Opportunity for “At Risk” Audio and Audiovisual Materials

Preservation needs extend beyond paper and microfiche holdings.  Do you have any  “at risk” audio or audiovisual materials in your collection?  The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has received $2,725,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a regranting program to digitize “at risk” audio and audiovisual materials of ‘high scholarly value’. The program will run four competitions between January 2017 and September 2018, awarding a total of $2.3 million.

To help develop guidelines and criteria for the program, CLIR will issue a pilot call for proposals, in partnership with the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC), in January 2017.  Following the initial competition for audio reformatting at NEDCC, CLIR will launch a series of three open competitions, disbursing $2.15 million in funds over two years. Calls for proposals will be issued in June 2017, December 2017, and May 2018. Awards from the open competitions will range from $10,000 to $50,000 and will cover direct costs of preservation reformatting for audio and audiovisual content by eligible institutions working independently or with qualified service providers.

You can read the entire press release here.  Consider items in your collection which may be eligible!

Public Access to Law and “Official” Court Reports

Some noteworthy posts in the area of access to (and preservation of) legal information:

Peter Martin, co-founder of the LII and author of previous works on citation, has a new blog post on the lag time between U.S. Court decisions and official publication. In terms of the time between the Court’s decision in a case and the arrival of the print volume containing that case at the Cornell Law Library, Martin finds the current delay to be 4 1/2 – 5 years. Not only does this frustrate attorneys and other researchers, but it leaves citation gaps in state print reporters as well — and indeed, in the Court’s own citation to its previous decisions. Martin points to Illinois as a model for publication, in terms of the speed of the release of official opinions (since the digital form is official), and for the immediate release of a public domain citation. He notes that Congress would likely have to act in order for GPO to create a parallel track of official digital publication.

Sarah Glassmeyer, who spent the last year at a fellow at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, has completed an inventory of state legal information that focuses on barriers to access, including  citation requirements, publication lag, and availability of historical law online. Using these (and many more) factors, she scores states, finding Illinois, Indiana and Oklahoma at the top overall, and New York, Illinois and Oklahoma the “most open” publishers of caselaw. Her raw data is available along with the report.

These issues of publication — official and unofficial, digital and print — are intertwined, with no clear solution for the improvement of public access now or in the future. Official digital publication doesn’t solve preservation problems if commercial concerns claim ownership over the information. An example, see the Fastcase litigation over Casemaker’s claimed copyright in Georgia statutes. A recent post by Robert Ambrogi serves as an excellent backgrounder and update, highlighting Casemaker’s recent attempt to have the case dismissed entirely — thereby avoiding a judgment on the issues. As of this morning, nothing new has posted to the docket since Fastcase’s motion for summary judgment and Casemaker’s amended answer and reply to the motion, but expect Ambrogi to report when that decision comes down.

October Preservation Tip

This summer Tedd Anderson, Conservation Technician at Duke University, wrote two entertaining blog posts on his successes boxing books of unusual size. The first details his work with Audubon’s Birds of America (40 inches by 27 inches) and the second with Duke’s collection of miniature books (several of which can fit together on your palm). Read for tips on how to make an enclosure that isn’t so heavy it adds an extra 20 pounds to an already hefty volume or so loose that a book might be dropped and lost.

Do you have topics you would like to see highlighted, or suggestions for resources?  Please send your ideas to Celia Gavett at cgavet@law.columbia.edu.

Tips from previous months are available here.