Digitisation and library preservation

Digital preservation is used to create digital versions of print-based materials such as books, journals and newspapers, with the aim of preserving their content indefinitely as well as making the digital form accessible to practitioners and students wherever they might be situated. Researchers can search online for titles and review the materials without the need for strain on fragile originals due to physical handling on access to their content. It is also a means of reducing the need for physical storage space at a time when downsizing of libraries has become a feature in many countries.

The LLMC Web Site: a means of preservation and a resource for research

The LLMC offers “a high quality source of digital or film replacement for their older, physically deteriorating books, while ensuring the preservation of the texts in multiple formats. In addition to the digital images captured in our scanning program and backed up on multiple servers, images are “written” to archival-quality Silver-Halide film as a second safe storage medium.”

The original paper blocks of scanned books are preserved in climate-controlled dark-archive space leased by LLMC in salt mines in Kansas.

Access to titles is through a LLMC-Digital online subscription, or titles are available for purchase in microfiche format, whichever is required. Current listings of the thousands of titles available in either format are available on the LLMC website.

Co-operative digitisation projects among the North American Law libraries: a tour of the landscape in 2010

The Law Library Microform Consortium (LMC) was founded in 1976, with 264 member libraries and with the aim of preserving primary legal materials in print and microform (microfiche). Beginning in 2002 it has been digitising legal and other materials and making many of its holdings available through its online service, LLMC Digital. Their mission was inspired by the fact that at the time the publishing industry only provided those items that made money for the publishers, but the microfiche they provided was little used as the publishers charged too much. It was then that LLMC began to provide microfiche versions of books and other documents, charging only a small amount per book, with the result that it took over the market. LLMC stayed with microfiche until digitisation came along. LLMC used the same philosophy as with microfiche, charging only a small amount and having a high turnover.

Figure 2:

LLMC Holdings of Annals of Congress, 1789–1824

It wants, in particular, to preserve those things that the commercial market does not see as profitable. It has digitised every court report ever published in the United States. If it is in the public domain, it is now digitised. The aim and purpose is to completely cover whole areas of the law.

LLMC is concerned with preservation and, since it is felt that digitisation alone cannot preserve the materials in the libraries, everything handled is converted to digital and a copy of the paper or book block is preserved in the salt mines in Kansas. If primary materials are sent to LLMC, the digital is written to archival film. One reason for this acute concern for preservation is that it cannot be assumed that the material will not need to be reformatted in the future.

Since 2003, 27 years of reformatting over 105,000 volumes into microfiche, another 50,000 and more volumes have been scanned and entered on LLMC's online service www.LLMC-Digital.org. Most materials are scanned in Hawaii at LLMC's headquarters, but rare and delicate books cannot always be shipped safely. So LLMC began to fund scanning partnerships, installing LLMC equipment in libraries which hold immovable, and precious, collections of law-related material.

Figure 3:

LLMC Search Results

In the US, as in other parts of the world, there is a huge drive to downsize the physical presence of libraries. LLMC recognises that space recovery is a consideration, which is why it tries to cover whole fields. LLMC is used frequently for downsizing physical collections.

Defence of the public domain is a key point for LLMC. There is a tendency for publishers to distribute the market amongst themselves, so that there is only one source for a given title which leads to monopoly pricing. If LLMC notices something that should be in the public domain, it will copy that title specifically in order to act as a governor of price. In Mr Dupont's own words, “If we notice the marketing is getting too pricey, we want to show it doesn't cost much to offer a vanilla brand of a given title.” Commercial publishers have learned to live with LLMC's approach, although in the early years their attitude was less compliant.

How LLMC works as an organisation

All the original members of LLMC have the right to vote and elect directors and the advisory board. LLMC is legally incorporated in the State of Hawaii and is run by librarians who guide where it goes as far as collection development is concerned. Great co-operation has been experienced from the academic giants such as Harvard. Special partner law libraries that allow LLMC scanners to operate on their premises are: George Washington University Law Library, where LLMC is scanning Civil Law; Saint Louis University Library, scanning Canon and Civil Law; Los Angeles Law Library, scanning materials from former British colonies.

“LLMC members receive a high quality source of digital or film replacement for their older, physically deteriorating books, while ensuring the preservation of the texts in multiple formats.”

LLMC is also partnered with the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), an international consortium of university, college and independent research libraries. CRL's aim has always been to acquire and maintain collections of primary materials that can be shared for original scholarly research.

If an item is in copyright, LLMC will not digitise it. The United States legislature passed an amendment, known as the “Mickey Mouse Amendment” to their copyright law for various reasons, one of which may have been in order that Warner Brothers could keep the copyright to Mickey Mouse. In any event, the law was applied across the board rather than admit it was to maintain the copyright on Mickey Mouse. As a result, LLMC cannot digitise commercially published titles beyond the year 1923 for another 13 years because of this amendment.

LLMC manages two additional cooperative projects. One, at Los Angeles Law Library targets the California Appellate Court Records and Briefs, amounting to about 75,000 volumes. The other, together with the Center for Research Libraries, targets legislative journals of the US federal and state legislatures, about 15,000 volumes.

LLMC incorporates within its Holdings Database the tracking of paper originals being archived by a group of law libraries, the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA). From the LIPA website - “LIPA is a non-profit … organisation of libraries working on projects to preserve print and electronic legal information. It provides the opportunity for libraries to work collaboratively on preservation projects at low cost and to take advantage of the partnerships created by the organisation.”

A case study: Middle Temple Library

Mr Dupont mentioned in his paper that a large number of volumes were donated by Middle Temple Library as a contribution to the project, Middle Temple being one of the Inns of Court in London with a library dating back at least 400 years. In 2006 Middle Temple Library was to begin a major reconstruction of the loft to provide an archive and rare book repository and conservation area.

The loft had been used for many years to house materials that were no longer of use to the library, mainly because it was law in subject areas which the Library no longer collected, such as old Commonwealth law reports, or material too out-of-date to be of use. At that time, I was cataloguer at Middle Temple Library and was involved at the start of the project by helping to remove the books from the shelves and list the materials, so I was particularly interested in hearing what had become of them.

The bulk of the books sent from Middle Temple, some 12,000 volumes, were early US and Canadian statutory material, materials on international arbitrations, some early North American legal periodicals and a variety of British Commonwealth early statutory material. The books have mostly now all been scanned and the digital texts added to LLMC's online digital library. The paper blocks from the scanned books (minus their covers which were removed prior to scanning) were shrink-wrapped and sent to LLMC's dark archive facility in 650 ft. deep salt mines near Hutchinson, Kansas, for permanent archival preservation.

With regard to ownership of books and materials scanned by LLMC, they are generally given to LLMC, so technically they are owned by them. However, LLMC has always considered that it holds donors' books in trust; in the unlikely event that they were ever requested back, they would return them. LLMC digitises 15-25,000 volumes a year and with 1.7m unique volumes held in the world's law libraries, it has a long way to go.

I should like to thank Renae Satterley, Senior Librarian at Middle Temple Library for giving me details of what was sent from Middle Temple to LLMC for digitisation and Jules Winterton, Associate Director and Librarian at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, who gave me more of the background as to the circumstances of how and why the books were sent to LLMC for digitisation. Mr Winterton had heard of Middle Temple's plans, and, as he happened to be on the Board of LLMC at the time, he naturally contacted them.