The LLMC-Digital Newsletter
Issue No. 14: June 2005
(footnote
# 3) thousands of volumes at the
same time, it is crucial that the process not be managed so carelessly that
basic preservation goals are ignored and unique resources lost.
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Fortunately, competent librarians are on the case. As
discussed in the last Newsletter, (footnote
# 4) a group of our colleagues, united
in an organization called the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) has
been working on a game plan to ensure the preservation in archival settings of a
minimum number of copies of all primary U.S. material. As a vital part of that
effort, LLMC has been cooperating with LIPA on the development of a national
on-line database through which we can track this massive discard process.
The goal of the project is to ensure that no library inadvertently throws out
what could be the last copy of a given title.
LLMC has been cooperating with LIPA on the development of this critical
database. Recently the prototype was reviewed by the relevant LIPA committee and
approved for sub-mission to the main LIPA membership at their upcoming meeting
during AALL in San Antonio. If it meets their approval,
the database will be activated and made usable by law libraries nationally.
During its “shakedown cruise,” the last half of 2005, it will be targeted at
the U.S. state courts reports series mentioned above. After that its use will be
expanded to monitor the full range of titles encompassed in the LIPA
preservation effort.
Progress on our Iraq Collection
One key to understanding our current troubles in Iraq is to understand where the
region is coming from. The entity now called Iraq emerged from the debris of the
First World War, when Great Britain and France were divvying up the spoils after
defeating the Ottoman Empire. Great Britain got the slice of the Mid-East then
called Mesopotamia. It merged the provinces and nationalities found there
into an artificial country dubbed Irak, which the world has been trying to make
sense out of ever since.
(footnote
# 5)
As our modest contribution to wider understanding in this area, LLMC has been
scanning the combined Iraq collections of some of our major U.S. law libraries,
with the goal of creating the most comprehensive collection ever made available
of British colonial legal and constitutional materials from
the entire Middle East, including Palestine and Iraq. (footnote
# 6)
The Middle East collection has been shaping up quite briskly. At this point we
have completed the scanning of the relevant materials from the collections of
Los Angeles County Law Library, the library of the Association of the Bar
of the City of New York, and the University of Michigan Law Library. To
supplement their colonial-era offerings, the Columbia Univ. Law Library has lent
us its full run of the Iraq Official Gazette, which is already half scanned.
Harvard Law Library is surveying its holdings with the goal of filling gaps in
the Columbia run. The first fruits of this project will appear on LLMC-Digital
in the August uploading. Many more titles will follow as they clear the
predictable cataloging backlog being chipped away at by our partners at St.
Louis University Law Library.
Some may find it interesting that, while we in North America are learning more
about Iraq, Iraqis will be learning more about us also. A U.S. Government
project tied to the Iraq re-construction effort has purchased roughly 110,000
volumes of law books on LLMC microfiche to help rebuild the libraries at three
Iraqi law schools. In addition, these same law schools will have access to
LLMC-Digital and the Iraqi national materials now being made available there.
Many Iraq titles, which have long been lacking inthat country, will now be
digitally repatriated.
Northern Neighbors Get More Neighborly
Apparently LLMC will soon get its first “Special Interest Group.” The
Canadian academic library subscribers to LLMC-Digital have petitioned as a group
to the LLMC Board of Directors for recognition as a special caucus. The petition
will be addressed by the Board at its upcoming meeting in San
Antonio. While we’re not sure just what caucus status will entail, the
specific areas in which our Canadian colleagues express interest are:
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greater input into the selection of Canadian titles for mounting on
LLMC-Digital, and an arrangement under which the Canadians as a group can
acquire at cost copies of the Silver Halide, preservation microfiche created
from our digital images. Their goal is to arrange archival storage for these
national materials within Canada. No doubt the arrangements arrived at with our
Canadian colleagues will influence how LLMC works with other groups with
analogous interests.
Pushing the Envelope on Site Use
LLMC regularly receives questions from conscientious subscribers asking us to
clarify permissible uses for LLMC-Digital content. We can¹t cover every
imaginable possibility, but our responses to several recent questions from
subscribing libraries may help to clarify our general attitude:
-
Question: Does our license from LLMC allow our library to use LLMC-Digital
content in our course packs? Response: You should feel as free to use our
content as you would to use the content if your library owned the physical books
and was Xeroxing from those. If it would be a permissible use
with the books, it's permissible from LLMC-Digital.
-
Question: Can we provide remote access to College of Law adjunct faculty
(instructors of law or practicing attorneys who are teaching at least one
course)? If we can, when can access be made available (i.e., three months before
classes begin or the day classes begin; the last day of class or the
day exams are due to the registrar)? Response: Our goal is to make
LLMC-Digital as accessible as possible without actually giving away the store.
