The LLMC-Digital Newsletter
Issue No. 19: May 2006
The
LLMC-Digital Newsletter
Issue
19
May 5, 2006
Contents:
1– Subscriptions, the
“lifeline” program -p.1
2– The Michigan partnership -p.2
3– Other board decisions -p.3
4– Bibliographic notes from all over -p.4
Subscriptions, The “Lifeline” Program
At its recent meeting in
Ann Arbor, Michigan, the LLMC Board of Directors authorized a major adjustment
to the LLMC-Digital subscription
schedules. The goal of this change is to expand the opportunities for
participation in at least parts of the LLMC-Digital
program.
Of course, some libraries
eligible for the Life-line Rate will prefer to explore the possibility of
providing controlled remote access to
their patron base. The new Lifeline Rate program provides for that enhancement
possibility, either now or in the future, on the basis of per capita charges
added to the Lifeline Rate. (Endnote # 1)
Revised LLMC-Digital Fee Schedule
— U.S. law schools (includes
IP access to the whole parent institution)
—
Mega-law-firms (over 750
lawyers; includes IP access throughout firm)
Category
B = $4,310
— Non-U.S. law schools (includes
IP access to the whole parent institution)
— US circuit libraries & associated dist. libraries (includes remote IP
access to all personnel)
— Large US state appellate court systems (includes
remote IP access to all personnel)
— Very-large-law-firms (300 to 750 lawyers; includes
IP access throughout firm)
Category C = $2,850
—
Mid-sized U.S. state appellate
court systems
— Large-law-firms (150 to 300 lawyers;
Category D = $1,910
—
Small U.S. state appellate court systems
(includes
remote IP access to all personnel)
— Mid-sized-law-firms (75 to 150 lawyers; includes
IP access throughout firm)
Category E = $1,300
—
Smaller-law-firms (10 to 75 lawyers; includes
IP access throughout firm)
Category F = $860
— Small law-firms (under 10 lawyers; includes
IP access throughout firm)
Category G = $250
—
Individuals (incl. IP access in office and home)
Category H, The Lifeline Rate = $1,000
— In-library
use for institutional libraries not covered in the previous categories. (IP or
other controlled remote access to the library's constituent patrons is available
on a negotiated per capita basis. Contact LLMC for details.)
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Our Evolving Partnership with Michigan
As mentioned in the previous
newsletter, a major reason for holding an LLMC Board meeting in Ann Arbor at
this time was to review our partnership with the University of Michigan. To that
end Board members spent a full day meeting with the main actors and supporting
staff in Michigan's digital library publishing program.
Board Members were treated
to presentations from those Michigan staff members directly responsible for
results in the four prime areas of LLMC/ Michigan collaboration:
— OCRing: converting our
digital images to searchable text files
— Interface maintenance and development: providing a usable format for
presentation of the data
— Access authentication: restricting access to our customers
— Serving: “broadcasting” our data to the universe of eligible users.
The Board was happy to hear
that in all of the above areas the overall systems were functioning smoothly;
most operational difficulties having been worked out in the first years of the
project. It goes without saying that there is always room for improvement. That
applies to everything in this field. So LLMC will always be seeking system
enhancements, particularly in the interface department. But Board Members were
gratified to find that there were no major outstanding problems in any of the
above categories.
One big area of possible longer-term
concern is the question of image durability. This is a basic preservation
question inherent in all media; but especially clouded in the digital arena due
to everybody's inexperience. The possibility exists at some indeterminate level
of risk that image quality in large aggregations such as ours can degrade over
time or as a result of the mandatory periodic migrations. This is not the most
sexy of subjects, and the countermeasures needed to guard against degradation
are achingly difficult, both to implement and to describe. Suffice it for now to
report that the Board has long had this issue on its radar screen. Some time
earlier we asked our Michigan partners to run tests to determine the extent of
any discoverable problems. The good news is that the final test results, which
were presented and discussed during our Ann Arbor meetings, show that our images
appear to be quite robust. While a small percentage of our tiffs failed to
actualize in the first go around, this was determined to be system related.
Subsequent tests on the now operative Linux system produced essentially no “no
shows.” While that is encouraging, this is an area where constant vigilance is
imperative. LLMC already runs checksum tests on every single tiff before it
leaves Kaneohe. In combination with Michigan, we are now working on programs
that will permit economical and regular batch processing of these fixity tests
at regular intervals in the future.
