The ‘morgue’: dead or alive?
| Pages | 337-346 |
| Date | 01 April 1995 |
| Published date | 01 April 1995 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb045385 |
| Author | Niël van der Merwe |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
Article
The 'morgue': dead or alive?
Niël van
der Merwe
Xcel,
PO Box
20355,
Alkantrant,
0005 South Africa
Abstract: It has been said that the newspaper industry
in
South Africa
publishes about 80% of the electronic text created
in
our
country.
What
happens
with that? What is the value of this information to the newspaper
industry
as well
as to the man in
the
street? This paper will describe the current situation and will
explain how the 'morgue' in a newspaper company
is
currently
used.
It will also
discuss the future directions that newspapers intend to follow.
New technology such as text retrieval systems, CDROM technology and the
Internet may change the face of the newspaper library for
ever.
Questions
regarding the challenges that face technology in order to establish an electronic
newspaper
archive,
the information requirements of journalists and how they use
online information will also be
discussed.
New developments in
technology
that
may in the future give
us
an electronic newspaper personalised according
to
our
specific information needs will also be
discussed.
1.
Introduction
The 'morgue'? Is it a place where dead
bodies are laid out for identification?
No,
the title
of this paper
has
nothing to
do
with dead corpses and everything to
do with information science. The
morgue in newspaper lingo is the li-
brary — the place where every article
and photo that has ever appeared in a
newspaper is archived and cross-in-
dexed.
Let us just for the moment try
to
de-
fine the 'morgue' and see it as some-
thing different than a newswire service
such as SAPA or Reuters in South Af-
rica. We can say that newswire serv-
ices only aim at providing information
on those matters that are recent and
newsworthy. They provide news sto-
ries in real time without any query and
access functionality over previously
archived data. We can also for the mo-
ment say the 'morgue' is something
different to the news databases pro-
vided on the large commercial online
services such as Prodigy, Delphi,
CompuServe and America Online.
Typically these large news databases
combine the data of various newspa-
pers and are external organisations that
newspapers use to market their infor-
mation in another way. The 'morgue'
also does not mean an electronic news-
paper that is delivered as a digitised
blend of text, graphics, colour photos,
sound and full-motion video on
a
com-
puter screen. An electronic newspaper
involves a totally new way of writing
and publishing, and does not mean the
exact version of a paper-published
newspaper on
a
computer
screen.
Hav-
ing said
this,
newswire
services,
online
news databases and electronic news-
papers do have definite relations with
the 'morgue' and this will be briefly
discussed later in this paper.
It has been said that the newspaper
industry in South Africa publishes
about 80% of the electronic text cre-
ated in our country. Although the per-
ception in the newspaper industry to a
large extent is still that they are in the
printing business, there are indications
that the newspaper companies are
starting to recognise that they must
rather consider themselves as informa-
tion providers (Jacobson 1995).
The tasks of newspapers are to de-
termine the current agenda and sec-
ondly to keep a record of contempo-
rary history (Greyling 1994). This
second task of newspapers was until
now done by storing paper copies of
each news article in clipping files in
the newspaper archive library. This
means that the work of the newspaper
archive library involves the daily cut-
ting and indexing of
newspapers.
The
clipping files are categorised under
various headings, such as the byline
file of each journalist,
a
clipping
file
on
an important person such as Mr Man-
dela or important events such as the
election of 1994 and the Rugby World
Cup '95 tournament.
The current problems experienced
in newspaper archive libraries are as
follow:
• The tasks of cutting and
photocopying the newspapers
stories are laborious and
time-consuming. A lot of
photocopying must be done to
ensure proper cross-filing of the
newspaper stories in the various
clipping files.
• The indexing, or 'enrichment',
as it is sometimes called, of the
newspaper stories involves the
assignment of relevant keywords
to these stories, thus creating
further problems because the
competence among editors
assigning these keywords may
vary. Furthermore the keywords
assigned today to a specific
newspaper story are not
necessarily the keywords that
end-users may use in future to
search for the same newspaper
story. This is even true where a
controlled keyword list is used.
Assigning these keywords is also
a labour-intensive process.
• Paper files can only be viewed
by one person at a
time,
and this
is particularly problematic when
The Electronic Library, Vol. 13, No. 4, August 1995 337
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