Digital Collections TF

Minutes, 12.12.03

Our guests were from the Law Library. Stephanie Davidson, Scott Matheson, and Bill Fray each discussed the digital projects they manage.

CURIAE: (http://curiae.law.yale.edu/) (Stephanie Davidson is the contact person)

This project started 3 years ago with the goal of getting Supreme Court Briefs online. These are briefs that support the plantiff or defendant in Supreme Court Cases. No one really publishes them…the Supreme Court sends copies to some libraries but not every library has all the briefs. Some are available on microform and Lexis and Westlaw have the current ones, but historic ones are generally unavailable or very inconsistently available. Non-law researchers are increasingly interested in this material.

There are so many cases and so many briefs it would take too long to get to the major cases. The law library developed a methodology, a meaningful way to pick cases through use of major law reference works. In this manner, they established a list of the most important cases and are digitizing material for these cases first.

They send the material offsite to digitize. Right now they are using PDFs, but hope to make it full text searchable in the future. They use a backend MySQL database for the inventory control and Zope to both communicate and pull it altogether.

A graduate student did a lot of the technical work on the site, and he was instrumental in getting the project started.

The Supreme Court Library is very interested in this project. Hopefully they will get another grant to fill in holes and work with other libraries to get more complete material.

STATE LEGISLATIVE JOURNALS:

Scott Matheson described the feasibility study the law library is working on to look at digitizing state legislative journals. They sampled two historical time periods, the New Deal and Reconstruction. The SCOPA grant they received enabled them to research the holdings of the law library, keep track of bibliographical data in a database, and also note physical condition.

In just these two historical periods the law library has over 1000 items. This is likely to be a huge project and the law library will be seeking outside funding and collaboration with other libraries.

AVALON Project (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/avalon.htm)

Bill Fray described the Avalon project. This project began in 1996 with 300 documents. Currently there are 6000 documents online, and the site gets 12 million page hits a year.

The project covers historical documents in the field of law and diplomacy. A big turning point for the project happened when the documentation for the Nuremberg trial was donated in electronic form. The Law Library donated some money to do more for it. They were able to get small grants to take care of the rest of the conversion of the Nuremberg trials. Current projects include US Diplomacy, such as providing access to the complete bilateral and multilateral treaties online.

Bill is the selector but of course takes suggestions. He has a student who scans the material, OCRs, and does spell check. The material is then put into page templates. This work is done on his own personal initiative.

He was asked if there has been any links to sets of monographs in Orbis. There has not.