Newsletter for June 2006

The LLMC-Digital Newsletter
Issue No. 20: June 2006

The LLMC-Digital Newsletter
Issue 20
June 9, 2006

Contents:
1– Annual Charter Members' meeting -p.1
2– LLMC's remodeled home web site -p.1
3– Welcoming a new kind of assistance -p.3
4– Locating the “missing volume 1's” -p.4
5– Formal interlibrary loan policy -p.4

Annual Charter Members' Meeting

As most readers know, LLMC is owned and run by a fixed group of Charter Subscribers to LLMC-Digital. The Charter Corps is made up of the 256 intrepid and far-sighted libraries that launched the digital project three years ago. (Endnote # 1) In detail, the way our governance sys-tem now works is that the day-to-day affairs of the project are handled by a paid staff of about 19 FTE that is supervised by LLMC’s corporate Board of Directors. The Board seeks advice as needed from an 18-member Advisory Council. Finally, the entire member-ship meets once a year, typically in conjunction with the annual conference of AALL. At these annual meetings the Charter Members select colleagues to fill vacant seats on the two governing bodies (Board and Council), receive reports from the LLMC staff on the project’s progress, and provide their input on issues major and minor.

A mailing inviting Charter Members to send representatives to our next membership meeting at AALL in St. Louis already has gone out to the directors of the Charter Libraries. The meeting will be held from 5:30–6:30PM on Monday, 10 July 2006, in one of the convention center rooms (location TBA in the convention program). Although voting privileges are reserved to the Charter Libraries' representatives, delegates from other subscribing libraries also are welcome to participate in this meeting and provide their feedback.

This will be the 29th annual meeting of the LLMC participating libraries. We also will be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the founding of LLMC. To mark the latter milestone, LLMC will be doing a bit more than usual with its booth space on the exhibit floor of the convention. This time around we will seek to demonstrate just how we are implementing our digitization efforts. In partnership with the manufacturers, LLMC will be showing, both examples of the various scanners used to scan the books delivered to you on LLMC-Digital, and also the system used to write the digital data back to archival film for long-term preservation purposes. All of this machinery is state-of-the art. (Endnote # 2) We think that our subscribers and others in the profession will learn a lot from this demonstration. So do make time to check out the LLMC booths (No. 709) in the center of the exhibit hall.

LLMC's Remodeled Home Web Site

As reported previously, for some time now LLMC staff have been working on a new model for our free-access corporate web site: www.llmc.com. Our general aim was to consolidate in “one box” categories of information now being offered in several separate forums. A subsidiary goal was to introduce search capacity to make finding our titles and other bibliographic information easier. The design statement was to provide a seamless bibliographic complement to our online service, LLMC-Digital.

Old data being consolidated on the redesigned web site includes:

— The bibliographic information for all of our microfiche offerings. Most of this data is currently available only in our printed catalogs. Although some copies are still available for specialized uses, those printed catalogs will now be phased out and will not be replaced. (Endnote # 3)

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— The holdings and fiche-count information for our microfiche titles that is now provided separately in “logs” online
— Supporting bibliographic and holdings in-formation for the titles on LLMC-Digital.
— Other routine background information relating to LLMC operations

New data being provided: In addition to consolidating and upgrading our old data, we also aimed to use the remodeled site to provide enhanced detail and to create tracking mechanisms for such LLMC missions as:

— Providing fiche count and pricing information down to the single volume level
— Identifying gaps in titles being scanned and providing a forum for soliciting loans or gifts of fill-in materials
— Giving timely notification to users of LLMC-Digital on the availability of given volumes of in-process titles
— Providing one complete, up-to-date, and searchable alphabetical list for all titles currently on LLMC-Digital

Adding a preservation component: During the remodel effort, another goal was grafted onto the project. Some of our member libraries also are active with LIPA, the Legal Information Preservation Alliance, (Endnote # 4) one goal of which tracks closely to a long-time LLMC mission, the preservation of printed legal documents. Besides preserving born-digital data, LIPA also seeks to ensure that a minimum number of paper copies of significant legal texts now held by law libraries survive the current era of enthusiastic hardcopy weeding. An essential tool for the success of this effort is a system for recording what is being saved and by whom. Nowadays that means creating a publicly accessible database. As it happens, that is just what LLMC was in the process of developing for its own purposes. So we were asked if we could “piggyback” a LIPA component onto our new tracking system. Since that could be done with relative ease and at reasonable expense, LLMC agreed to expand its template to permit the recording of the required LIPA information.

