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November
28, 2001
PICTURE COLLECTION IN DANGER We
at Time Inc. have just seen the closing of the Research Center this
summer and the lay-off of our mailroom employees in favor of less
expensive sub-contracted workers. Who
among us will be next? Rumors
are flying around the building about the Time Inc. Picture Collection.
Will it be dissolved? Will
it be moved offsite, or broken up like the Research Center? How will
this affect the magazines and special issues?
How many employees may be lost of the dozens currently working
there? An announcement on the future of the Picture Collection is scheduled for November 29. Before the Picture Collection is altered or threatened, all of us here at Time Inc. should understand its history and importance and be prepared to argue for its continued existence. What is the Picture
Collection? In
1997, Time Inc. editor-in-chief Norman Pearlstine described the Picture
Collection as one of the world’s richest repositories of the great
images of photojournalism. CEO
Gerald Levin has called it the company’s crown jewel. The Picture
Collection is a massive catalogued library located in the basement of
the Time & Life Building. It
contains more than 22 million images, of which Time Inc. owns only about
30%. The pictures are
available for research for company projects and for the magazines.
Many of the photos are well known and are of great historical
value. Who runs the Picture
Collection, and how does it work? As
important as the strength of the images is the skill of the researchers,
who are familiar with the Picture Collection’s efficient cataloguing
system. The system has grown since the start of Life magazine, in 1936,
to comprise 11,000 subject headings.
This gives the Collection unique capacities.
A researcher, given very specific information, can retrieve
practically any photo in the collection within 15 minutes or less.
Other existing picture libraries that are much smaller than
Time’s may require a day or more to retrieve a picture. Why should AOL Time
Warner keep the Picture Collection as is? It
is wrong to think that the Picture Collection is not needed because
photos can be obtained electronically.
Only a small proportion of the photos are available
electronically, and frequently the magazines need access to the actual
picture. Some of the scans
are too small for reuse or are flawed, and many pictures are not scanned
at all. However much money
might be saved by laying off staff and cutting back on space would be
offset by costs of remote retrieval. The
Picture Collection is a unique resource of great historical value. It is
made all the more valuable since the Bettmann Archive (a famous
news-picture archive now owned by Bill Gates) was moved into permanent
storage last year. Many projects that rely heavily on the Picture
Collection would be severely handicapped or at least be of lesser
quality if the Picture Collection is removed.
Typically, projects such as “Our Century of Change” (OCOC)
rely very heavily on the Picture Collection. For example, OCOC used more
than 600 pictures from the Picture Collection. Within the magazines,
there are also promotional and subscriber premium projects,
magazine-anniversary issues and timelines that use the Picture
Collection’s many resources. Photo researchers from the magazines say
that the Picture Collection is a fast and reliable source -- and
sometimes the only available source on deadline, as with the tragic
weekend deaths of Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr. The
jobs involved in maintaining the Picture Collection require a great deal
of knowledge and training. Not
only does the staff know the Picture Collection well, but many have deep
expertise in various areas (such as World War II, politics or movie
history). These skills are frequently in demand by the various
magazines. Moving
the Picture Collection to offsite storage would put in jeopardy the
safety of the pictures themselves and their retrieval.
If any are lost, the Company could face lawsuits by
photographers. And don’t
assume that offsite storage is safe; the irreplaceable files from
Fortune that were stored at Iron Mountain burned up in a fire several
years ago. For all of these reasons, including the historical significance of the collection and the unique services that its staff provides, the Picture Collection should be maintained as is. To do anything else would mean compromising a crucial element that allows Time Inc. publications to be the best in the industry. # # # # #
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