Building a Collaborative Digital Collection: A Necessary Evolution in Libraries

Abstract

Law libraries are losing ground in the effort to preserve information in the digital age. In part, this is due declining budgets, user needs, and a caution born from the great responsibility libraries feel to ensure future access instead of selecting a form that may not survive. That caution, though, has caused others, such as Google, to fill the silence with their vision. Libraries must stand and contribute actively to the creation of digital collections if we expect a voice in future discussion. This article presents a vision of the start of a collaborative, digital academic law library, one that will harness our collective strengths while still allowing individual collections to prosper. It seeks to identify and answer the thorniest issues - including copyright - surrounding digitization projects. It does not presume to solve all of these issues. It is, however, intended to be a call for collective action, to stop discussing the law library of the future and to start building it.

Keywords: Law libraries, Digital libraries, Digital collections, Digitization, Copyright

JEL Classification: K00, L86, I20, O34, O30