Alan Jamieson
Manager, ISD Library
Services 1
7 May 2007
I scarcely
imagined, when I qualified from library school back in the early 1980s, that I
would end up reading newspapers for a living. Nevertheless, this has been my
surprising fate.
Librarians have
always enjoyed providing what they call “current awareness services”. In
other words: selecting new items from their resources and placing these in view
of their readers, who are thus kept up-to-date with new information as it
appears.
For a long while
ISD Library ran a “cuttings” service - diligently scanning daily newspapers for
health-related stories; photocopying them; cutting them up and creating a
montage which we placed on various noticeboards throughout our building. The
only problem with this approach was that we kept getting asked later to dig out
stories (“It was in The Scotsman last month” - no, actually it was in The
Herald last year), and this involved us in a great deal of tedious
searching of boxes of photocopies. We needed a technical fix. The World Wide
Web provided this.
We now spend a
great deal of our time and energy creating the service known as media
monitoring.
We scan
newspapers and their websites, looking for healthcare news. We check the BBC’s
superb news website, which so often sets the agenda - and even provides the
content - for the newspapers’ choice of stories. We create two e-mail bulletins
a day, grouping news stories under headings according to their subject-matter (cancer,
heart disease, etc.). We link from our bulletin directly to the web
version of a story when this is available. We send our bulletins out to a large
list of readers who have asked to be updated in this way. We do this by 10.30 a.m.
and 4.00 p.m. on each working day. You can ask to join our
mailing-list. It’s
free!
We also break
the bulletins up into their individual stories, and publish these on SHOW, in a
database which can be searched back to 2002.
We aim to capture
the main stories in the news. However, we don’t try to cover all
health stories in all news sources: our aim is to be representative,
not complete. We cover a restricted number of sources, and omit stories we
consider to be of minor interest. On the other hand, we are resolutely parochial
and tend to highlight Scottish stories above others.2
Newspaper firms
are in the business of selling as many paper copies as they possibly can. This
is known as the “ratings war”. Of course, newspapers have many other nobler
functions - ensuring free speech, criticising government, adding to the
historical record, educating and entertaining readers. But if they don’t sell,
they die. Why should they expend precious staff resources on creating websites?
They feel they
must have a web presence: everyone does. Not to do so would be shameful,
embarrassing - the mark of an outdated and moribund technology. They want to
reach readers who are exiled all over the world. They see the web as a source
of advertising revenue. They want to evolve into a digital-only medium.
All of this
remains mere speculation on my part, since I have never known a newspaper
website to declare why it exists and what its relationship to its print version
is. However, I will offer here some
observations on how newspapers go about their online business.
Newspaper
websites do not, as a rule, contain:
TV, radio, cinema and sports listings; classified ads; family
announcements; graphical weather forecasts; different-sized headlines; detailed
financial listings; or nearly as many photographs as the print version.
To summarise,
newspaper websites predominantly contain textual material, and deal badly with
graphics, statistics and small print.
Also, websites
vary massively in their coverage, from “a small handful of headlines” (Courier) to “a near-comprehensive set of
stories, features and editorials” (Scotsman).
They differ,
too, in their manner of organising their material, but usually adopt an
arrangement which reflects standard newspaper sections: UK news, international,
politics, business, sport, and so on. Under these headings, the undifferentiated
list prevails, with long, wearying scrolls of headlines which fail to
indicate the importance of the story in the way that headline-size and
article-length and position do in print (Daily Record, Press and Journal). There
are some honourable exceptions to this rule (Scotsman).
Future-proofing
Newspapers in the
world’s great libraries form an enduring, precious and irreplaceable part
of the historical record. Indeed, US novelist Nicholson Baker has argued persuasively
in favour of newsprint over more recent technologies such as microfilm.
3
How do newspaper
websites shape up as a potential source for future historians? How can you find
information which was published in previous issues?
The news is not
good.
The media sites
which we monitor provide a range of approaches to searching and browsing their
past issues. At the deluxe end of the scale there is the BBC news: health, which offers an advanced search of its
content back to November 1997. More modest provision is made by for example the
Daily Record, which allows only a simple search of
the past five days’ stories. Some sites are browsable by date, others are not.
This range of styles
justifies our SHOW database, in my view, since we offer a single search across
a range of sources and years. I am
not saying our own search engine is perfect: it is not, and it badly needs
to be improved. 4 And of course, some links to past stories will become broken,
which is why we record page numbers when possible: here the great libraries
come back into the picture, with their carefully preserved print versions.
They will provide photocopies, for a fee, to registered libraries.