So, although we appreciate the conscientiousness of your inquiry, your
anticipated uses aren’t even close to being a problem. Why don’t we say that
access can begin on or after the day that the Adjunct Professor is identified
and gets his/her class assignment; so as to give him/her the longest possible
time for class preparation? As to termination; how about the
beginning of the month following the submission of final exam results to the
Registrar? Will that do it for you?
Super Donors, the List Expands
We receive many gifts of books for scanning purposes, and are grateful for each
one, even if it only involves a single book. (footnote
# 7) But it is only proper that we give
special recognition to those libraries making major contributions. Among the
latter that came on board since the last Newsletter are:
- Northwestern University Law Library has donated a set of the National Reporter
System prior to 1924, plus copies of all of its law reviews prior to 1924. Their
NRS volumes are in the mail and will start appearing on LLMC-Digital by about
Xmas.
- University of Pennsylvania Law Library will be donating an invaluable, and now
fairly rare, copy of the Federal Register. This latter title will be scanned and
mounted on LLMC-Digital during 2006.
Staff Development & Compensation
As LLMC expands its staff; it is striving also to upgrade both their competence
levels and compensation. In addition, it is trying to create opportunities for
advancement, while also planning for replacements for staff at career end.
Recent developments in these areas are:
- Next week LLMC’s two principal technicians will spend a week in Germany
training at the two factories which are the main source for most of our new
digital production equipment. Because none of this equipment is yet in use
anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere, we are acutely aware of our need
for in-house maintenance competence. It saved our skin more than once during the
fiche years.
(footnote
# 8)
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- During the fiche era our slim revenues rarely enabled us to do much more than
to try to pay our production staff modestly better than McDonald’s-standard
wages. We weren't exactly running a sweat shop, but it was hard to claim that we
were paying a living wage. Our improved revenues
now enable us to strive for a more equitable compensation schedule. Our
line technician pay scale now ranges from $11.00 to $16.00 an hour; i.e. from
$22,880 to $27,040 per year. Those with time in rank make even more. Our
technical supervisor salaries now range from the high $30Ks to the low $40Ks.,
and will rise further with time in grade. Finally, the supervisor’s
salaries are roughly a third of the Executive Director’s salary, and we will
strive to maintain at least that ratio in future years.
- As part of a methodical retirement plan, Jerry Dupont will be cutting down on
his time commitments at LLMC in a steady manner over the next years. As he does
so, it will become necessary to hire and train others to take over many of his
responsibilities. LLMC has now hired a very experienced librarian, Ms. Jolyn
Tamura, (footnote # 9)
to act as his Associate Director and a principal agent in this process. Ms.
Tamura’s main duty will be to take over portions of the work currently being
performed by the Executive
Director and mold them into jobs which can be performed by younger and less
experienced employees. She will also take a large part in recruiting and
training this new blood.
URLs, PURLs, and Their Kith & Kin
As an ongoing feature of its Content Status Table, (footnote
# 10) LLMC provides the URL for
each title mounted on LLMC-Digital. Many libraries are inserting these URLs in
their on-line catalogs to provide direct links to the materials. Some catalogers
have been asking us to investigate the possibility of switching to PURLs
(Persistent URLs); i.e. URLs which won't change should we switch to a new server
or make comparable changes in the future. (footnote
# 11) Our technical partners at the
University of Michigan have been working on this request for some time. They
have now concluded that, instead of adopting PURLs, it would be more prudent to
move to a ”handle system,” which they describe to us as being a “more
robust type of PURL.” They note that all concerned can rest assured that the
“name.umdl” URLs will continue to function. Michigan expects that the new
system will be ready for implementation by fall. When it is ready our cataloging
partners at St. Louis University will be notified to switch to handles in the
MARC records, and the new system will be explained in this newsletter. In the
meantime, the advice from our friends at St. Louis is that folks defer mounting
any new records until the change to handles has been implemented.
Googling
A group of subscribers, headed up by Franklin Pierce School
of Law Library (FPLL), and working with the New England Law Library Consortium (NELLCO),
is undertaking an experiment to check out the potential for applying a leased
Google GSA (search appliance) to a library’s full range of on-line services.
The Holy Grail, of course, is that elusive beast, one-stop-searching. FPLN &
NELLCO have asked LLMC, and other on-line publishers, to participate in the
trial. We will be meeting with them during the San Antonio AALL convention to
find out what actions and expenses would be required at the trial phase.
