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!
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