The LLMC-Digital Newsletter
      Issue No. 3: November 2003

The Board of LLMC is pleased to announce that it has recruited Hal Brown, whose recent law library activities were centered in Los Angeles, to serve as Assistant to LLMC’s Executive Director. This is a newly created position. Mr. Brown will be providing general aid in the management of LLMC affairs. However, at least initially his special concentration will be on everything related to LLMC’s local role in creating its on-line service LLMC-Digital. He will also serve as the prime point man monitoring coordination between headquarters production activities, the outsourced operations of LLMC’s digitizing sub-contractor in Illinois (MESI), and those services performed by LLMC’s digital partner, the University of Michigan’s Scholarly Publishing Office (UM-SPO). His concentration on LLMC-Digital matters should also facilitate more timely responses to inquiries on content and requests for assistance coming from users in the field.

The choice of Hal Brown as Assistant Director marked the conclusion of a national search which began in March. Some nineteen candidates applied for the job, of whom eleven proved interesting enough to warrant personal interviews. The process was more lengthy than usual given the dispersal around the country of LLMC decision makers; Board and Advisory Council members. Despite the long process, we were able to maintain the interest of most of the prime candidates, and the final choice came down to two superbly qualified law librarians; both of whom had the full confidence of the search committee. It also happened that both finalists spent important segments of their careers serving in responsible posts as law firm librarians. While not exclusive, this factor no doubt reflected an interest by some LLMC Board members in having the needs of this important user group represented in the development of LLMC-Digital.

Both finalists made site visits in early October to inspect LLMC’s headquarters operations in Hawaii, and to interview with local LLMC personnel. It was expected that the final steps in the recruitment process would take roughly until Thanksgiving, with the chosen person perhaps taking up their duties at the start of 2004. However, given some lucky circumstances, a degree of acceleration proved possible, and a final choice was made by the LLMC Directors via mail ballot in mid-October. Brown was able to wind up his job responsibilities with his former employer and to move to Hawaii by Oct. 29. He took up his new duties with LLMC on Nov. 3.

A native of Missouri, Brown was raised and attended elementary school on both sides of the Missouri/Kansas border. He earned his BA at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, and his MLS at Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas. His first law library job was as an Assistant Librarian at Washburn University Law Library, where he worked from January 1982, to September 1983. For the next four years he ran the library of a Kansas City law firm: Watson, Ess, Marshall & Eng.

As reported in the last Newsletter, the first development priority identified by various interested law librarians who checked out the LLMC-Digital beta site prior to launch was for an enhancement to the "clunky" title-access interface. Work on a completely new title-access system by the programmers at the University of Michigan’s Scholarly Publishing Office (UM-SPO) has been underway since mid-Summer. That project is now nearing completion.

LLMC’s Director and its new Assistant Director will be in Ann Arbor for general familiarization meetings during the second week in November. At that time they will be viewing the new "Citation Searcher" system and negotiating any last-minute policy and formatting changes. It is expected that the final clearances can be made during those meetings and that the new Citation Searcher system will be mounted on the site very quickly thereafter.

Several Charter Subscribers have already asked variants on the question: Are there any plans to provide digital usage statistics for our local patrons’ use of the LLMC-Digital collections? Happily this was something that was planned from the beginning and the mechanisms for for tracking user stats are already well developed by our University of Michigan partners. However, they caution that there is always a bit of a lag between the time when a collection first goes up and when the statistics for that collection be-come available. They expect that the statistics for LLMC-Digital will become regularly available before December.

The statistics reporting mechanisms will be available at http://stats.umdl.umich.edu, a site maintained by Digital Library Production Services (DLPS), an operational arm of our main partner UM-SPO.

[Ftnt #2 — Our apologies for all the subdivisions and resultant acronyms. Like most large university libraries, that at the U. of M. is a big and complex place. We will point out jurisdictional differences when that seems necessary to avoid confusion; as here, where the separate division DLPS is named as the author of the statistics site. For simplicity, however, this newsletter will generally subsume organizational distinctions in the University Library in a reference to "the University of Michigan." Finally, since we do mention them here, it may be useful to mention that the same DLPS personnel who are managing the computer systems which provide our statistics services also manage the OCR and confidence- ratings computer systems for all of the digitized images on LLMC-Digital before they are mounted on line.]

