After 32 years on south Granville street, Pacific Press moved last July to the downtown waterfront, splitting off from the presses' noise and grease. All production is now done in our new press facility in Surrey. The rest of us - Library, newsrooms, advertising, promotions, circulation - have set up in newly refurbished digs in Granville Square.

The Library landed in the prime north-east corner of the building. Our vistas now include cruise ships and battleships, sunsets and rainbows.

© Nick Didlick, Vancouver Sun

(In the old place, we basked in the fluorescent-lit glow of our brown and blue decor, with only distant peeks across a newsroom to the outside world.) Natural light makes a huge difference to humans, especially when there's a view too. Our new space is of roughly the same dimension as the old, but better used. Each library staff member has her own spacious work area, and the last of the clippings files that required acres of room were microfilmed just before the move. The impending move also gave us a great opportunity to rethink some musty collections like our vertical file, and do some weeding.

So there are many positive things about our library's new location: light! windows! Clean carpets with no machinery residue. New furniture and new efficient shelving. No thundering press-hum. Premium location, with a reading room as a new feature. A much better computer network. Downtown buzz.

But of course there is a downside. We are now removed from our newsrooms, behind locked doors. (Security is a reality, in a building with public access). We miss our old placement right between the feuding newsrooms, miss being "Switzerland", where Sun reporters and Province reporters could confer and trade barbed witticisms about the other's paper. The newsrooms, too, feel a bit officy, have lost those last vestiges of the old romantic press atmosphere. No ink-stained ghosts here. All departments feel a bit isolated, and face-time is more often replaced with e-mail and voicemail. Finally, we are aware of being tenants in a multi-tenant building, no longer owning the whole place.

The Pacific Press move itself was well-planned and executed like a military operation. The challenge was to make the move of 850 people and all the computers happen smoothly, with no lost production time. Detailed planning began two years in advance and as the Library manager I was included in the planning and project committees from the beginning. I had input into the Library's placement and design, and had the dubious honour of figuring out what would go where and how much space it would take. Fortunately, my numbers weren't off and all of our collections fit into their intended places. The only moment of abject panic was the discovery that a section of our irreplaceable microfiche collection was missing. After a frenzied drive back to the old building, the fiche were recovered from a dark shelf the movers had overlooked.

So six months later, we are settled. Our services and resources continue to be well-used. A second, biannual, survey in October showed strong support and appreciation for the Library, which reassured us. We have made a few adaptations to the new situation, including setting up a satellite library 'outpost' in the Province newsroom which is now on a separate floor from the Library. (The Sun is on the same floor with us.) We sometimes actually fax research results to our Province clientele now! We have trained even more reporters in the fine art of retrieving electronic files we send them.

The Press Library's mandate remains the same, only the delivery options have expanded. Our mission statement (Dilbert aside) is this:

The Library actively supports the information needs of the newsrooms and other departments, thereby directly contributing to the daily production of the Province and the Vancouver Sun. The Library has a further commitment to market our revenue-generating products and services.

While much of our research is done online by accessing our own databases and other full text sources via vendors or the Web, we do have essential collections that are used daily. The Library has developed value-added archives of Sun and Province text: indexed clippings on fiche, ca. 1940s to 1987, Infomart from 1987 to the present. We index and file the Sun and Province photos, in digital form now, with negatives and prints from 1970 to 1995. The Library also archives the two newspapers' full pages, on roll microfilm from the 1880s to the present, and on CD roms from our Quark pagination system since 1994. We also have books! Our physical collection includes directories, annuals, who's whos, quotation books, maps, magazines, select government publications from all levels, CD roms, journalism books, encyclopedias. Our reference resources have to cover the same broad gamut the newspapers do, from rock to fashion to medicine to politics.

In addition to research: Librarian Debbie Schachter trains end-users to search Infomart and to use the Internet, and has developed a Library home page that the newsrooms love, with links to journalism, directory and government sites. Graphics Librarian Kate Bird trains library and newsroom users in all aspects of the digital image system. Our library assistants process and maintain our archives and collections.

Beyond the newsrooms: the Library is the source for company-wide Internet access. I also contribute a weekly column to the company newsletter and electronically publish a monthly library newsletter. An executive library collection was begun last year, and is available to all Pacific Press staff.

Our library's secondary mandate is to run our fee-based service, Infoline, launched in 1992. In the last year its hours have expanded, and 1997 revenue was up 24% over 1996.

© Nick Didlick, Vancouver Sun

Infoline provides research and photo reprints to readers, the public, corporate and media customers. Library assistants provide Infoline service Monday to Friday, and fill requests, including making reprints from the digital image archive. Kate oversees the permissions side of Infoline, for photo use by other media, and does extensive photo research for clients.