This seems to be National Library Week at the IAJ. But we are especially in sympathy with the concerns raised by Victoria McCargar, associate technology editor at the Los Angeles Times, concerns she writes about in The Sybold Report addressing the issue "Following the Trail of the Disappearing Data."

The piece lays out the very real issues facing not just institutions of journalism but, we believe, the fabric of democracy. Though McCargar is talking about newspapers, her arguments should be applied to ALL journalism institutions. There's no reason -- except short-sightedness -- that broadcast operations have any less responsibility to maintaining information patrimony. (Well, maybe they do: they long ago dropped having real news operations because, gee, that would cut into shareholder returns.)

Elliott Parker, and the Journet listserv, tips us to a NewScientist.com report....
"Governments and big business like to indulge in media spin, and that means knowing what is being said about them. But finding out is becoming ever more difficult, with thousands of news outlets, websites and blogs to monitor.
"Now a British company is about to launch a software program that can automatically gauge the tone of any electronic document. It can tell whether a newspaper article is reporting a political party’s policy in a positive or negative light, for instance, or whether an online review is praising a product or damning it. Welcome to the automation of PR. " http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7210&feedId=online-news_rss20)--at

Interesting perhaps in its nuance, but hardly new in concept. Here at the IAJ we've long been impressed with the work done at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory around "information visualization."
"Information Visualization is the direct visualization of a representation of selected features or elements of complex multi-dimensional data. Data that can be used to create a visualization includes text, image data, sound, voice, video - and of course, all kinds of numerical data." See http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/about.html and http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/technologies.html