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Digital Projects

The Harvard Law School Library is becoming increasingly involved in the acquisition, development, and management of digital information. The Library's network now provides access to a growing database of free Web resources; to an expanding number of bibliographic databases, electronic data files, and full-text resources through the Harvard Libraries gateway; to commercial online services licensed directly by the Library; and to a large assortment of CD-ROM publications.

As a means of delivering timely and important information, legal scholarship online has become highly effective and is widely demanded. To date, digital resources of the Harvard Law School Library account for just over 5% of our total holdings. However, this percentage is expected to grow. Although digital materials at the Library take many forms, a distinction can be made between electronic resources that we subscribe to or license, and digital projects that we create in-house.

Digital projects can be primarily represented in four different areas:

Even though the distinctions separating these categories can many times be somewhat fuzzy (for instance, online exhibits usually involve converting some physical material), as a way of understanding the different types of digital projects undertaken here at HLSL they are a good place to start.

Digital Reformatting Projects

Conversion projects involve taking analog materials (such as books, photographs, artifacts, etc.) and creating digital instantiations of them. The complexity of these kinds of projects can range from a simple scanned photograph, to a book that has been completely re-keyed, to a combination of diverse materials which are converted using various methods of digitization resulting in a whole new type of scholarly resource.

As part of a year-long project to analyze and standardize the way the Library approaches digital projects, the Library has adopted the Guidelines for Digital Reformatting Projects. This methodology will be used when planning and implementing future projects, making them easier to accomplish and bringing some consistency to our digital publishing efforts.

Bracton Online

Bracton Online is an example of a re-keying project in which the text of a document (in this case, a book that is considered one of the canonical works in English legal history) is re-typed using word-processing software that results in a searchable text. The online version of Bracton is presented in the original Latin as well as an English translation, both of which are searchable.

The Common Law

Since its publication in 1881, The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. has become a landmark of legal philosophy and scholarship. The work is a compilation of essays and articles first presented as a series of lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston. As with Bracton Online, the version presented here is in electronic form. It differs from Bracton, however, in that instead of having the text re-keyed it was scanned using optical character recognition (OCR) software. While fairly precise, this process does require proofreading to ensure that the text has been accurately converted.

Legal Portraits Online

Completed in the spring of 2004, Legal Portraits Online contains cataloging records and images for the Library's collection of approximately 4000 legal portrait images. These portraits include etchings, engravings, drawings, and photographs of jurists and legal scholars dating from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century. As the most heavily used portion of the Library's visual collections, digitization and Web access not only greatly facilitates access to the collection, but also significantly reduces the need to handle the originals, thereby helping to preserve them for the future.

Nuremberg Trials Project

The Nuremberg Trials Project: A Digital Document Collection is an example of a digital project which has resulted in a new type of reference source. The Library holds over one million pages of documents relating to the war crimes tribunals held after World War II. The Project combines document imaging, document re-keying, and document analysis to create a rich base of information about the trials. A Web interface allows searching of the document analyses and the full texts of the trial transcripts, the latter of which also contain links to the analyses and digitized images of the various evidentiary documents used in the trials at the points at which they are introduced into the proceedings.

Scarlet Trials

The Harvard University Libraries has launched a new digital collection, Studies in Scarlet: Marriage and Sexuality in the U.S. & U.K., 1815-1914. Drawn from the Harvard Law School Library's extensive trial collections, Studies in Scarlet presents images of the texts of over 420 separately published trial narratives printed in the United States or the United Kingdom from 1815 to 1914. The cases involve not only trials for murder and rape but also those for domestic violence, bigamy, seduction, breach of promise to marry, and the custody of children.

Especially rich as sources for the study of the history of women, the trials concern the wealthy and renowned, such as Caroline, Queen Consort of George IV; Oscar Wilde; and Harry Thaw, who murdered the architect Stanford White in a fit of jealous rage. The larger part of the collection, however, consists of the stories of ordinary men and women thrust into the public eye when their marriages and love affairs went wrong, or their relationships did not conform to social standards.

Studies in Scarlet is a virtual collection created by a web-based catalog that provides a unified, collection of thematically related resources. Using Virtual Collections, public users can now be guided to a curated collection selected from the millions of resources available through Harvard's union catalogs. Catalog records, including any links to associated digital objects, are harvested, loaded into the new virtual collection, and periodically refreshed through re-harvesting to capture any new cataloging changes in the source data. The Virtual Collections service includes a web-based user interface to provide browsing and searching capabilities that are confined to the individually defined virtual collection. For more information, see: http://hul.harvard.edu/ois/systems/vc/

Court of Restitution Appeals Reports

During the Nazi period, thousands of victims of religious, racial and political persecution were compelled to sell their businesses, houses, and other property under duress. In many cases, property was simply confiscated by the German Reich. After the war, the Western Allies all agreed to restitute property taken by the various methods of Nazi spoliation. Unfortunately they were unable to agree on a unified law for the three Western Zones of Occupation and for Western Berlin. As a result no fewer than four different statutes dealing with this problem were enacted. The Harvard Law School Library has digitized the twelve volumes of opinions and other documents of two of these courts. An index into these digitized materials is available here.

