Legislative history is, essentially, whatever sources you can find that help reveal the intent of the legislative body in it’s conduct, usually passing legislation. But the principle also applies to actions of the executive branch, and, therefore, includes hearings, speeches, correspondence, reports (commissioned or otherwise), and whatever else a resourceful researcher can uncover or discover. Today, blogs, webpages and email will qualify as sources of legislative history. And there’s a lot of it. I think that this turns the whole idea of understanding teaching of legal research on it’s head: it’s not about the sources or knowing what they are, it’s understanding how information gets from one place to another. Where do legislative ideas come from? Where do they go? How do they get there?
The last story raises many questions. How will all these pictures and email, etc., be stored and uniformly upgraded to the latest operating systems and apps? Perhaps they envision an enormous “Time Machine” type device on every block that will capture everything from all citizens computers and then move it along from OS to OS and from app to app. Security, of course, wouldn’t be more of an issue that it is in our garbage dumps, right?! Good grief.
The National Science Foundation (those smarties!), has established something called, the “Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access.” You can see the announcement here: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0737721 . The McClatchy News service picked up the story (http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/25669.html), and the newspaper report was so weird, I didn’t believe it was reported correctly. But, it is true. The task force, funded to the tune of $277,000, is tasked with figuring out a way to preserve all our digital detritus, and recoding/migrating the stuff periodically so it won’t get obsolete. Think about it: Is this going to be like a utility where all the garbage on our computers will get stored and automatically moved along the stepping stones of technological progress? How in the world will this be accomplished while preserving privacy and common sense? Wouldn’t the money perhaps be better spent teaching people how to use their computers?
If we assume that law libraries, especially public and academic ones, are charged with collecting materials for the benefit of our patrons, and that this includes our future patrons, then we are headed for very difficult times. As publishers switch from print to electronic dissemination of information, we are placing ourselves squarely at their mercy, and the mercy of the market place - which has no mercy. We saw this recently when a “technical” difficulty suddenly blocked Lexis users from access to Tax Notes Today. This was an accident, but not an unusual incident.A few years back, many academic law libraries suddenly lost access to BNA’s US Patent Quarterly. Why? After the fact, we learned that BNA was blocking access to USPQ through Lexis to all customers who weren’t also buying the print from BNA. The point is, just because you have it through Lexis or Westlaw, doesn’t mean that you always will have it through Lexis or Westlaw. Behind the scenes contracts between publishers affect what is available to us, the customers. So, what happens when a service like Hein Online gets purchased by Westlaw? I assume that Lexis users are hosed until Lexis gets it’s own system to compete. Practitioners who are suddenly faced with needing access to materials that aren’t available on whatever service they ordinarily use, probably assume that the nearest academic law library will have what they’re looking for. Sadly, as law publishers increasingly put the squeeze on us with exorbitant double-digit price increases, academic law libraries are dropping print materials at the same rate as many practitioners. Eventually, academic law libraries won’t even have access to all the historical materials that lawyers and judges refer to.
It occurred to me recently that the term, “digital collection” may well be an oxymoron. When libraries ‘purchase’ a digital collection, it is usually a license, not a purchase at all. How can libraries collect licenses? When a publisher decides to drop a file or database from an online service, what is a library to do about it? We can insist on paying less for the service, but that’s about it. Libraries are the repositories of civilization, but if the record of our civilization is all digital and we libraries try to collect it, we are left with nothing - ultimately. What do we own? A file folder filled with contracts.
An example of this recently rocked the law library world when suddenly, without warning, it appeared that Lexis dropped Tax Notes from their service. This has happened with other services. Contract issues between information providers and Lexis or Westlaw have affected the services available to Lexis and Westlaw subscribers. For example, if you don’t subscribe to various BNA titles, either in print or electronically, you can’t get access to them through Lexis or Westlaw. So, in this modern age, a library charged with collecting, preserving and making available to researchers valuable information (including historical information) can no longer guarantee that what it has ‘collected’ is still in its collection.
So what are we collecting? Information or information about information?
OK. Who doesn’t want to be the Leonardo, Gutenberg or Edison of his day? But do you get there by declaring it to be so? Or do you wait around for posterity to declare that you’re special? It seems to me that humility is an important aspect of greatness. At least in the present. Edison may have been a keen self-promoter, but history proved him correct in whatever he may have thought about his accomplishments. Heck. Did he need to brag about the lightbulb? His invention was destined to place him the history books, because it worked.
