Knowing their news: Library workers as informants to journalism studies research

Abstract

This research note describes a new role for the public library: a knowledge base of community media information in the context of a larger journalism research project. In rural areas of the Canadian province of Alberta, professional journalism has been struck by a series of cutbacks as newspaper titles have closed or merged to form regional publications. In studying this, efforts to generate a census of Alberta newspapers were stymied by incomplete search results when looking online to identify the titles of publications in scores of rural towns. Public libraries provided the solution: they were easily locatable online, and the library workers were aware of their community’s information ecosystem and were eager to help the researcher in a quest for information on local journalism. This article describes the process and outcome, and encourages further partnerships between small town libraries and academic research.

Keywords

• community journalism
• libraries
• rural
• newspapers
• local news