The Henry Phillips Papers, 1728-1738

In July 1728 Henry Phillips killed Benjamin Woodbridge in a duel on Boston Common. The 17 documents that make up the Phillips Papers span the years 1728-1738 and were likely assembled by Phillips’ brother Gillam for his extended lawsuit in which he tried to become sole inheritor of Henry's estate. The papers fall into three groups: legal papers that relate to Henry Phillips' duel with Benjamin Woodbridge and Phillips' subsequent flight from Boston; an inventory of Henry Phillips' estate; and legal documents and letters from Gillam Phillips' unsuccessful litigation.

Online Exhibits

The Special Collections Department at the Library has produced several Web instantiations of exhibits held in the Caspersen Room. It is hoped that in the future, all or most of our Special Collections exhibits will be accompanied or followed up by a Web exhibit. These "Glass Case Exhibits" will include material presented in the physical exhibit as well as additional material and scholarship. Examples of exhibits already online are:

History in Deed: Medieval Society & the Law in England, 1100-1600

History in Deed. This exhibit of English land deeds from the twelfth to the seventeenth century conveys not only important historical legal information regarding the transference of land, but also gives one a glimpse into the social, civic, and religious life of the people of the time.

Charles Hamilton Houston

Charles Hamilton Houston. Charles Hamilton Houston, who, in 1923, was the first African-American to receive an SJD degree from the Harvard Law School. (Althogh not the first African-American to graduate from Harvard Law School, that honor goes to George Lewis Ruffin, who graduated in 1883.) This exhibit, produced with the help of the Legal Information Institute, presents a number of photos of Houston, as well as letters and links to film clips about him.

"Sundry Good and Needfull Ordinances" Food & Drink in the Law Library

"Sundry Good and Needfull Ordinances". The "Sundry Good and Needfull Ordinances" exhibit displays a sampling of books, manuscripts, and photographs that all deal in some way with food and drink, though not always strictly with the law. These examples, covering from the nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, provide some sense of the variety of the Library's holdings. The exhibit coincided with several other food-related exhibits at various Harvard libraries and museums.

Portrait Project Exhibition: Online Version

In March of 2004 the Special Collections Department presented The Legal Portrait Project Online, an exhibition in the Library's Caspersen Room which combined examples of portraits from the collection together with computer terminals to allow viewing of the digitized images. An online version of this exhibition is now available for viewing.

Electronic Publications  & Research Guides

The Library already produces several educational and informational publications, and increasingly we want to create online versions of publications for access via the Web. Examples of some of our current online research guides include:

Foreign & International Law Resources, An Annotated Guide to Web Sites Around the World

Foreign & International Law Resources This resource, continually updated by Library staff, presents a compilation of Web sites of interest to students and faculty conducting research in international legal issues.

Research Guides

The Research Guides page on the Library site offers a comprehensive list of Web links and resources helpful to students, faculty, and staff at the Law School. These include a variety of items ranging from basic information for first-year law students to links to foreign law resources.

Current Awareness

Through the Current Awareness program, the Library downloads bibliographic data on newly received books and tables of contents from journals and delivers that information to faculty members online. Collections of Web sites that might be of interest to the faculty are compiled by Library staff and delivered through Current Awareness as well.

Web Publishing & Archiving Projects

LEDA

LEDA. The Library, in coordination with a loosely knit consortium of law schools and the Cornell Legal Information Institute, is developing an electronic depository in which legal scholars may submit papers and other scholarship. This Web-based repository, which is called LEDA (Legal Electronic Document Archive), automatically converts submitted material to a non-proprietary mark-up language for archival purposes and then is converted to HTML for Web display. An index is generated from the metadata submitted by the author and then feeds into the computer-generated index for Web searching.

Plans for the Future

The process of acquiring, licensing, cataloging, processing, and providing access to digital information produced by others involves most Library staff and has left few jobs unaffected. In general, however, these activities parallel the Library's traditional tasks and the existing organizational structure and operating budget have been equal to the task.

But the Library finds itself irresistibly drawn more and more into the creation and archival retention of digital information -- from converting portions of our existing collections, to archiving papers deposited in electronic formats, to creating new digital research tools. Plans for the future include digitizing our collection of portrait images of famous lawyers and legal thinkers (already underway as part of an Library Digital Initiative, LDI, grant challenge), digital conversion of our medieval Japanese manuscripts, and the continued digitization of our collection of historical trials and significant legal texts. Already we are linking through the HOLLIS catalog to images of a number of unique items held in our Special Collections department. Additionally, the Library would like to provide online access to indexes to important resources such as the Moniteur Universel newspaper, court reports from 1789-1870, and the English session laws from 1641 to 1700.

Here existing staffing patterns and financial resources are proving to be inadequate. Funding for these types of special projects must come from sources other than the Library's operating budget. However, financial and staffing considerations notwithstanding, the Library is looking forward to increasing its presence in the online community of legal research and, indeed, joining the ranks of other libraries that have taken up leadership positions in the province of digital libraries.