The Amazon Kindle hasn’t even been released yet, and he’s already got Newsweek quoting him as saying that he’s going to improve the book, the way he “improved” the bookstore. Good grief.
First of all, is Amazon.com an improvement over Borders, Tattered Covers or Barnes and Noble? It may be an easy way to shop while you’re at work, but I’m not sure that it’s an improvement on wandering the stacks of Tattered Covers or Strand bookstores.
Second, how do you improve on a book? By making it digital? How does that improve a technology that’s been around before Gutenberg? Think about it. The old-fashioned book works every time, requires no power source and is simple to use. (I’ve never had a patron ask for help using a book! The most ignorant patron in the world can figure out how to lift a cover….) They can be dropped and work with light. Anything digital is going to rely on a myriad number of associated technologies for them to operate. And if they’re not all working in harmony. Who knows what kind of kind technological “adventures” are in store? What’s more, will a Kindle be guaranteed to work in 200 years? My copy Bushrod Washington’s biography of George Washington still works as well today as it did when published nearly 200 years ago.
Call me a cynic, but I just don’t yet buy Jeff Bezos as the new Gutenberg. I’m sure it will sell some books. But it’s not going to make me toss any of my prized books any time soon. It’s a gimmick, Jeff. Not a revolution.
Of course, I’d sure love to have one….
Gizmodo reports that Atiz Innovation Co., Ltd., a leading manufacturer of book digitization hardware and software, has announced the development of “BookSnap”, a personal book scanner that allows the user to digitize, “rip,” her own books. The Atiz website, http://www.atiz.com/, declares, on it’s home page, that “It’s not a scanner. It’s a book ripper.” It also declares that it allows the user to transform books into PDF’s at 500 pages per hour. Assuming that you can turn the pages that fast, that means that you can convert your copy of “No Country for Old Men” into a digital book in about a half-hour.
The website is silent on the platform on which their software runs, or what kinds o ebook readers that the resulting books can be displayed. Since BookSnap converts books into PDF’s, we know that books ripped in this way can be read on your computer or any device that will handle PDF’s.
TradingMarkets.com posted this interesting article which highlights Espresso, the on-demand book publishing machine that was announced recently. The ironies are frightening. Kinko’s can become a bookstore, bookstores can become publishers and libraries faux bookstores. Publishers can make more money by licensing all these activities and selling direct to consumers. Ironic, isn’t it? Amazon is the one major player that would be taken out of the market by this scenario….
This past weekend, I attended a meeting of the Mid America Association of Law Libraries, where Rivkah Sass was the keynote speaker. Wow! If you ever get a chance to hear her speak about change, don’t miss it.
But she got me thinking about an old idea I’ve had about the perfect blending of old and new technology. You see, many people tend to see the coming “revolution” as some sort of an all or nothing thing: you are digital and like everything to be on computer, or you’re a book person, who disdains computers and wants everything in print. That’s dumb in my opinion. Who declared war? There’s no battle going on, there’s simply life, lived in reality.
We need to regularly evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of various technologies and formats and adopt or collect those that work, and drop those that don’t. But sometimes, hybrids make most sense. Consider this: ALR, CJS or things like annotated codes are fine research tools, but their indexes suck. What if instead of an index, there was a volume that was really a solid state computer with it’s flash memory stuffed with indexing information? Such a device could be cheaply made and easily updated either wirelessly or with little flash upgrades. It could have a BW touch screen that allowed you to search the text of the treatise or encyclopedia in full text and provide lists of citations. You could even build a little thermal printer in the top that would print lists of cites of a roll of paper like a cash register receipt. End of indexes, without killing the book. Such a device would cost about fifty to one hundred bucks to manufacture and next to nothing to maintain. At today’s costs, such a device could added into the cost of maintaining the subscription and hardly be noticed.
Brewster Kahle, creator of the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine is one of the is apparently one of the masterminds behind the UNESCO digital library initiative reported below. Way to go, Brewster! The only question remains: will anyone be content reading books online?
I once read “Greystoke, the Legend of Tarzan” on a Palm Pilot (in full color, I should add), just to say I did it. Once was enough for me….
