The Law Library of Congress (LLOC) started archiving 90 popular legal blogs (blawgs) in 2007, and now archives more than 100. It hopes to regularly archive 200 blawgs by the end of 2009. Originally these archives weren't available to the public. Now you can access the LLOC's blawg archives at http://www.loc.gov/law/find/web-archive/legal-blawgs.php.

...is the title of a posting yesterday (2/4/09) by Frank Pasquale at the Balkanization blog. It reviews the excellent piece by Harvard's Robert Darnton in the Feb. 12, 2009 New York Review of Books, "Google & the Future of Books" (accessible as e-journal for us Georgetown affiliates). Darnton's essay echoes much of what John Palfrey had to say about the settlement at the AALS in San Diego when he spoke at the Law Library section lunch. Pasquale addresses briefly some of the possible challenges to the settlement, but all three professors- Darnton, Palfrey, and Pasquale- are worried about the possiblity of changing times or the end of good will on the part of Google, and in principle, the privatization of a project that cries out to be for the public good, with equality of access to the information in perpetuity.

The June/July 2008 issue of the Virginia Lawyer includes four articles by law librarians, focusing on issues of interest to Virginia practitioners and legal researchers interested in Virginia materials.  

Virginia Law: It’s Online, But Should You Use It?
by Timothy L. Coggins

Feeling Short-Circuited? Assessing the Availability of Virginia Circuit Court Opinions
by Jeanne Ullian

Locating and Using Internet Archives for Virginia Practitioners
by Michele Gernhardt

Librarian Protects and Defends Legal Documents
by Dawn Chase

Around once each year, law librarian Gail Warren assembles, edits and submits articles by law librarians for publication in the Virginia Lawyer, the official news magazine for the Virginia State Bar.

Harvard's Et Seq blog posts links to old editions of the Bluebook. It is a sampling of editions between 1926 and 1991. What fun to see what it used to be like...I think we are gonna like online a whole lot better; I do already.

As a follow-up to the earlier post of February 12, 2008, the outcome of the Harvard A & S faculty vote on posting scholarly articles appears on the university's web page, to wit:

"In a move to disseminate faculty research and scholarship more broadly, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) voted Tuesday (Feb. 12) to give the University a worldwide license to make each faculty member's scholarly articles available and to exercise the copyright in the articles, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. "

And you might want to scoot virtually over to Harvard Law, where they are posting a digitization project called "Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders: Crime Broadsides Collected by the Harvard Law School Library." In those days, open access meant ...to executions, from the looks of it. Creepy.

There's an interesting article in the New Yorker entitled: Digitization and its discontents. by Anthony Grafton. In it the author argues that mass digitization projects may not bring on the research utopia that some predict.

Excerpt:

Google’s projects, together with rival initiatives by Microsoft and Amazon, have elicited millenarian prophecies about the possibilities of digitized knowledge and the end of the book as we know it. Last year, Kevin Kelly, the self-styled “senior maverick” of Wired, predicted, in a piece in the Times, that “all the books in the world” would “become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas.” The user of the electronic library would be able to bring together “all texts—past and present, multilingual—on a particular subject,” and, by doing so, gain “a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don’t know.” Others have evoked even more utopian prospects, such as a universal archive that will contain not only all books and articles but all documents anywhere—the basis for a total history of the human race.

In fact, the Internet will not bring us a universal library, much less an encyclopedic record of human experience. [...] The rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently. It will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.

Available exclusively on the New Yorker site, Adventures in Wonderland that provides a good article summary together with many links to some important digitization projects.
 [spotted by Peggy Fry & Marylin Raisch]

The U.S. Government Printing office has begun a pilot (beta) program to authenticate public and private laws from the 110th Congress (2007-2008). Here's a note about this from their site:

GPO’s Authentication initiative focuses on the primary objective of assuring users that the information made available by GPO is official and authentic and that trust relationships exist between all participants in electronic transactions. In furthering GPO’s mission to provide permanent public access to authentic U.S. Government publications, GPO is working to afford users further assurance that files are unchanged since GPO authenticated them.

Find full information on the Authenticated Public and Private Laws: Main Page. Additional general information is available on the Government Printing Office Authentication site.