Annabel Colley wins the European Special Librarian of the Year (ESLY) award for
2001

The winner of the Special Libraries Association's (SLA) European Special Librarian of the Year Award for 2001 is Annabel Colley, BBC Current Affairs Web Producer.

The award, sponsored by Factiva, seeks to recognise outstanding achievement in special librarianship in Europe by developing innovative concepts and services which contribute to the better promotion and appreciation of the work of special librarians amongst information professionals, clients and wider world.

Annabel Colley is the BBC Current Affairs Web Producer and has been at the BBC for 12 years. Working closely with BBC News Online, She manages web sites, live chats, web forums and online news stories from the Current Affairs department. The BBC News Online site gets an average 6 million total page views a day and BBC Current Affairs produces approximately 750 hours of TV and Radio a year in the UK.

Annabel took BBC Panorama - the world's longest running investigative TV current affairs show - online in 1999, as their first Web Producer. Prior to that, as the Information Researcher on the Panorama team for five years, she carried out investigative research online and offline. Inspired by SLA News division members at the 1998 SLA conference in Indianapolis, she pioneered some computer assisted research and reporting techniques among the Panorama team.

She also devised a small scale research intranet site, which led to her approaching BBC Information and Archives with a business case for its development across the Corporation. She then worked as a consultant for BBC Information & Archives on the project development stage for BBC Research Central Intranet site. Launched in 2000, this major research portal for the BBC is now helping programme makers across the BBC access in-house and external databases and draw on relevant, evaluated web sites to make their programmes.

She says she jumped on the Internet bandwagon fairly early on and describes a lunch time seminar she ran in 1996 entitled "The Wired Journalist" as a career turning point leading to a "dual career as both librarian and journalist". It was attended by many BBC editors and reporters and "suddenly news librarianship (and my job as information researcher at Panorama) became cool because of the Internet".

This has led to her working part time for BBC Journalist training and BBC Multimedia training and writing for BBC Web Wise. She has run Internet masterclasses for the Financial Times, The Guardian News desk, and a Radio Netherlands course for African Journalists.

She speaks widely at domestic and international conferences and is a regular contributor to journals and books in this field. She is the outgoing chair of the Association of UK Media Librarians.

Annabel has worked in the media since graduating from University of Wales with a Masters in Library and Information Studies in 1988, joining the BBC in 1989 as a librarian in the Film and VT library and then as an information researcher in the press cuttings library

See Annabel's presentation slides (pdf) from her talk "From Librarian to Web Producer via nvestigative Journalism" at the SLA Annual Conference in San Antonio

2000: William Hann

1999: Kevin Miles

Ten Years of the ESLY award by Sylvia James