My boring newsletter
Posted on November 25th, 2015
The (Continued) Zeal of a Podcast Convert
No podcast today.
— Bill Barnwell (@billbarnwell) October 21, 2015
Posted on November 22nd, 2015
The Zeal of a Podcast Convert
Serious question. Is anyone listening to podcasts? Who can find the time?
— Aaron Kirschenfeld (@kirschsubjudice) July 12, 2015
No podcast today.
— Bill Barnwell (@billbarnwell) October 21, 2015
Posted on July 25th, 2015
More Information: I've Landed @UNCLawLibrary
Posted on May 1st, 2015
#LawRepositories - OER & Perma.cc - Glassmeyer & Ziegler
- Data (the “raw" law)
- Information
- Knowledge
- Content
- Container
- Conveyance
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- Free repositories have been the subject of the talk
- Publishers are treating digital materials different from print materials.
- Copyright extension (in term and scope).
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- Orphan work problem: 25% - 50%
- Format changes.
- Taxpayers pay for courts, professors, licenses.
- Publish and distribute from the desktop.
- OS refers to the software
- OA refers to the content
- Garbage
- “Given away"
- Forbidding
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- Sometimes things under CC license don’t look “open"
- Removes barriers to education ($$)
- No more reinventing the wheel all the time
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- Why do we struggle to teach “What Are Primary Legal Materials?" over and over?
- Public domain legal materials for:
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- Law schools
- CLEs
- Paralegal training programs
- SSRN
- TWEN & Blackboard (or other LMS, I suppose)
- Published court opinions
- Don’t hide the license
- Make the document “re-mixable"
- Make lots of copies so people don’t have to hunt for it!
- The Casebook (H2O Platform)
- Digitization Efforts (Caselaw & Special Collections)
- https://perma.cc/about
- Links. Will. Break.
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- (There was a great conference on this topic in October at Georgetown Law)
- Perma.cc is a simple web app. Resolves links to the very page the author intended to reference.
- But it’s also a code repository!
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- Available on GitHub
- 85 law libraries acting as Perma.cc registrars.
- Perma is also a platform; recently released an API.
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- Recently have built a small Word plugin, being tested now.
- Finally, Perma is a network.
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- Institutional combination.
- Library mirroring.
- Sarah says yes. Question is where the content is hosted?
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- Cost a concern. Stability, too.
- Quarterly archive feature of bepress.
- Prototype has been created.
- Still being tested.
- There is no manual, but some folks have developed resources.
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- Libguide at Boston College on it (link to be circulated)
- Audience noting resistance from journals
- Courts have different sensitivities.
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- Links being created might be used to forecast an opinion.
Posted on March 31st, 2015
#LawRepositories - Breakout - LIPA (Margie Maes)
- Preservation in print and digital form.
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- PALMPrint for primary law print (facility in Massachusetts) in partnership with NELLCO.
- Legal Information Archive for digital (with OCLC).
- Archiving law review materials in bepress in CLOKSS available.
- Partnership with Archive-It (for Web archiving).
"Digitization just means you've doubled the amount of preservation work you have to do." - some guy in audience #LawRepositories
— Sarah Glassmeyer (@sglassmeyer) March 31, 2015
Posted on March 31st, 2015
#LawRepositories - Is Digitization Preservation?
- We’re too small, it’s only me.
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- Do what you can, and then you’ve done it. Your own small part.
- We can’t afford it.
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- Student labor, equipment not too expensive. Fuji ScanSnap worthy of lust!
- We don’t have the technical skills.
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- We can all specialize, use our own skills. The technical folks from #LawRepositories - Lightning Talks will handle the technical stuff.
- Not a priority.
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- It can’t wait. The books are falling apart.
- It’s (primarily) about (open) access
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- “Intellectual output" = call for new term needed!!
- Editorial input might be the sine qua non of publishing, but are publishers doing it?
- Digitization means creating something new.