Launching the New LLMC Web Site: We are happy to report that the remodeled LLMC corporate web site will “go live” this month. The switchover is set for June 15, 2006. From that date on users going to our old web site address, www.llmc.com, will discover that a new interface is in place. (Endnote # 5)

We hope that we've basically done our job and that using the newly remodeled web site will generally be intuitive. Most of the tabs and sub-tabs in the headline on the Home Page are self-explanatory. However, there are some new features which may be worth special flagging. The principal new or significantly revised features will be found under the 2nd and 3rd main tabs, on the home page: “Search Holdings” and “Online Service.”

Exploring the “Search Holdings” Options

The meat of the changes adopted in the new interface appear under the first three sub-tabs leading from this heading as listed below:
— “View all holdings” This sub-tab brings a user to lists covering each of LLMC's thousands of titles. All are grouped according to jurisdiction or subject category; i.e. in the same way that they are arranged in the title lists provided on the home page of LLMC-Digital. In fact, these lists are the very ones that users link to when using the “info” buttons provided on the LLMC-Digital home page.
— “Search for Titles” This sub-tab brings one to a feature providing for a keyword search for words appearing in any LLMC title. It will solve the long-standing problem users sometimes have had locating obscure LLMC titles.
— “Search Descriptions” This extra keyword search option enables one to look beyond the words in a title to words contained in the title descriptions provided by LLMC in the main title-display layouts.

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Exploring the “Online Service” Options

The first four sub-tabs under this heading are self-explanatory. The last two tabs lead to features which were offered in our old web site interface, but that are now presented in a possibly more useful format.
— Online Holdings Clicking on this tab leads to an alphabetical list of all titles currently online, something for which we have received a fair number of requests. Accompanying the listing for each title are its OCLC number(s), fiche & online holdings information, and its online URL.
— Recent Online Updates This is a reprise of a well-received feature of our present interface, a month-by-month log of new titles or volumes added to LLMC-Digital. Catalogers and others use this dated list to catch up on their work as of the last time they checked the site for updates.

Checking Out the Main Layout for a Title

This is the most innovation-laden feature of the new interface. It is best explained with an example. Please use any of the above search options to locate the principal listing for the title Alabama Supreme Court Reports. The layout there is the same used for all titles. You will find the full title description at the top, followed by a spreadsheet-style presentation that breaks the title down into its component volumes.

The blue-field portions of the spreadsheet track LLMC's holdings, while the fields in yellow are reserved for tracking the print co-pies being preserved by various LIPA libraries. In our example, The Alabama Reports, LLMC's fiche holdings are complete through 1923 (the copyright cutoff year), but its online holdings are still incomplete, especially in the early years. Over in the yellow boxes we see that Columbia Law Library (the first LIPA library to contribute holdings data for this title) indicates that it has all of this set, but would welcome better condition replacement volumes in some cases; e.g., Vols. 2-6.

Tabs at the top of the spreadsheet columns facilitate three separate functions. The first, “Donate Title”, activates the online mechanisms for donating titles, either to LLMC for scanning, or to one of the LIPA Preservation Libraries to complete their runs. The second tab, “Preserve Title”, activates the system for Preservation Libraries to submit their holdings information. The third tab, “Fiche Holdings”, provides access to a spreadsheet giving price information for the fiche version of that title down to the volume level.

Doing the Right Thing by Preservation

It should be noted that both the “Donate Title” and the “Preserve Title” options lead to an on-line interaction with a real person working at LLMC's headquarters in Kaneohe, HI. As part of its contribution to the LIPA Print Preservation Program, LLMC has agreed to staff this position indefinitely. Using the options available makes it possible for libraries that anticipate discarding materials to easily ensure that they are not discarding the last copy of a given volume. The Print Preservation Pro-gram provides a simple way for discarding libraries to check on the preservation status of each of their discard volumes. Among the on-line options offered are the opportunity, and simple online methods, for donating materials to the LLMC digitization program, or to donate fill-in volumes for titles being maintained by the “Preservation Libraries”.

We hope that the online instructions for participating in the Print Preservation Program are generally self-explanatory. In addition, those with implementation questions are invited to drop by the LLMC booth at AALL, where trained personnel will be able to walk potential donors through the process

Welcoming a New Kind of Assistance

When libraries give us large numbers of books for scanning, often it's on a now-or-nothing basis. This means that LLMC is faced with a regular need to store thousands more volumes than it can scan in the near future. This creates a need for “surge” storage space beyond the limited capacity of our Kaneohe headquarters building. We have now been offered assistance from one of our parent institutions, the Univ. of Hawaii Law Library (UH-Law), to cover this pressing need. UH-Law is blessed with an intensive storage facility capable of housing roughly 65,000 volumes. That capacity was commandeered for years by the Main University Library (UH-Main) to store its excess stock. Fortunately,

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UH-Main recently moved its materials into a new addition, thus freeing up this asset. UH-Law has offered us the use of this facility as surge space for the indefinite future. This extra storage space will enable us to take timely and maximum advantage of large gifts.

