An Hybrid Library Model for Newspaper Organisations : Research-Based Recommendations

In the nearly two centuries old Indian print media industry, the ‘newspaper business’ is the largest segment, which is highly dependent on the skills and calibers of the journalists. The newspaper journalists, by nature of their profession, very frequently seek information from various sources and channels and mainly from their ‘in-house newspaper library’. However, over the past decade, particularly, after the introduction of the Internet, digital archives, epaper archives and other ICT tools into - both - newsrooms and newspaper libraries, the journalists’ approach to information seeking have gone through a paradigm shift. Therefore, the author of this paper undertook a doctoral level research work and examined the “Information Needs and Information Seeking Behaviour of English Newspaper Journalists in India in the Internet Era” with a prime objective to make a special recommendation for upgrading the Newspaper Library and Information Services (NLIS) for efficiently serving the information needs of the newspaper journalists. This paper broadly presents the overview of the research work and highlights its major findings. Further, this paper, as a major contribution to the newspaper librarianship, specifically recommends a new model for developing an integrated hybrid library for the newspaper organisations