UK Libraries Hosts International Session on Digitization of News

University of Kentucky Libraries is hosting the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) 2016 News Media Satellite Session, August 10-12, at the Hilton Downtown Lexington. Keynote speakers include Patrick Fleming, of the British Library at St. Pancras Campus, and award-winning newspaper columnist Tom Eblen, of the Lexington Herald-Leader.

The session will look at how different news preservation players serve news content creators through digital curation and preservation support, with emphasis on examining strategies toward legal deposit and preservation on local, state and national levels.

UK Libraries has played a major role in newspaper preservation and digitization. One of the first institutions to participate in the NEH United States Newspaper Project (USNP), UK Libraries catalogued and microfilmed more than 3 million pages of historic Kentucky newspapers over 20 years. In 2005, UK Libraries was again on the cutting edge of newspaper preservation, as one of the first six institutions awarded the NEH funded National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) grant. UK  Libraries was awarded four consecutive NDNP awards, the last of which concluded in 2013, and developed meta|morphosis, a film-to-digital institute that brought people from around the world for hands-on training in newspaper digitization. 

IFLA keynote speaker Patrick Fleming, a journalist and former newspaper editor, is head of Business Change at the British Library’s St. Pancras Campus. The British Library serves business and industry, researchers, academics and students in the United Kingdom and worldwide. Every year, 6 million searches are generated by the British Library’s online catalogue and more than 100 million items have been supplied to users.

Tom Eblen, the second keynote speaker, is the metro/state columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader. He was the Herald-Leader's managing editor from 1998 to 2008. Tom returned to his hometown in 1998 after 14 years with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he was a regional/national reporter, a business reporter and editor, and an Olympics reporter and editor. Tom is a former board member of the Associated Press Managing Editors and a member of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame.

IFLA is the leading international body that represents the interests of library and information services and their users. As the global voice of the library and information profession, IFLA has more than 1,300 members in approximately 140 countries.