I was at home in this area. I searched Dialog's chemical, mechanical, and engineering databases.

Linda Wright, library secretary, located the articles and obtained full-text copies via interlibrary loan and other sources.

Along with this research, the reference staff answered 80 questions per day on other subjects. We were able to retrieve our own information accurately because the six members of our database input staff never allowed our system to be more than 24 hours ou t of date. This was truly a team effort between the library and the newsroom.

When Irene Nolan, managing editor of The Courier-Journal, jumped on a desk in the news room, announced the winning of the Pulitzer and thanked those involved, saying thanks "to the library staff for all that research done so well," we knew we had a ccomplished our goal. The Pulitzer was just an additional satisfaction.


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