open access
By - Tuesday, July 26, 2011 - 10:22am
(I’m a much better writer than public speaker, so here’s the text of my planned opening remarks delivered during AALL2011 Program H4: The Role of Law Libraries in Advancing Law.gov: Open Sourcing America’s Operating System.)
Hi. I’m Sarah. I’m am not supposed to be here today.
One of my favorite filmakers is a man named Kevin Smith. He was part of the big indie filmaking wave of the 1990s and his first film was a low budget movie called “Clerks.” It took place in a convenience store, not unlike 7/11s that Mr. Malamud suggested law libraries might turn into to last month at Harvard.
If you’ve not seen it, it’s a comedy. The main character – Dante – gets called into work on his day off and you know, hijinks ensue. Through it all, he has a catch phrase…”I’m not supposed to be here today.” I sympathize. I really am not supposed to be here today. I’m a last minute sub for this presentation and I could never fill Erika Wayne’s shoes, but I’ll try.
But that’s actually not why I bring up Clerks and the whole “I am not supposed to be here today” thing. I get the feeling that – when I talk to some other librarians about law.gov (and perhaps this is a feeling shared by some of you here today) that they think “I am not supposed to be here today.” This is not my job. Why are we even talking about this at AALL?
Some actual comments:
- It’s pointless to even worry about it until the state and federal governments step up
- I can barely get my day job done. I don’t have time or money to work on law.gov
- law.gov will never be able to compete with Lexis and Westlaw (so again, why bother)
- will firms even need librarians/research specialists any more if law.gov becomes a reality
- The next time Malaumd tells me to scan something, I’m scanning a picture of my butt and faxing it to public.resource.org
(Okay, that last one might have been me.)
(I was having a bad day.)
(I really do respect Carl Malamud and all the work he has done and continues to do.)
(Really)
It’s absolutely true that library staff and budgets are stretched to the breaking point. And law.gov will never be a complete substitute for commecial providers. But before getting bogged down in the can’ts and won’ts and why things won’t work, I think it’s necessary to step back a moment and realize what law.gov is.
I think when I first heard the concept law.gov I thought it meant that the government would put up all the codes, cases, regs up online with a nice pretty interface that people could easily search. I maybe be moving to Chicago, but deep down I’ll always be a hillbilly from Southern Ohio and I have a strong feeling that this is the Godddman United States of America in the 21st century for god’s sake…there’s no reason that citizens should not be able to access the law via the Internet.
However, the more and more I got into it, I realized that it wasn’t that simple. law.gov isn’t just law.gov and the work that Mr. Malamud does at public.resource.org. I actually like to refer to it as “Open Law” just so there’s no confusion. it’s authentication, and nccusl, and state surveys and preservation and digitizing collections.. It’s really about the government to release the raw data and information – which we already own, after all – so that others can make it into something useful.
So law.gov is actually a whole host of things and it actually gets a little overwhelming. One starts to think that yes, this is an impossible task
I mean, don’t get me wrong..it’s going to happen. To deny this fact is to be a heliocentrist in the time of Galileo. It may take a little longer without the assistance of libraries adding to the corpus by digtizing their older holdings or might not be as stable because no one was able to convince a certain state legislature about the proper procedures to take when mounting their laws online. but rest assured, it is going to happen.
And this is a good thing. I’m into it because of the rah rah this is ‘murica goddammit reasons, but other people will tell you that by releasing this data non-profits and smaller information distributors can innovate and come up with exciting new projects and new ways to do research. And there may in fact be an economic bonus to the legal industry and libraries if primary law is made more open. Here’s the thing. I don’t care why you get involved, but please get involved.
Okay, so I don’t get all bogged down in language, as I tell my students, here’s the take home message from my opening statement.
1) open law is coming
2) librarians need to be involved because we care about the stuff that everyone else thinks we’re crazy to care about.
3) and remember when I was saying how overwhelming the issues surrounding open law are? well that’s a good thing. Because that means that there are thousands of ways to be involved.. but there’s one thing to note: there’s no real leader. So if you’re waiting for AALL or SLA or the government or Harvard or someone like Carl to say “here’s the plan, gang. you do this and you do this and it will get done.” That’s not going to happen. You have to just sort of jump in.
4) And yes, “just jumping in” is not an easy task.And it’ll be messy and probably not a perfect first (or second or third) attempt. So if you’ve thought about it and decided that either this issue isn’t important to you for either personal or professional reasons or you really don’t have the time or resources…okay. That’s fine. You know, I’d rather shoot myself in the face before spending any amount of time talking about RDA. We all have different things that light our fire. But nothing is gained and no one is helped by simply pointing out that something is not going to work. I think I saw a tweet saying something similar in an earlier session during this AALL…dont’ say “that’s stupid” but instead “here’s what would work.”
So, basically, I encourage (and beg) you to see where your talents can be applied in the open law movement and join in. And if you can’t, well…stop your bitching about it.
An addendum about Kevin Smith, the film maker I mentioned at the beginning of my remarks. He’s actually getting out of the movie business. He likes to make little 2-3 million dollar movies and once you roll in the marketing budgets that studios require the economics just became stupid.
He’s currently promoting what he declares to be his second to last film by travelling around the country in a bus and doing one off meet and greets and showing the movie in independent theaters. Not an easy task. And when he came to Chicago, I jumped at the chance to go see the movie and hear him speak.
