About LIPA

LIPA is the acronym for the Legal Information Preservation Alliance, a loosely organized group of law libraries focused on the preservation of legal information in all formats, including print and born digital. LIPA's mission statement reads: The mission of the Legal Information Preservation Alliance [LIPA] is to provide the leadership, the necessary organizational framework, and the professional commitment necessary to preserve vital paper and electronic legal information by defining objectives, developing and/or adopting appropriate standards and models, creating networks, and fostering financial and political support for long term stability. A web site providing background on the organization is hosted on AALLNET at http://www.aallnet.org/committee/lipa/

One project of special interest to LIPA is the preservation of a minimum number of paper copies of all primary U.S. and Canadian legal materials. Its concern is that, with many law libraries discarding hardcopy in favor of retention on film or in digital format, the law library world as a whole could inadvertently be discarding all print copies for some titles. The plan LIPA has devised to address the print-preservation problem is to recruit and identify a core group of "Retention Libraries” willing to retain specific titles utilizing a “distributed-retention” approach. 

An essential component to the success of a scheme based on distributed-responsibility is a central, universally accessible, database to track which libraries are saving which titles. Since LLMC already had developed a comparable database to track its own digitizing and paper retention program, it offered to let LIPA "piggyback" its print retention effort on the LLMC platform.  The results of this collaborative effort between the two organizations are beginning to be displayed on this web site.

Interested parties are invited to access the holdings table for the Alaska Supreme Court Reports. As will be seen with the Alaska reports example, the Columbia and Harvard Law Libraries, two of the leading LIPA print retention libraries, already have loaded their holdings for this title in the yellow field.  In this example, both Columbia and Harvard have hardcopy for each volume of this title and are pledged to archive this title indefinitely.  With some titles it may happen that one or both libraries have imperfect copies for certain volumes.  In that case they will use the "I" symbol in the relevant volume boxes to indicate that they would welcome better-condition retention copies for those volumes.  LLMC itself uses the columns in the blue field to indicate which volumes it has in fiche format and/or on line, or for which it still needs scannable copy.  The last LLMC column  (Paper Backup) indicates whether LLMC has a paper copy of that volume in its salt-mine dark archive, which is another node in the LIPA Print Retention Program.  LLMC will also use the "I" symbol to indicate when it is still seeking a better retention copy for a given volume.  Libraries planning to discard their print copies of any title are encouraged to consider becoming part of the LIPA Print Retention Program by offering their discard volumes to any of the listed depositories that indicate missing or imperfect volumes.

The overall responsibility for defining the conditions for implementing the LIPA Print Retention Program rests with LIPA.  for its part, LLMC is proud to be able to collaborate in the LIPA effort and will continue to perform its record-keeping role for as long as needed.