Finally, Online Legal Information Is a Topic of Serious Discussion

Legal linkrot has been a newsworthy topic since the publication of  Something Rotten in the State of Legal Citation: The Life Span of a United States Supreme Court Citation Containing an Internet Link (1996-2010) in Yale Journal of Law and Technology.  The New York Times featured the study in its September 23, 2013 article In Supreme Court Opinions, Web Links to Nowhere.

The ABA Journal has joined the discussion this month with ’Link rot’ is degrading legal research and case cites. The article features LIPA’s own Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group (CDPG).  CDPG harvests and preserves legally significant publications based on the collection development plans of its member libraries. Annually the members of the group check to see if links to a sample set of publications still work. The number of dead links has grown annually, but the 2013 report was significant because for the first time over 50 percent of .gov links no longer worked.

It is gratifying to see the preservation of online legal information as a topic of serious discussion and the work of groups like CDPG recognized. New tools like permaCC offer the promise of consistent and permanent links to online legal information. Maybe by the end of the decade linkrot will become a quaint artifact, like the sound of a 56K baud modem.

Mary Jo Lazun Head of Collection Management Maryland State Law Library

#ChesapeakeDigitalPreservationGroup #DigitalPreservation #linkrot #Permacc

Principles and Practices for Digital Preservation – Webinar

Digital preservation deserves significant attention in this information age. Digital materials have a shorter lifespan and are more fragile than paper-based resources. Please join Fang Wang, Reference and Special Collection Services Librarian at St. Mary’s University School of Law and certified Digital Preservation Outreach and Education Trainer on Thursday, August 29 at 11 a.m. central as she outlines six principles and practices for preserving digital materials. Learn answers to questions about preserving legal information in the digital format, steps to protect your digital content and provisions for long term access and management. Registration closes on August 26.

This webinar is sponsored by the American Association of Law Libraries and the Legal Information Preservation Alliance.

#AALL #DigitalPreservation #Webinars

NDSA Announces National Agenda for Digital Stewardship

Since its founding in December 2010, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (of which LIPA is a member) has worked to establish, maintain, and advance the capacity to preserve our nation’s digital resources for the benefit of present and future generations.

In late 2012 the NDSA Coordinating Committee, in partnership with NDSA working group chairs, began brainstorming ways to leverage the NDSA’s national membership and broad expertise to raise the profile of digital stewardship issues to legislators, funders and other decision-makers. The National Agenda for Digital Stewardship became the vehicle to highlight, on an ongoing, annual basis, the key issues that affect digital stewardship practice most effectively for decision-makers.

The NDSA is excited to announce the release of the inaugural Agenda on Tuesday July 23 in conjunction with the Digital Preservation 2013 meeting.

“The Agenda identifies our most pressing digital preservation challenges as a nation and gives us the direction to deal with them collaboratively,” said Andrea Goethals, the Digital Preservation and Repository Services Manager at the Harvard University Library and one of the Agenda’s authors.

Effective digital stewardship is vital to maintaining the public records necessary for understanding and evaluating government actions; the scientific evidence base for replicating experiments, building on prior knowledge; and the preservation of the nation’s cultural heritage, but in the current resource-challenged climate, digital stewardship issues often get lost in the shuffle.

Still, there is broad recognition that the need to ensure that today’s valuable digital content remains accessible, useful, and comprehensible in the future is a worthwhile effort, supporting a thriving economy, a robust democracy, and a rich cultural heritage.

The 2014 National Agenda integrates the perspective of dozens of experts and hundreds of institutions, convened through the Library of Congress, to provide funders and other executive decision-makers with insight into emerging technological trends, gaps in digital stewardship capacity, and key areas for development.

The Agenda informs individual organizational efforts, planning, goals, and opinions with the aim to offer inspiration and guidance and suggest potential directions and key areas of inquiry for research and future work in digital stewardship.

The Agenda is designed to generate comment and conversation over the coming months in order to impact future activities, policies, strategies and actions that ensure that digital content of vital importance to the nation is acquired, managed, organized, preserved and accessible for as long as necessary.

In addition to the discussions during the Digital Preservation 2013 meeting, a series of webinars will be scheduled over the next few months to provide further opportunities for the digital stewardship community to learn more about the agenda and explore opportunities to put it into practice.

The release of the inaugural Agenda is an important milestone in digital stewardship practice. For more information follow the activity on Twitter (hashtag: #nationalagenda or @NDSA2) and read more about the NDSA and the Agenda on the Signal blog.

********************************* Margaret K. Maes Executive Director Legal Information Preservation Alliance P. O. Box 5266 Bloomington, IN 47407 Phone: 812-822-2773 mailto:mkmaes@gmail.com http://lipalliance.org/ *********************************