Law Librarianship in the Twenty-First Century by Balleste Roy;Smith-Butler Lisa;Luna-Lamas Sonia;

Author:Balleste, Roy;Smith-Butler, Lisa;Luna-Lamas, Sonia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Digitization Projects

Aside from leasing and purchasing digital resources, libraries can build their own digital collections. These efforts come in many varieties and are a locus of innovation in academic law librarianship. The least technologically demanding of these types of projects is creating a digital repository of the law school’s faculty scholarship and journals, or an online brief bank for a firm’s attorneys. Most of these documents have already been digitized, so assembling such a collection generally requires acquiring and cleaning up the appropriate files, ascertaining intellectual property rights, and then loading them into a vendor-provided or open source digital repository platform. A more ambitious collection could involve digitizing materials that thus far only exist in analog format. Institutional archives, court records, records relating to local legal history, and faculty papers are good candidates for local digitization projects.

The costs of local digitization projects are mostly due to personnel and equipment, because the materials to be digitized are either readily available to librarians or, in the case of law journal articles, relatively inexpensive. You may need to invest in digitization equipment and software. What you will need depends heavily on the materials you wish to digitize and the access features you wish to provide, such as search and indexing. Digitization work can be outsourced to specialized vendors, and your project may benefit from the economy of scale that some of these vendors can achieve.

You will need some sort of public access platform. Vendor-hosted platforms are dominant in the law library market at present. Open source platforms are available, but require qualified staff to install and maintain both the servers and repository software. Law libraries have successfully implemented both vendor- and self-hosted repositories, either independently or in cooperation with university library systems.[34]

Digitization projects can easily mushroom into an unmanageable amount of work, so it is important to add a section on local digital collections to your library’s collection-development policy. It is better to start small and set achievable goals. Once those are accomplished, your goals can become more ambitious. For example, you can expand the scope of your faculty publications to those written by adjunct professors and faculty who used to teach at your institution, but later left. You can move from journal articles to book chapters, pieces written for the popular press, congressional testimony, drafts that have been posted on the Social Science Research Network, or lecture notes. Perhaps the library will dive into multimedia, collecting images, audio recordings, and video recordings of lectures and conferences held at the school. Such an effort would present a new host of challenges, compared with collections that are predominantly text. You might need additional editing software or a new platform to preserve and provide access to the content, and you may need to hire a qualified vendor to handle some of the work.

To keep digitization projects manageable and to justify the expense, set criteria for what will be included. Assuming you are not planning a massive quest to digitize everything in your library’s collection, good

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