Two: Libraries, Local Media, and Findability

Librarians want to make quality local news and media accessible to their patrons. Community journalists want to increase the discoverability of their work.

There is interest among librarians, at universities at least, to create access to independent and/or local journalism and media through their collections. Working with one of these media creators to pilot a technically sound and replicable institutional subscription to their content could be a useful proof of concept.

• At least one prominent independent media creator seems to have developed such an institutional subscription via the Ghost platform (See Next Steps).
• From a journalist’s perspective, the demise of Google search makes it an imperative that we conceptualize new ways to enhance the discoverability of quality local news and information. Given this, it makes total sense for libraries to step in and leverage their communities’ trust—which is legitimate and earned—to lift up quality local information sources.

A news/media-side consortium that could allow libraries to subscribe to bundles of geographically or topically relevant local/independent digital content would make this financially feasible for libraries.

• One initial barrier to this work is that journalists don’t understand how digital collection development works in libraries. LF could help educate the news world about this process (See Next Steps).
• Might libraries that have built these kinds of consortiums (on the buyer side) have models, wisdom, or technical assistance to offer news organizations in creating something similar (on the distributor side)?
• This is the kind of project that philanthropic funders would be likely to support. John Bracken, as someone who used to be on the journalism philanthropy side at the Knight Foundation and is now on the library side at DPLA, might be a good person to approach with this idea.

This consortium would need to offer a platform or application through which libraries could facilitate patron access.

• Half of the needed tech exists (OPDS), the hard part would be building out the desired user functionality.
• Sarah Houghton doesn’t see any reason why libraries couldn’t begin pulling in web news content through OPDS feeds into the Palace App.
• RSS also still works. What if libraries leveraged existing open source RSS feed readers on their websites?
• The new BRIET application might be a feasible technical solution for libraries to lend subscription-based local news or independent media on a CDL model.

Other considerations:

• News website search functions are awful. On the other hand, browsability in library news databases is awful. Any platform created in partnership should try to solve both problems or meet in the middle.
• Academic library acquisition is largely based on demand, but if we aren’t discussing the possibility of collecting independent news media, then students/faculty/patrons don’t know to demand it.
• Does this warrant a public advocacy campaign? Or is that putting the cart before the horse?
• It would be helpful for libraries, at a minimum, to highlight local public news sources on their websites or in their social media.

“It would be interesting if you could do local bundles or local packages. So in a smaller state it might be everything in Rhode Island, here you go. And in a state like California it might be the Bay Area, Central Coast, or Santa Barbara area. You might be able to find ways to portion it out. Because I think local interest doesn’t die at your city border, depending on where you work and depending on the things that you care about, it could extend pretty far.”

– Sarah Houghton

“Journalism has a distribution problem. Nonprofit news, particularly, has a distribution problem. And it sounds like if we were able to figure out that block (distribution through library websites/catalogs), there’s a creative solution there that enables both. It creates distribution pipelines for news information, and it could break the block of like, who has rights to what? Because in journalism, we’re constantly producing stuff that we have the rights to, and, from the nonprofit side, I don’t see good instances of that connection being made. I think it’s totally feasible.”

– Darryl Holliday