Due Process: Georgetown Law Library Blog

The Georgetown Law Library has launched a new data archiving service, the Georgetown Law Dataverse, to support the empirical research of Law Center faculty members, academic centers and institutes, and legal journals.

"Georgetown Law faculty are increasingly publishing scholarship with empirical data components," said Law Library Director and Professor of Law Michelle Wu. "This trend is reflected in the broader legal academy as well. As a result, free, open and reliable access to source data has become critical to the development of legal scholarship. With an eye towards facilitating such scholarship, the Georgetown Law Library is offering this innovative service to support the preservation and sharing of digital datasets."

The Georgetown Law Dataverse is a repository of digital datasets, collections of statistical information or other related data used in empirical scholarship. This service will allow authors to permanently preserve and publically release data that they have collected. Authors who continue to update their work after publication can upload revised data as it becomes available.

More information about the Dataverse is available here: http://www.ll.georgetown.edu/collections/dataverse.cfm.

This entry was posted on January 12, 2012 at 1:41 PM and has received 781 views. Print this entry.

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This entry was posted on March 28, 2011 at 10:38 AM and has received 17857 views. Print this entry.

This Veterans Day, we might reflect upon the progress made possible through the sacrifice of military servicemembers, and the tragedy, triumph, and trials of war. In legal history, the tribunals for war crimes following World War II have had a profound impact on our domestic and international jurisprudence and scholarship, and there are a growing number of online resources to help us research these important materials.

Transcripts and associated documents of the Nuremberg Trials (officially the International Military Tribunal for Germany) have been digitized, organized, and made available for free on the Web through several ongoing initiatives, including Yale’s Avalon Project, the Nuremberg Trials Project at Harvard Law, and the Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection at the Cornell Law Library. The National Archives has also converted many of their microform documents on WWII crimes and trials to PDF.

Although no comparably extensive online compilation yet exists for the Tokyo Trials (International Military Tribunal for The Far East), some of the most important and interesting documents are available on iBiblio.org through the HyperWar Foundation (the Tribunal’s judgment) and the Harry S. Truman Library website (official correspondence and photos). For now, full transcripts of the Tokyo Trials are only available in print, here at Georgetown in the Wolff Library.

The Law Library also offers a good selection of relevant print and electronic resources; try an Encore keyword search to see our cataloged holdings on the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials.

This entry was posted on November 11, 2010 at 4:12 PM and has received 18131 views. Print this entry.

The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive has released the results of its third annual analysis of “link rot” among the original URLs for law- and policy-related materials published to the Web and archived though the Chesapeake Project.

The 2010 analysis reveals that nearly 28 percent of the online publications archived between March 2007 and March 2008 have now disappeared from their original locations on the Web but, due to the project’s preservation efforts, remain accessible via permanent archive URLs. This sample of online publications was first analyzed in 2008 and showed link rot to be present in 8.3 percent of the publications’ original URLs. One year later, in 2009, the same sample showed an increase in link rot to 14.3 percent.

During the three years that the URLs were studied, link rot increased from about one in every 12 archived titles in 2008, to one in every seven titles in 2009, and finally to about one in every 3.5 titles in 2010. These findings demonstrate a dramatic increase in link rot among archived Web content over time.

The analysis also explores the prevalence of link rot among top-level domains, showing content at state-government URLs (.state.__.us) to be at a significant risk for link rot, compared to resources posted to government (.gov) and organization (.org) Web sites.

A detailed summary of the study is available at http://legalinfoarchive.org/.

The Chesapeake Project was launched in 2007 by the Georgetown University Law Library and the State Law Libraries of Maryland and Virginia as a collaborative digital archive for the preservation of important Web-published legal materials, which often disappear as online content is reorganized or deleted over time.

Having successfully completed its two-year pilot phase in 2009, the Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive is expanding. A new law library has recently joined the Chesapeake Project, and the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) in March 2010 announced the formation of its Legal Information Archive, a collaborative digital preservation program for the law library community modeled after the Chesapeake Project. All LIPA-member libraries are invited to participate in the Legal Information Archive. 

For more information, visit the LIPA Web site at www.aallnet.org/committee/lipa or the Chesapeake Project at www.legalinfoarchive.org.

This entry was posted on May 5, 2010 at 1:04 PM and has received 18957 views. Print this entry.

Fans of the legislative process have a new favorite Web site to frequent. C-SPAN has made digital copies of every program it has broadcast since 1987 available online. This video collection, totaling more than 160,000 hours, is searchable and is indexed by subject, person name, congressional committee, and several other fields.

In addition to its coverage of Congressional activity, C-SPAN also broadcasts original programs, such as Booknotes, and America and the Courts. These programs are included as well, and the entire collection is available at no cost for education, research, review or home viewing purposes.

This entry was posted on March 24, 2010 at 11:34 AM and has received 19228 views. Print this entry.