This site was developed to track usage statistics for all of the digital collections maintained by Michigan. Use statistics for LLMC-Digital will be provided for each of the roughly 76 "digital collections"

[Ftnt #3 — Understanding this concept of "digital collections" is important for understanding the organization and workings of the LLMC-Digital site. Due to the immense size to which we are aspiring with this service (100-million page images in just the first ten years), the sheer quantity of images will be so great that manipulating them all at the same time would cause a very significant degradation in ser-vice; particularly in speed. Thus the goal of optimal performance requires that the full quantum of images be divided up into manageable chunks, called "digital collections." This will be done using roughly the same "form classification" which guided the bibliographic division of LLMC’s fiche materials into a printed catalog of 15 sections. The only change will be that the titles in the two LLMC print catalog sections covering the greatest volume of materials (Sections One & Two, U.S. Federal & U.S. State) will be further subdivided. Thus, on the site at present there are titles for three federal digital collections: Legislative, Executive, and Judicial. Similarly, as materials from Section 2 of LLMC’s printed catalog, U.S. States, are mounted, these will be organized into 50 digital collections; one per state. Each of the remaining 13 to 15 sections of the print catalog contain the right amount of material to comprise one digital collection. Finally, titles from LLMC’s Common Law Abroad project will be be organized into ten digital collections, corresponding to the ten sections into which the Common Law Abroad bibliography is organized. Eventually this will result in a total of at least 76 digital collections comprising LLMC-Digital. Each of these will be separately searchable, as will any combination thereof.]

into which the LLMC-Digital library will eventually be organized.

Upon accessing the site, users of the stats service will find a pull-own menu listing all of the digital collections managed by DLPS. They should note that all LLMC-Digital collections for which materials have been mounted to date will be grouped together in this menu under the lead prefix "LLMC." After selecting the desired collection and specifying the time period of interest, users will be able to view reports on the number of hits, number of sessions, number of searches page-images retrieved, etc.. The number of searches will be further broken down by type: simple, Boolean, proximity, and bibliographic. Statistics will be available for the user’s home institution, for all LLMC-Digital subscribers combined, and as averages.

At least initially, the goal is to provide user statistics for each of the 76 or so digital collections into which LLMC materials will be divided. Our Michigan partners gave us the choice of having, either this level of specificity, or of having combined statistics for all of LLMC-Digital collections. It was our guess that the more detailed statistics would be a better option at present.

[Ftnt #4 — After all, it may someday be useful to somebody someday to know how many law firm members access LLMC’s Canon Law Collection. More seriously, we thought that law librarians might find it useful to to have available the statistics broken down by category as they make hardcopy acquisition or retention decisions, or decisions about back-up needs in either hardcopy or fiche format.]

We could change the format in the future to one of providing combined statistics if subscriber feedback seemed to warrant that.

Richard Amelung, our cataloging man at St. Louis Law Library, reports that a number of subscribers had difficulties, at first, in using the URL’s provided with the cataloging to connect to the LLMC-Digital website. Then, after the general problem had been solved, they continued to have difficulty connecting to some specific records on the site.

The first problem, using the URLs provided by St. Louis to connect to the site, stemmed from the fact that there are two different server systems operating at Michigan affecting LLMC-Digital. One array serves up the main content of the site, while yet another handles the URLs. While the first was fully operational, the other,

[Ftnt #5 — The URL server is managed by yet another department of the U.M. library system. See note 3 above for related comment. Because of this division of responsibility, for the time being, the URL’s relating to the records for any titles making their first appearance on LLMC-Digital will lag by a few days behind their initial on-line presence.] was having technical difficulties.

Those difficulties have now been resolved and access to the site is now functional for most of the URLs provided by the St. Louis cataloging.

