Information Outlook article – The pivotal role of the news librarian

The 2024 Fall issue of Information Outlook features a fantastic article from SLA Europe member, Richard Nelsson, head of research at The Guardian News & Media, on the pivotal role of a news librarian.

Read an excerpt below:

It was 29 December 2020, and I was at home checking my work email for the final time that day. As manager of the Guardian’s news library I needed to make sure there were no urgent editorial queries before logging off. Thankfully it was mainly Christmas junk mail, but one message with the subject Wartime stories caught my eye, sent by Julian Borger, the paper’s world affairs editor. He wrote:

“I was wondering about the possibility of doing a bit of research. My family lore has it that my Austrian Jewish grandparents appealed for foster parents in the UK for their son (my dad) in the pages of the Manchester Guardian. He ended up being fostered by a Welsh couple.” 

Julian went on to explain that he had been corresponding with a US lawyer who had mentioned in passing a similar story whereby her father had also been saved from the Nazis by the paper in 1938. 

The query could have waited, but my professional curiosity was aroused. So later that evening I logged into the paper’s digital archive, a collection of PDFs of almost everything published in the Guardian from 1821-2003, to see if such an ‘advert’ really did exist. Apart from the surname and a rough timeframe of summer 1938, there really wasn’t much to go on. Added to this was the fact that scanned images can sometimes be blurred, meaning keywords and names don’t show in the search results. However, years of poking around ever-changing newspaper layouts and designs had given me a good sense of direction as to where an article might be located. 

At first I thought the Borgers plea might have been in a small standalone advert but I soon realized if it did exist it would be among the tightly packed classifieds. Eventually, I found myself staring at a page from 3 August 1938 consisting of adverts featuring everything from domestic servants to musical instruments – and then there, under the heading Tuition, it was: a block of six short ads, the second reading, 

“I Seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent Boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family. Borger, 5/12 Hintzerstrasse, Vienna 3.”

I sent Julian an email, “Could this be it” with a cutting attached, and the next day he replied, “This is my dad! … It was an object of family legend, and now it’s real.” Naturally, I was glad to have located the advert – tracking down ‘hidden’ information is part of the news librarian’s job. But of course for Julian this two-line classified ad meant much, much more.

You can continue reading this article in the 2024 Fall issue of Information Outlook.