What Others Are Saying

Perhaps as a contribution to National Preser-vation Week, the “mainstream press” has recently been paying attention to several pre-servation projects in which LLMC is engaged with partners.

• The first article in time was distri-buted nationally by the Associated Press. It covers a joint scanning pro-ject in progress over the past three years between LLMC and the Iowa Legislative Services Agency (ILSA), with support from the Iowa State Law Library. Several newspapers ran edi-ted versions of the article, but the most complete version is probably the one that appeared in the Des Moines Register.[1] What the article describes is a swapping arrangement in which ILSA and LLMC have been sharing the costs of digitizing and preserving the bulk of the primary legal material for Iowa; with both parties using the images received from the other to fill out their online runs of Session Laws, Legislative Journals, Compiled Sta-tutes & Codes, and Attorney General Reports.[2] To date LLMC has contri-buted ca. 223,000 scanned images and ILSA ca. 236,000 to the common store.[3] Although LLMC still has a small amount of ILSA-provided A.G. Reports to scan, the greatest part of the anticipated product from this part-nership has already been produced. Going forward, ILSA will help LLMC keep current all of the “live” Iowa runs. And LLMC will aid Iowa in its preservation goals by storing the print versions of all of these materials in its salt-mine archives in perpetuity.
• The second article appeared, right on the heels of Preservation Week, in the May Issue of the ABA Journal. [4] The main theme of this article is the general problem of preservation and how preservation efforts are being ad-versely affected by widespread bud-get cuts. Its scope is wide-ranging, as the author interviews librarians and other people on the preservation frontline in places as removed as Maine, Iowa, Washington, D.C., Illi-nois and Hawaii. LLMC features in the article because it has partnered with most of the people interviewed. We’re happy that the ABA Journal chose to run with this topic, and we hope that the article helps to spread our core message that, if significant preservation is ever to occur, it will only be when we in the library world all learn to work together.