The second problem, which users are still experiencing, involves a failure to connect to a certain few specific titles. The cause of that problem has now been identified with near certainty. Apparently the Michigan URL server is taking exception to certain LLMC control numbers which end with a "trailing" alphabetic character. Longtime LLMC-fiche users will be familiar with the fact that, on our fiche, we use a unique "control number" for every separate bibliographic entity (e.g. the unique fiche control number for The Federal Cases is 78-054). In some cases, where it seemed desirable to have a closely related title (e.g. an index set) filed close to the title to which it referred, we would add a letter to the LLMC control number (e.g. 78-054B). This worked fine with the fiche.

We recognize that the LLMC control numbers have long since been incorporated into the cataloging for most of our titles. Some libraries even file the fiche by these control numbers. Therefore, from the beginning our goal was to keep the control numbers for the fiche and for the corresponding on-line titles identical, if at all possible. So our first effort will be to see if Michigan’s computer

systems can be made to adjust to our past fiche practice. Only if that fails will we introduce any alternative involving different numbering for these problem titles.

The amount of material available on LLMC-Digital is still quite modest. That is only to be expected given that we have just completed the first six months of working out the complicated system in which three agencies (our digitizing sub-contractor in Illinois, our HQ crew in Hawaii, and our partners at the University of Michigan) are involved in creating the content for the site. But the pace is starting to accelerate as more and more of the people involved perfect their roles and learn how to smoothly integrate their separate activities.

The pattern which subscribers can expect to see followed for the indefinite future is that the computer staff at UM-SPO will mount new content processed though our digitization system in a given month at the beginning of the following month.

[Ftnt # 6 It should be explicitly noted that LLMC will not refrain from mounting a given title just because some of the volumes are not yet completely vetted. We believe that few libraries would hold a hardcopy set back from their patrons just because one or more volumes were missing. Most would put out for immediate use what was available and fill in the gaps later. Following that analogy, each month we will mount partially completed sets which are working their way through the system; relying on whatever notification system is then in effect (see above) to inform users what is available at that time. Of course, in general we will try to process titles through as whole units; so that the timeline between first introduction and final completion will be relatively short in most cases.]

Thus, all volumes which were completed in October were mounted on the site in the first week of November. A holdings list of all titles currently on LLMC-Digital is provided as an appendix on page six of this Newsletter.

The use of this Newsletter will serve for the moment as the vehicle for notification of the actual content of LLMC-Digital. However, it soon will prove inadequate to handle the volume of bibliographic material anticipated. It also fails the crucial test of being immediately available, digitally, to patrons using the web site. We are aware of this inadequacy and have been thinking about alternatives.

There are several. For example, some members have asked if we couldn’t develop an on-line notification service such as that maintained by Washburn University Law Library for Hein-on-Line.

[Ftnt # 7 — See http://washburnlaw.edu/heinonline/]

We’ve studied that excellent service. Our notification service should at least provide, as they do, on-line holdings, OCLC numbers, and URLs. However, we think that an expanded version of the Washburn/Hein-on-Line model might better meet both our internal needs and those of our users. Our printed catalog has for long won appreciation in certain quarters because of the amount of useful, beyond-cataloging, bibliographic data it contains for many of the titles we offer. If it were done gradually, as the titles are mounted, it would be quite feasible to migrate this useful data to our on-line content notification vehicle. That instrument might even eventually replace our expensive, and quickly dated, print catalogs.

This is the direction in which we are tending and concerning which we are in active negotiations with our Michigan partner. Once the basic framework decisions have been made, we feel that it makes the greatest sense to begin to implement the project soon, while the quantum of titles is low and initial implementation would be relatively easy. You can expect, therefore, to read more on this subject in the very next Newsletter.

As of this date we have finalized the list of those U.S. subscribers who have signed on as Charter Members of LLMC-Digital. That list is provided below on page 5. Since the non-U.S. deadline for Charter Membership is Dec. 31, we may see a few more foreign entrants by then. Basically, however, this listing portrays the community of you and your library colleagues who will be building, and running, LLMC-Digital. So once again, a sincere welcome!

 The LLMC-Digital Charter Member Community

 LLMC-Digital — Titles on-line as of November, 2003