One of the key tasks carried out by newspaper libraries since the 1990s has been the archiving of news text to be passed on to news aggregators (or ‘hosts’ or ‘vendors’ as they are variously known). Delivering this text has never been much of a priority for newspaper publishers, one consequence of which is that these online archives do not contain the entire content of the printed newspaper, largely for legal and contractual reasons. As the editor and Richard Nelsson have said elsewhere (Schopflin and Nelsson, 2007), the labour-intensive and timeconsuming task of newspaper text archiving has been ripe for automating or outsourcing, yet in most cases remains a key in-house activity of the library. Why this might be is explored in the current chapter, which looks at the implications of today's newspaper content being available and searchable via online databases. The author worked at the Glasgow-based Herald newspaper between 1994 and 2006, latterly as Head of Rights and Information. He is currently Knowledge and Information Manager with the Scottish Institute for Excellence in Social Work Education. He is also a noted expert on issues concerning information and the law, in particular online newspaper copyright.

This chapter will describe some of the legal factors that affect the creation and management of digital text archives and the role the librarian may play in these processes. It will look in particular at the 2001 US Supreme Court judgment in favour of freelance journalists whose work was being sold to online news vendors, a key moment in highlighting why newspaper archiving is not straightforward. And in case anyone thought that the issue was settled, at the time of writing (November 2007) members of the US Writers’ Guild are on strike because they feel they are not being remunerated for the repurposing of their work on digital and mobile platforms. As media organizations continue to reuse their content in new formats, it becomes more than ever important that somebody is ensuring that the correct metadata is added to it so it is not used for inappropriate purposes. This has to be done by the only people who care about the content of newspaper and television output after it has been published, that is the librarians, archivists and information professionals.