Perhaps the biggest question on our
Directors' minds when they went to Ann Arbor was the University of Michigan's
massive joint project with Google, and how that might impact on our own
relationship with Michigan. Despite the constraints of non-disclosure agreements
covering most portions of the Google enterprise, our partners at Michigan
probably were as generous as they could be with background information. In any
event, they told us enough. There is little question that the Michigan/Google
project will be very very big. Everything in the University's library system,
including the Law Library collection, will be scanned. The only likely
limitation would come from the federal courts, which may prevent copyrighted
titles from being included in the scanning. Michigan's payoff for its massive
cooperation will be a free digital copy of everything Google scans. The
University Library's long-term goal is to use its copy of those tiffs to expand
its own digital library outreach.
Given the plans of both Google and
Michigan itself, there can be little doubt that at some point our interests and
theirs will diverge. In three or four years both Google and Michigan will be
“broadcasting” much of the same data now being provided by LLMC. The
difference will be that both Google and Michigan will be offering their data
free, with their funding coming from elsewhere, while LLMC follows a
subscription model that is inherently self-supporting. There are ways in which
that
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3 in the print version starts here)
might be made to work, but not with
Michigan and LLMC serving from the same platform and utilizing the same
interface. A separate source of foreseeable conflict between Michigan and LLMC
is the growing drain on psychic and physical energy. We have some difficult
sailing ahead of us and there will be plenty of hazards. Piloting
those shoals may be possible with some deft maneuvering, but it will take
sustained and focused attention, something LLMC won’t be able to expect from
Michigan in the longer run, as the sheer enormity of the Google program makes
its demands on the limited UofM infrastructure. We will all be competing for
finite attention and energy. These will inevitably and justifiably gravitate
toward Michigan's core interests. No shame in that, it’s natural. But the LLMC
Directors wouldn’t be doing their job if they didn’t look ahead and start to
envision viable alternatives.
Fortunately, our current relations with
our Michigan partners are amicable and mutually useful, and the Google
enterprise, at least to the extent that it begins to overlap with us, will take
some years to unfold So there is no need for haste. Therefore, the disengagement
is likely to be gradual, and we should have ample time to feel our way. The
important point for now is that our Board has made the basic decision that in
the longer term the maturing of Michigan's new ventures with Google likely will
create conflicts of interest, making a long-term Michigan/LLMC partner-ship
awkward. Over the next year the Board will begin to explore options for
reconceived partnership arrangements. As to the details, the Board does not feel
constrained to follow any particular model. It could well be that we don't even
go the partnership route, but rather merely outsource functions that don't
pertain to our core mission.
As the Board explores its options, it
will be guided by those bedrock principles which it believes to be of foremost
importance to our unique user community; namely that, as to the main body of
literature entrusted to our care, legal materials in the public domain, we will
— Retain ownership
— Attend to long-term preservation
— Ensure the option of low cost access
Other Board Actions
Along with the major items discussed
above, the Board also discussed and moved on several fronts of more than usual
interest to the membership:
—
Elections: Two seats on the Board of Directors
will be open at the time of our next membership meeting in St. Louis in July.
Following long-established practice, the current Board has recruited two
candidates willing and able to serve four-year terms. One Board nominee will be
Dr. Richard Amelung, currently Acting Univ. Librarian at the Univ. of Saint
Louis. By the time of our July meeting Richard will be back at his real job in
technical services at the St. Louis Univ. Law Library, in which position he also
guides the cataloging effort for LLMC-Digital.
The other Board nominee will be Prof. Chris Simoni, Dir. of the Northwestern
Univ. Law Library. Members should know that additional nominations are in order.
Anybody wishing to nominate an additional candidate should ensure that that
person is willing and able to serve a four-year term. Anyone wishing to
publicize a candidate's availability in this newsletter should contact Jerry
Dupont at 800-235-4446 no later than June 15, 2006.
Recruitment:
Since Exec. Dir. Dupont has now gone down to 80% time, and will be cutting back
even more in future years, the Board will soon embark on a national search for a
replacement. Dupont plans to work part-time for at least several more years, and
the Board decided that the best use of his remaining time would in guiding the
bibliographic development of LLMC-Digital.
With that front covered for the near future, the Board felt that it could look
farther afield in the range of qualifications it will be seeking in a new
executive director. Thus the pool of acceptable candidates is likely to extend
beyond people currently working in law libraries; with demonstrated
technological, production and management skills being at a premium. The Board's
Personnel Committee was charged with coming up with a search strategy along
these lines by the time of the Board's July meeting.