In addition to helping with our short-term storage needs, UH-Law is also helping with a somewhat less obvious problem. We frequently receive gifts of long periodical runs (court reports, etc.) where part of the run is either in copyright or in a copyright status so clouded that near-term scanning is not possible. So these books sit in limbo. (Endnote # 6) However, if not accepted at the time of the initial gift, the “limbo” books may well be discarded and lost forever. In these cases UH-Law has agreed to add the doubtful volumes to its regular collection indefinitely, with the proviso that, should copyright roadblocks clear, these volumes will be returned to the LLMC program for scanning and mounting on the web. On behalf of everybody who benefits from LLMC-Digital, we extend our thanks to UH-Law for helping to give our scanning program this valuable flexibility.

Locating “Missing” Volume 1's

Several users of LLMC-Digital have asked why ALL of our multi-volume sets lack a first volume. Of course, sometimes the first volume hasn't been scanned yet. But if folks can't find ANY first volumes, then the problem is perceptual, stemming from the way one of our title-display options works; i.e. when a user finds a title through its URL. In that display variant Vol. 1 is listed separately from the other volumes. For example: if you use the URL provided for Georgia Supreme Court Reports [http://name.umdl.umich.edu/82982], you get a display showing all currently available volumes for that set, including Vol. 1. And separate URLs are displayed for each volume. However, the URL for Vol. 1 is embedded in the full cataloging record provided at the top, where it can be overlooked. One might ask: why don't you just group the listing for Vol. 1 down with the listings of the other volumes? Surprisingly perhaps to the layman, that would take a major adjustment to the interface we rent from the University of Michigan, requiring substantial programming time and energy. We plan to make this change someday, but this refinement is way down on our priority list for program enhancements. In the meantime we hope that this notice will enable most people to get past the problem.

Formal Interlibrary Loan Policy

In the first years of our digital program, when asked for LLMC's policy on interlibrary loans of data derived from LLMC-Digital, we responded that libraries were free to do with the digitally derived data whatever they felt authorized to do if they owned paper copies of the books. While this rough and ready formula served the purpose for many, it's lack of subtlety proved unnerving to some, who asked for more specificity as protection in this litigious world. So, while we still stick with the intent of the former guideline, we have now adopted the more formal wording below. This wording will be added to the standard licensing forms for future subscribers. Present subscribers can be assured that, by this formal notice, the following phraseology has been incorporated into their license contracts:

— To the extent permitted by copyright law, subscribers to LLMC-Digital may make copies (including digital copies) of materials retrieved from the service and distribute such materials and copies as part of a formal interlibrary loan (ILL) program, where this program is administered directly by the subscriber, restricted to official ILL partner libraries, and operated in accordance with generally accepted practices for such programs. (Endnote # 7)

Endnotes:

1.) Those interested can view a list of the Charter Members by going to www.llmc.com and clicking on the tab “About LLMC”. The group includes all kinds of libraries, although it is weighted in the main toward the academic side, including 90% of all AALS-affiliated U.S. law school libraries and 75% of the Canadian.
2.) In fact, for all four of the systems being demonstrated, LLMC currently is the only owner in the Western Hemisphere.
3.) The exception is the copyrighted bibliography The Common Law Abroad, which is available from the Wm. S. Hein Co. That bibliography will re-main the sole source of information for titles tar-geted by the CLA project. Of course, once titles are scanned and go online, they will appear with the usual backup information on the new web site.
4.) For detailed information on LIPA and its mission see its web site at www.aallnet.org/committee/lipa
5.) You don't have to change your “favorites” set-ting. The remodeled LLMC will be accessed using our current web address: www.llmc.com. For technical reasons, those going up on the site on June 15th and for a short time thereafter will find a “redirect” box. Clicking on that will bring one to the revamped site. Once a few domain details have been negotiated, the “redirect” will disappear.
6.) An example is a gift title we just received from SUNY Buffalo Law Library: Recueil général de lois et des arrêts, 1791–1968, a 177-year long run of French court reports. LLMC will scan up to 1940, but the copyright status of the last 28 years is unclear and may remain muddled for years. With the assistance of UH-Law we will be able to save these “limbo” volumes indefinitely; hopefully providing time to finally clear up their status.
7.) We are indebted for this lawyerly wording to Iva M. Futrell and Roger V. Skalbeck, both of George Mason School of Law, who suggest it in a recent article in Legal Information Alert, Vol. 25, No. 2, Feb. 2006, p. 7.