- Digitization is about both access and preservation.
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- Need to be considered independently.
- Preservation is backup and recovery
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- Backup and recovery is a disaster-planning mechanism, not for access or preservation necessarily.
- Bit rot is probably the most dangerous thing.
- Acquisition of a turnkey repository is enough
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- We need to be doing more with repositories.
- What’s the goal?
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- Maintain the object for as long as needed that is authentic and accessible.
- Reduce handling.
- Ensuring authenticity
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- When you digitize, you’re the custodian.
- Trusted Digital Repositories (TDRs)
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- Most have decided that bepress meets the needs, but it’s not open-and-shut.
- Control and Structure
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- It’s a constant process of evaluation.
- Management, Technology, and Content
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- Disasters happen!
- But loss of institutional memory is also a disaster.
- Repositories
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- National Digital Stewardship Alliance
- LIPA & preservation in LOCKSS
- SAA Jump In initiative
- No single preservation strategy
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- We’re talking about tools but also where things will be in the future.
- Migration
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- 3 to 5 years. Seems like a lot. But keep it in mind.
- Structure
- Processing
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- Less process, more product.
- We can get caught up in the details, leading to delay.
- Do no harm
- Don’t preclude future use
- Don’t let the first two be obstacles to action
- Document what you do
- Not volitionally, but because the things have not been identified.
- Materials not significant. Intellectual value.
- But, leave the organization of the creator in place if you can.
- Archival students can be helpful. Box-level content organization can be done rather easily.
- St. Mary’s (TX) has received grant, but had a bad experience with a particular set of papers through DPLA Hub.
- Have been several grants recently, Univ. of Utah (IMLS)
- LYRASIS (mass digitization), Sharon has worked with them.
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- Margie Maes mentions it’s a challenge with smaller law collections
- Duke has its own digitization center university-wide, can do small projects.
Posted on March 31st, 2015
#LawRepositories - Lightning Talks
- University of Chicago (Chicago Unbound)
- Databases and scripts
- A real-live relational database!
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- UI is MS Access
- Mostly Python and SQLServer
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- Excellent third-party tools that are helpful in academic law libraries
- Customizations built on DigitalCommons
- Selenium for browser automation
- Different strategies employed by different libraries.
- Why automate?
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- Saves time...
- Saves effort...
- Consistency
- Journal structure
- Public links from Dropbox
- bepress spreadsheets filled out well
- Also harvesting from ILP
- The most difficult part
- Repositories are necessarily for content
- Content reuse requires shaping content
- OAI-PMH is simple
- and stable
- and used by bunch of different languages
- Student editors
- Challenging publishing environment
- But the product is important!
- Addition of 22 additional fields to those required by bepress.
- A way of connecting things in the Google search results.
- Addition of a Google Author ID
- SSRN IDs are also identifiers
Posted on March 30th, 2015
#LawRepositories - Hollie White and Avery Le - Using Metrics to Make Repository Decisions
- Number of papers
- Number of downloads
- Email of monthly usage from bepress
- Author reports
- What’s important to community?
- When will you collect it?
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- Regularly!
- Who wants to know?
- For DOWNLOADS
- For VISITS
- Overall and collection level downloads.
- Article level collections
- Visitor information, looking for spikes.
- 9 student-run journals.
- Every repository is different.
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- But, custom alerts in Google Alerts. Close to real-time monitor.
- Spikes in traffic:
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- Is it a bot?
- Is it conspiracy theorists?
- Correlations and Multiple Regressions for statistical analysis of collection
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- Analysis in STATA
- Example: Do metadata and downloads correlate?
- Ranking of downloads
- Who do you show this to?
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- Faculty
- Administrators
- Search Queries (from Google Analytics)
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- Tool: Tagul
- Donut Chart (social media data)
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- Tool: AmCharts
- Map (network domains)
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- Tool: Google Fusion Tables
Posted on March 30th, 2015