LIPA Announces 2024 Project Grant Recipients: University of Utah and University of Nevada, Las Vegas

The Legal Information Preservation Alliance is excited to announce the recipients of this year’s project grants, awarded to two innovative and important preservation projects.

LIPA awarded a $1,275 grant to the University of Utah for their Digital Object Identifier (DOI) project, a collaboration with Hein Publishing and the Utah Law Review. This pilot project aims to streamline the process of creating DOIs for law reviews—an essential tool in ensuring stable access and accurate citation for digital publications. Although DOIs are widely used across most academic fields, law reviews have yet to adopt them fully, making their content vulnerable to unstable URLs and difficulties in long-term accessibility.

This project will create a workflow template that simplifies the DOI process for law reviews, tackling common barriers such as cost, lack of technical expertise, and long-term management concerns. Hein Publishing will handle the technical aspects, including metadata creation required by Crossref, and deposit metadata on behalf of law reviews, ensuring their content remains discoverable and stable.

The key objectives of this project include:

• Simplifying DOI adoption for law reviews by developing a model for others to follow.

• Ensuring long-term digital access to law review articles through the use of stable DOIs.

• Promoting the widespread adoption of DOIs in legal scholarship to enhance citation accuracy and the reputation of law schools.

By the end of this project, the Utah Law Review will be fully integrated with Crossref, and the project team plans to develop an outreach strategy to encourage other law reviews to adopt this DOI process.

LIPA also awarded $2,500 to the Wiener-Rogers Law Library at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas to support the processing and public availability of the archives of the Las Vegas Chapter of the National Bar Association (LVNBA). Founded in 1981, the LVNBA is the oldest organization representing African-American attorneys in Nevada. Its archives include important materials such as programs, certificates, meeting minutes, newsletters, and oral histories from 24 prominent Black jurists in Nevada. This grant will allow the library to hire a trained archivist to assess, organize, and make the archive accessible to scholars, students, and the public.

The project's goals include:

• Reviewing and organizing the archive's materials.

• Establishing guidelines for preserving both the physical and digital archives.

• Creating naming conventions and access methods to enhance discoverability.

• Proposing strategies to publicize the archives, particularly the oral histories.

• Recommending policies for the archive's ongoing maintenance and growth.

This project will open the archives for research and scholarship, preserving the contributions of Black jurists in Nevada’s legal history, particularly their role in the civil rights movement.

LIPA congratulates both the University of Utah and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas for their innovative preservation projects. These grants will not only help advance the preservation of vital legal information but also promote greater accessibility and discoverability of important legal resources.

Stay tuned for updates on these projects!

Do Law Libraries Even Need Books? The ABA’s Recent Changes to Standard 606

In February of this year, the American Bar Association’s House of Delegates finalized a number of changes to the ABA’s Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools as part of the 2023-2024 revision cycle. Among these changes was a surprising, and potentially worrying, change to the standard relating to library collections.

Formerly, Standard 606 (Collection) mandated “reliable access” to a core collection of enumerated categories of primary and secondary materials. The new Standard 604 requires “reliable and efficient access” to a collection that is “complete, current, and with sufficient continuing access”

for the law school to comply with the Standards. Interpretation 604-1 makes clear that physical books need not be part of a library’s collection in order to comply with the standard, and even more bluntly, the accompanying cover memorandum states: “Physical books are no longer required.”  A physical library space is still expected for the time being, thanks to a successful amendment advanced by Scott Pagel of George Washington University Law School, but physical materials are not.

Naturally, the change has already stirred a great deal of discussion and concern about the implications. At a minimum, the ABA clearly has not prioritized the maintenance of those collections and it’s likely the change will serve as an accelerant for existing trends in law school administrations’ ability to encroach on library spaces and budgets. As now written, Standard 604 won’t encourage law schools to preserve or expand their libraries’ physical collections, and provides cover for faster deaccession and tilting the balance even further away from ownership of print toward licensing of online materials. Losses of 80 or 90 percent of physical collections and the spaces that house them are no longer unthinkable.

While libraries need flexibility in order to connect their patrons to the information required for their research, work, and other endeavors, there are many compelling reasons for law libraries to keep robust physical collections and to secure ongoing access to legal information in print. LIPA can help with those efforts by providing forums for discussion and collaboration, and resources for preserving unique, fragile or endangered legal information. If the ABA’s recent changes have made preservation of physical collections a more urgent priority for you, please join the discussions at the upcoming two-part webinar co-presented by LIPA and AALL’s TS-SIS this summer and LIPA’s annual member meeting in July (registration link).

Explore the Digital POWRR Institute

As a solo archivist in my law library, my responsibilities include documenting the life of the law school. Preservation is included in that responsibility so that others may access that life in its many forms in the future. Much of that life is now being produced digitally. For a law library fortunate enough to find itself responsible for their law school archive, digital preservation is a necessity.  

This January I had the opportunity to attend the Digital POWRR (Preserving digital Objects With Restricted Resources) Institute at the University of Arizona. The Institute is designed for librarians and archivists to build skills for curating and preserving digital collections under the tutelage of Digital POWRR project staff. Topics of lecture and discussion included digital preservation policy, storage solutions, hardware obsolescence, and integrity. Limited resources can also equate to limited time. 

One of the best aspects of the Institute was the “Walk the Workflow” demonstration of a digital preservation tool called DataAccessioner. DataAccessioner is an open-source tool that creates a copy of the files that live on external media while capturing any associated data to a new file location such as a network drive. Having the opportunity to test drive a tool such as DataAccessioner under the guidance of instructors made my experience all the greater. Such experience is not easily obtained without a price. 

I’ve been presented with great information at many points in time. However, if I do not take the opportunity to use that new found knowledge right away I will easily lose it. Perhaps the best takeaway from the Institute is the “POWRR Plan.” The POWRR Plan is a personalized and actionable preservation plan that attendees work on in consultation with POWRR instructors to take home to their institutions. This allows attendees to use some of their new found knowledge and take action. The plans include both short and long term goals that span from one month to twelve. 

One of my short-term goals within my POWRR Plan was to properly document the digital objects under my stewardship and include what the digital objects are, where they are stored, and where they can be accessed. One of my long-term goals is to create a statement on preserving digital collections at my law library. Having such a statement will help ensure that digital preservation is not just a core philosophy within archives and special collections but the law library as a whole. 

For those interested in attending a future Digital POWRR Institute, please visit the POWRR website at the following link: https://digitalpowrr.niu.edu/