- the number having smear
tests fell by more than 5% ... (Herald)
- figures revealed
yesterday ... (Scotsman)
- new figures show a 16 per
cent increase ... (Scotsman)
- targets ... are not being
met, figures show (Daily
Record)
- official statistics for
2006 showed ... (Scotsman)
- new figures ... according
to NHS Scotland (Herald)
- NHS statistics show
roughly 4% of the country's smokers ... (Press
and Journal)
- figures revealed more
than 46,000 people tried to quit ... (Scotsman)
- figures released on the
first anniversary of the ban ... (Daily
Record) - - figures obtained by The
Scotsman show ... (Scotsman)
- the latest cancer
waiting-time figures … (Scotsman)
- statistics obtained by a
north-east MSP … (Press
and Journal)
- fewer people in the
Lothians are dying from strokes ... according to new figures (Evening News)
- patients ... have been
removed from official waiting lists. (Evening News)
- the latest statistics for
NHS Scotland hospitals … (BBC News)
- figures show the
Executive has met its ... waiting time target (Evening
Times)
- cancer patients ... are
still waiting ... figures revealed yesterday (Scotsman)
- patients were removed
from official waiting list figures ... (Herald)
- figures obtained by North
East Tory MSP ... (Press
and Journal)
- figures revealed by the
Scottish Conservatives ... (Scotsman)
- figures released ... in
response to a question by SNP Dundee East MSP (Press
and Journal)
- almost a quarter of
[babies in Scotland] are delivered by Caesarean section (Scotsman)
- birth episodes at the
three Glasgow hospitals were officially measured at 11,858 (Herald)
named (2)
Information Services Division or, for short, ISD or ISD Scotland (BBC,
Glasgow
Evening Times)
Since the launch
of the redesigned ISD website last year, we have maintained a page on the site
called “ISD in the News”. This page serves to monitor the use of ISD
information in the media, and to point readers to the specific sources of the
information on the site. The page’s address is -
http://www.isdscotland.org/isd/4322.html
Finally, I
thought it would be interesting to compile some statistics of ISD stories in
the news since 2002.
At the end of
April 2007, our SHOW database of media monitoring contained just over 29,500
stories since February 2002. Of these, 503 (or 1.7%) reported ISD information or
activities. Therefore, of an average of around 470 stories a month, around 8
relate to ISD in some way.
The table below
shows how often various ISD topics have appeared in the past five years.
ISD stories in
Media Monitoring, February 2002 to April 2007
|
Topic |
Number |
% |
|
|
|
|
|
waiting times |
98 |
19 |
|
cancer, incl. cervical screening breast screening |
53 13 5 |
11 3 1 |
|
delayed discharges (“bed-blocking”) |
39 |
8 |
|
childhood immunisation (esp. MMR vaccine) |
35 |
7 |
|
workforce |
34 |
7 |
|
drug misuse |
22 |
4 |
|
heart disease and stroke |
18 |
4 |
|
data collection / research |
14 |
3 |
|
complaints |
14 |
3 |
|
alcohol misuse |
14 |
3 |
|
dental health services |
14 |
3 |
|
births |
13 |
3 |
|
surgical mortality |
12 |
2 |
|
abortion |
10 |
2 |
|
information technology |
10 |
2 |
|
general practice |
10 |
2 |
|
NHS costs |
10 |
2 |
|
prescriptions |
10 |
2 |
|
teenage pregnancy |
9 |
2 |
|
hospital activity |
9 |
2 |
|
obesity |
7 |
1 |
|
breastfeeding |
6 |
1 |
|
accidents |
6 |
1 |
|
fireworks injuries |
6 |
1 |
|
mental health |
6 |
1 |
|
sexually transmitted diseases |
6 |
1 |
|
occupational health and safety |
5 |
1 |
|
infant mortality |
5 |
1 |
|
infectious diseases |
4 |
1 |
|
junior doctors' hours |
2 |
0 |
|
smoking |
1 |
0 |
|
ophthalmic services |
1 |
0 |
(Percentages rounded to nearest whole number)
ENDNOTES
ISD (Information
Services Division) and ISD Library started life in the mid-1970s at the same
time as their parent organisation, the Common Services Agency (CSA). The CSA
became NHS National Services Scotland (NSS) in 2004 when it moved its Edinburgh
headquarters from Trinity to South Gyle.
We use the
following sources -
Daily
newspapers -
Scotsman,
Herald, Courier, Press and Journal, Daily Record, Edinburgh Evening News,
Glasgow Evening Times.
Sunday
newspapers -
Sunday Herald,
Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Times, Sunday Mail.
Online
news -
BBC news: health
Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. London : Vintage, 2002. back to article
The public
version of the database will only display the most recent 100 stories in
response to any search. So if you search for the term “surgical mortality”, you
will find 30-odd stories dating back to 11 February 2002. If on the other hand
you use a very general term such as “cancer”, a full 100 stories will be
displayed, but these will date from only a month or two ago.
As administrators, we are able to search a full version of the
database. This provides us with all hits, but is very slow.
We are currently working with SHOW to improve the database.