A Letter from our Chair, July 2020
Dear LIPA Member,
Traditionally, the Chair delivers a report at the annual business meeting held at AALL. We will be having a virtual business meeting but I wanted to address a few issues without the pressure of the camera.
In these unique times, we all need to find ways to conserve resources, money, space, and personnel. We are all learning that collaboration is key to moving forward and hopefully carrying out our various missions. From our founding LIPA has been about collaboration. We have focused on developing collaborative programs that solve problems.
Law Review Preservation Program
If your law reviews are in Digital Commons, they can be automatically archived in CLOCKSS, an international dark archive for long-term preservation. The Law Review Preservation Program is the first comprehensive long-term archiving solution for law reviews published online. But I can hear you asking, why bother when my journals are available in our digital repository?
It’s hard to imagine but your institution may not always be able to support the repository. We librarians worry when beloved products or services, previously maintained by academic or non-profit institutions, are purchased by for-profit companies. If a law review is no longer available from any university or publisher, it will be triggered from CLOCKSS under an open-access Creative Commons license, guaranteeing that law review articles will remain in the public domain forever.
The program is free and given how easy it is to be part of the Law Review Preservation Program why not join. Instructions are on the LIPA website.
LIA is a collaborative digital archive established to preserve and ensure permanent access to vital legal information published online. It represents an opportunity for the law library community to take on new responsibilities as stewards of our digital legal heritage. With Preservica as its technical host, LIA can easily and securely preserve a variety of content (digitized documents, photos, websites, and more) and related metadata. The LIA can be particularly useful to institutions without a digital repository. Your institution can preserve print and born digital materials of importance to your state, city or institution. What about preserving papers of notable alumni or materials from notorious trials?
Preserving America’s Legal Materials in Print (PALMPrint) is a shared collection, jointly owned by LIPA, NELLCO, and the participating libraries. A participating library may count the PALMPrint holdings as their own. Changing accreditation standards mean keeping fewer print items on our shelves but that doesn’t mean we still don’t appreciate the importance of maintaining an accessible, reliable collection. My institution is deaccessioning print volumes so we can remove shelving and rearrange student seating to promote social distancing. As a PALMPrint participant we will have no reduction in title count.
Archive-It Partnership
Probably my favorite but most overlooked program is our partnership with Archive-It. Websites are legally significant documents, and we all need to be preserving our institutional websites. LIPA members receive a 20% discount.
Professional Development & Training
LIPA also offers live and on-demand webinars and related materials. Access past content on the LIPA website, including programs on grant-prospecting and writing, digital project management, and more. Upcoming offerings include how to launch a digitization project and marketing your library’s services in a remote environment.
I have been associated with LIPA for a number of years and believe that membership is a good return on investment. LIPA has enjoyed strong support from academic and court law libraries. We hope to keep your support by championing collaborative preservation projects. It has long been an interest of mine to collaborate with other law libraries in my state to share the responsibility for preserving state legal materials. I will be continuing on the Board as a member-at-large and hope to focus on developing a template for state wide collection development plans. Is this a project of interest to your institution? What preservation projects would you like to see developed?
For those considering ending their membership or institutions that have already done so, I would personally ask you to consider the actual benefit of membership. Thank you to all our continuing members. Your support is so important. There is a lot to do, and we need to work on it together.
The LIPA board wants to hear from you. We welcome your questions and project ideas and hope to see you at our virtual membership meeting on Monday, July 27th from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. (Eastern). Click here to register for the meeting.
For myself and on behalf of the other members of the 2019-2020 board, Joe Custer, Jason Eiseman, Julie Kimbrough, Susan Nevelow Mart, and Rob Mead, thank you, take care, and stay safe.
Sincerely,
Sharon Bradley, Chair
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Board of Directors (2019 - 2020)
Sharon Bradley, Chair
Joe Custer, Member-at-Large
Jason Eiseman, Secretary
Julie Kimbrough, Chair-Elect
Rob Mead, Treasurer
Susan Nevelow Mart, Member-at-Large