-- The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive releases its ‘Two-Year Pilot Project Evaluation,’ describing size of digital archive, access statistics and ‘link rot’ among archived publications --



The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive has released a comprehensive report evaluating its digital preservation efforts over the past two years.

A joint effort of the Georgetown University Law Library and the State Law Libraries of Maryland and Virginia, the project was created as a two-year pilot to investigate the feasibility of establishing a collaborative digital archive, shared by multiple institutions in the law library community, for the preservation of Web-published legal materials. The aim of the project is to ensure long-term access to these born-digital publications, which can be easily lost as Web site content is rearranged or deleted over time.

The project evaluation reveals that nearly 14 percent, or approximately one in seven, of the online publications archived between March 2007 and March 2009 have already disappeared from their original locations on the Web but, due to the project’s efforts, remain accessible via permanent archive URLs. A similar analysis in 2008 showed that slightly more than 8 percent of archived titles had disappeared from their original URLs, demonstrating a dramatic increase in “link rot,” or inactive URLs, among archived Web content over the past year.

The evaluation also reports that the libraries participating in the project have archived more than 4,300 digital objects and tracked more than 177,000 visits to www.legalinfoarchive.org, the open-access home of The Chesapeake Project’s digital archive collections. Users of the project’s Web site visited from U.S. educational, government, and military institutions, as well as from countries abroad throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Pacific Islands.

The full project evaluation is available at www.legalinfoarchive.org.

Having successfully completed its initial two-year pilot phase, The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive is currently expanding. Law libraries nationwide are encouraged to join this collaborative digital archive or establish similar preservation initiatives under the auspices of the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA).

For more information, visit the LIPA Web site at www.aallnet.org/committee/lipa or The Chesapeake Project at www.legalinfoarchive.org.

This entry was posted on June 25, 2009 at 4:21 PM and has received 19445 views. Print this entry.

Amazon just announced a large-format version of their electronic book reader, called the Kindle DX, which you can see in action at engadget. The product doesn't launch until this summer, but it could be in the hands of many university students for a pilot coming to five schools this fall. Library Journal reports that these schools are: Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Princeton, Reed College and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.  As of yet, there are no law schools who will try this out.  Because Kindle books are typically locked into a single device, this could mean the disappearance of a used book market.  That said, it means fewer dead trees and possibly more publishing options for content producers.  In law schools, where much of the raw source material is in the public domain, casebooks and case compilations could be done very economically, if not for free.

An interesting feature of the new device is that it supports native PDF documents, instead of forcing people to pay to convert them to a proprietary Kindle format. This means you could get class notes or reading materials in PDF format and read them directly.  It's not clear if this would support image-based formats like scanned law reviews from Hein Online or published reporter cases from Westlaw.  If so, this could be a boon for students willing to pay almost $500 for the device.

In the past, there has been some debate over whether libraries can lend Kindle readers to their users. One problem with having a Kindle in a library is that book purchasing is tied directly to the account on the device.  A library owning one to lend would have to disable purchasing options. Books purchased for the Kindle cannot be transferred to another device.

In advance of the latest Kindle announcement, the New York Times ran a story about large format e-book readers, exploring questions of whether these could save daily newspapers.  Media conglomerate Hearst Corporation is rumored to be launching a wireless e-book reader. They publish everything from Harper's Bazaar to Good Housekeeping to Popular Mechanics.  It will be exciting to see how electronic books develop over time.  They look like a possible life preserver for print media. Perhaps this Fall we'll see how they fare in the education sector.

Update: Additional coverage, including law school topics, is found here:

• Who will get the first e-book into the law school classroom?
• Case Western Reserve University students will use textbooks on Kindle electronic reader

This entry was posted on May 7, 2009 at 2:05 PM and has received 21042 views. Print this entry.

The Law Library of Congress (LLOC) started archiving 90 popular legal blogs (blawgs) in 2007, and now archives more than 100. It hopes to regularly archive 200 blawgs by the end of 2009. Originally these archives weren't available to the public. Now you can access the LLOC's blawg archives at http://www.loc.gov/law/find/web-archive/legal-blawgs.php.

This entry was posted on April 1, 2009 at 1:42 PM and has received 21837 views. Print this entry.

...is the title of a posting yesterday (2/4/09) by Frank Pasquale at the Balkanization blog. It reviews the excellent piece by Harvard's Robert Darnton in the Feb. 12, 2009 New York Review of Books, "Google & the Future of Books" (accessible as e-journal for us Georgetown affiliates). Darnton's essay echoes much of what John Palfrey had to say about the settlement at the AALS in San Diego when he spoke at the Law Library section lunch. Pasquale addresses briefly some of the possible challenges to the settlement, but all three professors- Darnton, Palfrey, and Pasquale- are worried about the possiblity of changing times or the end of good will on the part of Google, and in principle, the privatization of a project that cries out to be for the public good, with equality of access to the information in perpetuity.

This entry was posted on February 5, 2009 at 12:18 PM and has received 24987 views. Print this entry.