The debate of vendor-neutral citation forms and ownership of case law led me
to thinking about not only who owns the law, but who preserves the law. With
the availability of legal materials in electronic format, we're tossing print
copies of reports, selling or giving them to other libraries. Or because of
budget or space crunches, we sell, give away, or toss (because it's much
easier) materials that are not used or are out of scope for our collections.
I'm concerned about what we're discarding. Is there a need for
originals/print versions of materials? Should we be keeping some materials
in print for legal history and other scholars? If so, who should be keeping
print copies? And how do we educate each other to know when we have
something that should be preserved and not tossed?
Retrospective conversion and weeding projects come to mind as instances when
issues of what to toss, keep or give to another library arise.
Ciao,
Lyo
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Lyonette Louis-Jacques Internet: llou@midway.uchicago.edu
Foreign and International Law D'Angelo Law Library
Librarian & Lecturer in Law "[We] stand on top of the mountain,
University of Chicago Law School free within ourselves" - L. Hughes
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