Our Michigan partners have cautioned us that, even assuming that becoming Google
compliant is possible, there may be significant programming costs associated
with the effort. The LLMC Board is watching this experiment closely and with an
open mind. Ultimately its decision will be swayed by
whether the bulk of our subscribers would be likely to benefit from any
significant expenditure required.
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Progress Reports & Housekeeping
- Software Migration at Michigan: Our partners at the University of Michigan are
just now completing a major systems enhancement, which has taken a year of
planning and several months in the implementation. Briefly, they have executed a
cumulative conversion and indexing from their existing SGML to XML/Unicode. To
give a sense of the scope of the job, the indexing alone took 37 hours of
mainframe time. Naturally not everything went perfectly, and there were a few
ripple-effect glitches in the performance of the Michigan on-line libraries,
including LLMC-Digital. We tried to keep our
listserv appraised of each of these as they occurred. Hopefully most of that is
now behind us. The good news is that, while we won’t see any big immediate
benefits, this conversion positions Michigan to take advantage of big technical
improvements still in the developmental pipeline.
- No June Upload! Late July Upload: One of the ripple effects of the big
conversion project is that Michigan was not able to upload new content at
the beginning of June as is their monthly wont. Also, the July upload, which
will be huge, is likely to be tardy, perhaps not occurring until the middle
of the month.
- Problems with the TVP Search: As was mentioned in the February issue of the
Newsletter (Issue 12, p.5), we are experiencing problems with the TVP search on
our LLMC-Digital home page. The problem occurs with titles like The U.S.
Statutes at Large, where each volume has many parts, but the whole
volume has continuous pagination. In these cases, unless the user knows and
enters the correct part number, the system defaults to Part One and, if the page
isn’t in that part, a “no hit” is reported. Michigan has put this item at
the top of its development list, but the problem has proved to be more complex
than expected. They now expect to have it worked out by sometime in the fall.
- Citation Searcher: For some time we have been asking Michigan to create for us
a search system geared to legal citations. This enhancement feature has been in
development for over a year.
(footnote
# 12) We are happy to report that that
long process is coming to fruition. Michigan now expects a
grand rollout by late fall or early winter.
- Open URLs and Federated Searching: We have been receiving requests from
subscribers that LLMC-Digital be made compliant with both Open URLs and
Federated Searching and have been asking Michigan to look into this. (footnote
# 13) In response they recently hired
an additional programmer,
whose duties will include these two items, which have been moved to the top of
their development schedule. Their present expectation is that we are looking at
a 2006 release date for both items.
- Color and Maps: LLMC has been working with Michigan on being able to handle
color and to mount large maps, with pan and zoom features. Both efforts
are now bearing fruit. You can expect to see color in use in the near future.
Because color has a downside, in that it requires large amounts of storage
capacity and slows down system performance, it will not be employed for its
cosmetic potential, but will be utilized only when it adds to comprehension of
the content.
- LLMC’s IRS-Forms Program: LLMC will not be migrating its annual IRS-Tax
Forms Package to LLMC-Digital. We are terminating this service because the IRS
itself has decided to provide a full historical-forms backfile with annual
updates on its own site: www.irs.gov/formspubs.
- LLMC’s MLA Documents Program: We have received permission to migrate
LLMC’s backfile of and current updates for the Documents Series of the
Maritime Law Association of the United States. The actual transfer to on-line
will occur later in the year after some technical details have been worked out.
- New LLMC e-mail address: LLMC has a new main generic e-mail address, which we
would prefer that you use instead of any older addresses you may have on
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record. It is llmc-digital@hawaii.rr.com.
The two principal addressees monitoring this new address are Debbie Bagwell, our
Business Manager, and Jerry Dupont, our Executive Director.
Eureka! Finally, a Business Plan!
One of the payoffs for hanging around long enough is that eventually the
conventional wisdom develops a bit of jargon that puts a name to what you’ve
been doing all along. That’s happened recently to LLMC. The techie buzzword de
jour is “Long Tail.” It’s an old concept, having a long pedigree in
statistics, where it refers to a feature of “power-law” distribution. It
gained its current vogue when used by Chris Anderson in an article (footnote#
14) in the technology magazine Wired to
describe a common phenomenon in e-commerce.
An example of the “Long Tail” is the English language, where a small number
of words account for the bulk of common usage, while a long tail of more obscure
words fills out the vocabulary. Imagine a graph. The graph line starts high in
the left hand corner, then drops precipitously to about an inch from the bottom,
and then continues along the bottom in a “tail” to thefar right side. Many
areas of commerce (book stores, music stores, plumbing supply outlets) have
product lines which match that graph - a few big sellers and then a lot of
obscure items, each of which generates only a low level of demand.
