The library

After writing Monday that I would start "writing" in my blog, absolutely NOTHING cool has happened to me. Even if my digital camera was back at my side, I would have NOTHING to take photos of.

The most exciting thing that has happened was the 2 new book shelves in the newsroom. That's right... Book shelves.

Stay with me now, I'm going somewhere...

The back room/hall/garage of every newsroom is full of tapes. After decades of covering every tree lighting, winter storm, airport delay and first day of school, the work of our lenslinging predecessors sits waiting in the archives.

The archive's busiest times are probably every month before sweeps. Someone always gets assigned a story about meth, and the only fresh video is the three interviews and a stand-up. List of tapes in hand, the weary shooter will stumble into the archives searching for any little morsel of video to cover the epic of a story his or her reporter churned out.

Most of the time you wonder when you would ever need 30 seconds of Lindsey Lohan from last year, but when a 5 minute plastic surgery story gets thrown in your edit bay, you bless the person who saved that clip, and the hundred other clips of obnoxious smiling celebrities. The archives are a wonderous thing.

I bet you're wondering where the shelves mentioned above fall into place...

Well, my newsroom doesn't have twenty plus years of tapes.
We don't even have the 90s on tape.

The archives? A bookshelf. One. And it's not even full.

The station is only four years old. There is no way we could have an expansive library. But it's the funniest picture.

Imagine. Tucked away in the corner of the newsroom sits a bookshelf. It's the height of the metal shelving you'd find in a garage. In fact, it's the same material but half as thick with three times as many evenly spaced shelves. DVC Pro tapes fill one side. The other side is about 2/3rds full. It's taken 4 years to not quite fill that one shelf. Today the production crew moved in 2 more identical looking shelves.

I could see why they'd want to put in another shelf. We are getting close to completing the one. And it would be the end of the world if a second shelf wasn't ready when we reached capacity. But why add a third?

It won't see a tape for another 4 years!

Oh well. It makes the "library" look bigger and those years do creep by pretty fast. Hell, get a fourth one up there! It'll only be 8 or 9 years before we'll need that one too.