Congratulations to the University of Michigan Law Librarians

It is always gratifying to see the librarians highlighted in a law school alumni publication. Over the weekend, I read a laudatory article in the Spring 2011 Law Quadrangle: Notes from Michigan Law. The article, entitled "Whither the Law Librarian," will not be news to any law librarian. It portrays four dual-degree librarians who work at the University of Michigan Law Library as "helping to advance digital research rather than hinder it." The librarians interviewed point out that being a librarian has always been about managing information--finding it and using it--and for this reason, format is simply not that important. The article concludes with the often-repeated statement that "technology has flooded researchers with so much information that, now more than ever, they need a guide to help them navigate the chaos." This is probably true, but I wonder if students today actually believe it.

The piece includes a nice one-page spread featuring Jerry Dupont, a 1967 alumnus of Michigan Law, and the Haiti Legal Patrimony Project, which was undertaken by LLMC in the wake of last year's devastation. Haiti's libraries were not spared, and the country risked the loss of its legal heritage. The Law Quadrangle describes Dupont's efforts to collect over 700 books and documents in "a huge bibliographic project." Items were identified and located in libraries around the world, and are now being scanned to create "a massive digital record ... that combines the strengths of the various collections" from which it came. Margaret Leary, Director of the Michigan Law Library, which provided about ten per cent of the materials being digitized, has the last word about the Haiti Project: "This project is an excellent example of the way collection development policies result in the whole being much greater than any one library."

Preserving Guatanamo's Records

A dedicated law professor, librarian, and attorney are working together to create the Guatanamo Bay Detention Center archive, which will be a "repository of the records and first-person accounts of hundreds of defense lawyers who have worked on detainee cases." The story is reported in the July 10 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. The individuals involved are Mark P. Denbeaux, a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law and director of its Center for Policy and Research, which put out an important series of reports on Guatanamo; Michael Nash, director of New York University's Tamiment Library, known for its collections on labor, politics, and public policy; and Jonathan Hafetz, who is a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project and an adjunct professor at Seton Hall. Both Denbeaux and Hafetz have represented Guatanamo detainees. The archive will be housed at Seton Hall and at the Tamiment Library, according to a recent press release. The project is the brain child of Denbeaux, who marched at Selma in 1965 and now regrets the "'million details' that went unrecorded." He wants to make sure the same thing does not happen with Guatanamo. Because all of the detainees will probably not have public trials, "the archive may turn out to be one of the few public sources of information about what really happened at Guatanamo."

As a librarian interested in the preservation of digital information, I was interested to learn that the Guatanamo archive is likely to be "one of the first collections to make its debut under a digital-archiving project called Web-at-Risk: Preserving Our National's Cultural Heritage," which is fully described here. The Chronicle article describes librarians' role in digital preservation projects, and concludes that good institutional partners are a must if a large-scale project like the Guatanamo archive is to be done successfully.

Ephemeral Digital Archives

Most librarians are following the Google Book Settlement carefully, wondering what it will mean for long-term access to a large part of the scholarly record. This article from Inside Higher Ed will do nothing to quiet their concerns. It describes the "fate of 'Paper of Record,' a digital archive of early newspapers with a particularly strong collection of Mexican newspapers ..." Paper of Record was bought secretly by Google in 2006, and some time last year, the site disappeared. "After weeks in which historians have complained to Google and others about the loss of their abiilty to work, the previous owner of the archive has received permission to bring the archive back for some period of time, and resumption of service could start as early [as] next week." The article describes the blog posts of historians "worried about what the incident says about the availability and accessibility of key resources" and the "'fragility of evidence in the digital era.'"