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—
New corporate web site and LIPA: The Board
reviewed and gave final approval to a redesign of LLMC's corporate web site,
www.llmc.com. As explained in previous newsletters, we had this redesign
underway for our own internal purposes; not least to replace our paper catalogs
by aggregating our bibliographic and sales data in one place. Later we realized
that our new format could be tweaked with relative ease to serve the print
preservation mission of the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA). So
we worked out the last details of the redesign in concert with them. We plan to
launch the redesigned web site on June 15. A special issue of this newsletter,
explaining the joint LIPA/LLMC print preservation program, will accompany the
launch.
—
Google request to crawl LLMC texts: We have
received a request from Google, via Michigan, to allow Google to crawl the LLMC-Digital
image database. Contrary to what we may have stated in the past, this is now
technically possible, although, even at the most basic level, it would still
cost LLMC some modest development money. However, the LLMC Board's concerns went
beyond expense. Given that, contrary to JSTOR, LLMC does not tag down to the
article level (and, with our literature, probably couldn't), the Board was not
satisfied that Google would have anything relevant to point to. They
didn't see how any of the Google result displays proposed (title page of book,
first page of case, snippets, etc.) get around the irrelevant and/or misleading
answer problem. Given this uncertainty the Board has asked Google to do some
more thinking, and perhaps experimentation, to clarify these questions before
LLMC commits to serious cooperation.
Bibliographic Notes from All Over
As a general rule, this newsletter
lacks the space or time to offer reviews of new legal publications. However, we
feel that some notice is due when a new book fortifies an existing LLMC mission.
This happens to be the case with the superb new title Prestatehood Legal Materials; A Fifty-State Research Guide, Including
New York City and the District of Columbia, by our colleagues Michael
Chiorazzi and Marguerite Most. The work is brilliant in conception and scholarly
in the execution. It fills a lack from which we suffered for years as we
developed the LLMC fiche collections. LLMC-Digital
subscribers should know that any of the pre-1923, or otherwise public domain,
titles mentioned in this work are ipso
facto candidates for inclusion on our web site. Gifts or loans of such
materials for scanning are ardently solicited.
On
another front, an alert reader took issue with our “wimpy” description (Issue
#18, p. 3, ftnt.1) of
a recently scanned text, Malleus
Maleficarum (The Witches' Hammer) as
“an incunabulum and an early Canon Law classic in criminal procedure.” He
writes that Dan Brown in Chap. 28 of his ubiquitous block-buster The
Da Vinci Code, describes this work as being “arguably...the most
blood-soaked publication in human history.” Pace Mr. Brown, the competition
for the latter distinction is intense, so we take no side. However, we note that
our original description, while perhaps a bit too anodyne, is accurate insofar
as it goes. More rare texts on this theme from George Washington Univ. L.L. will
follow.
Endnotes:
1.)
Example: An enhanced Lifeline Rate was just ne-gotiated by LLMC with the Library
of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, a pioneer in off-site
delivery of electronic services to its members. The Library currently serves a
base of 23,000 members. It has negotiated a rate of $0.10 per member, which,
added to the Lifeline base of $1,000, results in an annual subscription for
off-site delivery to all members of $3,300.00. This is about half of what the
Library would have paid under the old LLMC-Digital
fee schedule.
Libraries already subscribing to LLMC-Digital,
and which qualify for coverage under the new Lifeline Rate program, are invited
to reexamine their subscription status. LLMC will assign them either the new or
their old rate, whichever is less.
2.) Issues #12, pp. 2–3;
#14, p. 2; #15, p. 4, para. 1; & #17,
pp. 1–2.
3.) As evidence, JSTOR, which
is technically similar to us, as recently announced, is now doing it: “JSTOR
Crawl Site Update: As was announced in December, JSTOR has released a new crawl
site to enable search engines to index the scholarly literature in the archive.
This crawl site is available to public search engines who sign a license
agreement with JSTOR and contains the full-text or optical character recognition
(OCR) files for the majority of journals participating in JSTOR. Our first crawl
site partner is Google. Google participated in a pilot with JSTOR to develop the
crawl site during 2005. Now, more than 2 million of the full-length articles and
book reviews archived by JSTOR are searchable in both Google and Google Scholar.
We look forward to indexing and making searchable an increased amount of
material as the scope of the project and the number of crawl site partners
expand.”
4.) 1,500 pp. in 2 bks,
Binghamton, NY, Haworth Information Press, 2005, $149.95
End of Issue # 19