Thursday, February 12, 2009

The Wall Street Journal's news research library is

....and apparently with no apologies. (Official shutdown date appears to be March 23.)

Link to February 11 Editor & Publisher post.

Excerpt:
The librarian who operates The Wall Street Journal's news research library -- which is set to close with the elimination of her job and another staffer's -- said in a memo to other librarians that the shutdown is both a personal difficulty and a hit to news coverage.

"When I asked who will do research for the reporters, I was told, 'No one,'" the memo from Leslie A. Norman, posted on a librarian list serve last week, stated. "The reporters will probably be using a Lexis product called Due Diligence Dashboard (you know how your moms told you 'if you can't say something nice...')"

She later adds that it cannot replace the "knowledge about how to research using all the tricks we've learned over the years. We figure that the reporters will probably spend 10 times our compensation trying to do their own research."

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