The coping mechanism for the traditional brick-and-mortar merchant with limited
space was to “stock the hits” and “ignore the dogs.” It was the only
practical response to finite capacity. But the e-world has turned that approach
on its head. On-line stores have unlimited shelf space and the ability to
cheaply publicize a huge variety of offerings. Now it is possible to aggregate
the low level of demand for thousands of obscure products to generate a
cumulatively massive business. Aggregating dispersed
audiences; breaking the tyranny of physical space. Those are the secrets of
eBay, Amazon, and Rhapsody.
That is also the way LLMC-Digital works now and the way LLMC-Fiche worked over
the years. The only difference is that in the fiche era we were limited to
limited circulation paper catalogs to inform potential buyers, while the web now
gives us the capacity to aggregate a much bigger audience.
If we are operating within a Long Tail dynamic, then we can profit by adapting
to our circumstances some of the lessons learned by the big boys. Anderson
helpfully distills some of the important rules for us:
- Rule 1: “Make everything available. Embrace niches. Almost anything is worth
offering on the off-chance that it will find a buyer. In a Long Tail economy,
it’s more expensive to evaluate than to release. Just do it! Thoughtlessly,
automatically, and at an industrial scale.”
- Rule 2: “Cut the price in half. Then lower it. Pull consumers down the tail
with lower prices.” (footnote # 15)
- Rule 3: “Help people find things. Remember that you need both ends of the
curve.”
A recent article in the Economist, (footnote
# 16) celebrating the 10th birthday of
eBay and building on the eBay experience, expanded on those rules:
- “Build scale fast.” Note that eBay was trounced in Japan because Yahoo got
there early and eBay got there late.
- “Don’t think you’re invincible. Expect change!” Google is top dog in
searching today, but Yahoo was in 1995, Inktomi in 1997, and AltaVista in 1999.
- “Don’t think you know your competition.” The web is a market with low
barriers to entry. To stay in the game every actor has to stay agile, keep an
open mind, and retain an ability to reinvent itself.
- “Don’t stay static. Keep aggregating a wider group of users.”
- “Keep listening to your customers.” In the past most expertise was
in-house. Today it’s the customers who are the best judges of what they want.
Just give them choice.
Footnotes:
1.) New readers can view a list of Charter Members by going to
www.llmc.com/LLMCCharterCommunity.asp The group includes all kinds of libraries, although it is
decidedly weighted toward
the academic side, including 88.5% of all U.S. law school libraries and 75% of
the Canadian.
2.) Using the modest multiple of $250.00 per sq. ft., this
would be the equivalent of over $25,700.000 in new construction. Recovered space
might make room for collection growth from new acquisitions or be reusable for
other institutional purposes.
3.) They will be discarding. The used law book market is at
this point practically extinct.
4.) See Issue
12, pp. 23. See also Issue
No. 11, pp. 45 for more on responsible de-accessioning.
5.) For a more detailed description of these events, see Issue
No. 8 Newsletter , pp. 24.
6.) The targeted titles are listed on LLMC’s corporate web
site www.llmc.com/TargetCollection.asp.
7.) For example, last week we received a call from a lady in
Florida whose late grandfather was a lawyer. Among his effects was a one volume
supplement to Cyclopedia of Law & Procedure published in 1918. She managed
to track us down on the Internet, and, due to her diligence, her grandfather’s
book, described as being in good condition, will soon be available to all of us
on LLMC-Digital.
8.) After their week of training in Germany, the two
technicians will come back via Washington, D.C., where they will train staff to
use this equipment in our first out-sourced scanning operation at George
Washington University Law Library. For background, see Newsletter Issue
No. 13, pp. 12.
9.) Ms. Tamura is an exceptionally experienced librarian,
having served as Assistant Director during the founding years of the University
of Hawaii Law Library from 1975 to 1985 and as Hawaii State Archivist from 1985
to 2003. We welcome the skills she will bring to our project and appreciate her
courage in coming out of early retirement to take on our challenge.
10.) See www.llmc.com, the
LLMC-Digital tab.
11.) See Issue
No. 12, p. 6
12.) See Issue
No. 4, pp. 34
13.) See Issue
No. 12, p. 6
14.) Anderson is the editor-in-chief of Wired. See www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html.
A
good summary of the article appears in the May 7 issue of The Economist at p.
72.
15.) He also advises: “Don't charge for separate titles. Go
for a flat, low rate.” Fortunately, we are ahead of the curve on that one.
16.) June 11, 2005, pp. 9 & 6567.
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