He told a story about being at south by southwest in the mid to late 1990s and he was on a panel with Quentin Tarantino, and Robert Roderiquez and some other of the big indy directors. Tarantino asked the audience “how many of you want to be film directors?” and of course almost everyone raised their hand . And then he asked, “how many of you want to be film distributors?” and no one raised their hand. And Quentin said that people need to get into the distribution business because if film and film distribution is taken over by impersonal corporations instead of by the people that love it and respect it as an art form, then the art will be driven out of the industry..it’ll purely be about profits. And that is sort of what happened to Kevin Smith and why he’s no longer going to direct fillm but look into alternate ways of distributing film and other ways of expressing his creativity.
Now, it’s not a perfect parallel between the film industry of the 1990s and the current legal information landscape, but it’s close enough. And as you’ll see, I think we might have to start to get comfortable with the idea of “good enough” and so I bring it up as a way of suggesting that we need to brace ourselves..we (as librarians) may have to get into the content creation and distribution business whether we like it or not and whether or not we feel like it’s our job. There will be no more “I’m not supposed to be here todays.”
Thank you.
Photo credit: http://kevin-smith.wikia.com/wiki/Dante_Hicks
By - Thursday, June 23, 2011 - 9:11am
I love being a librarian.
Some of it is because of the big picture/honorable professional stuff that I frequently blog about here. But honestly, I really love the day to day: staffing a ref desk, hunting down a hard to find piece of information, working with law students…Not only do I never wake up in the morning dreading going into work, but I often am really looking forward to it.
So it is with very mixed emotions that I announce that very soon I will no longer be a librarian.
At least not the kind that works in a library.
If I’m timing this right, John Mayer, the executive director of the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) has just announced that starting August 15, I will be the new Director of Content Development for CALI. This is definitely an unexpected and unplanned development in my career, but one that I couldn’t be more excited and thrilled about. It’s not every day that you’re offered a job that will give you the opportunity to change the world and, knowing some of the projects that CALI is working on and the possibilities of what it can do, well….I really think we can make a difference. Definitely in the way future lawyers are educated, but also in how regular citizens have access to justice and legal materials.
When John offered me the job, he was almost like a combination of Morpheus in The Matrix and The Godfather.
My new boss, John Mayer, at CALIcon Vegas
I realized that I could continue on my safe library career path, enjoying my job and wishing some things in the legal information landscape would be different OR I could take a bit of a leap of faith, alter my plans and spend my time actually making the products I think are needed instead of waiting for them to happen. As you’ve probably noticed, Gentle Reader, I really like quotes. One of my all time favorites is from Ghandi: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” I really think this position will allow me to do that. And, in the end, that was an offer I couldn’t refuse.
Although I am not going to be working in a library, I still will always consider myself to be a librarian. I’m just literally putting my money where my mouth is when it comes to all of my talk about how libraries and librarians should work and collaborate with technologists and other related fields. It’s definitely going to be a different environment and the new freedoms I’ll have to create and explore are a little breathtaking. The CALI crew are also just a lot of fun to be around. As I told John after I accepted the offer, I feel a little bit like I’m running away and joining the circus.
So, this is a big step. It’s exciting and scary and, yes, even makes me just a little sad. I’m sure there’s a German word that encapsulates all of these emotions. But you know, I have always believed that life is meant to be lived to fullest and that you should try new things and take big risks – otherwise you’re just taking up space and counting down the clock until you die. And that’s such a sad waste of a life. I dunno…maybe I was the only kid that was actually listening when they read that Robert Frost poem at graduation.
This isn’t just a big professional step, but a personal one too. I’ll be moving to Chicago, which is slightly different from Valparaiso, Indiana. You know, just a little. So I’m also very excited about the opportunities for adventure that living there is going to provide. I’m a bit of a country mouse, so I am a little nervous, but in my house hunting adventures I have already learned the secret to driving in Chicago: Don’t think about your insurance premiums and just gun it. Which I guess is sort of the theme here.
So. Lots of changes happening in the next month. My last day at Valparaiso is going to be July 29 and I would be remiss if I didn’t also include a big THANK YOU to all of my colleagues here who have been so much fun and valuable to work with. I am so sad about leaving them and this beautiful place.
But…now on to a new adventure.
CALI, hve, LibPunk, meta, open access, the future
By - Friday, June 25, 2010 - 8:27am
The following is the text of a 5 minute ignite speech that I gave as part of the CALI Conference Friday Plenary. The presentation slides appear here. The formatting will seem odd… those are my slide change breaks.
CALI Ignite Speech
Howdy. My name is Sarah Glassmeyer and I am a librarian. Don’t let the bun and glasses and sensible shoes fool you, I’m not that kind of librarian. Most librarians aren’t that kind of librarian. Even that librarian isn’t that kind of librarian. Behind the trappings of librarianship, lies wild eyed revolutionaries.
I thought that there would be no better place than here – in one of the birthplaces of the American Revolution – to talk about a revolution that’s been brewing in libraries. The scholarly communication revolution. And actually, just like the American revolution wasn’t just started in here in Philly
or in Virgina
Or Boston, this revolution isn’t happening just in libraries. All links in the scholarly communication chain – IT professionals, teaching faculty and librarians – have been fighting their individual battles. It is my hope,
That as the individual colonies were able to temporarily at least put aside their differences and unite for a common good, the scholarly communcation players will be able to work together in this cause. Just so there’s no doubt about who the British Empire is in this extended metaphor, I mean commercial information vendors.
Now, contrary to popular belief, I don’t hate information vendors. Many of our founding fathers and mothers didn’t hate the British Empire. I’m just saying that, like the British Empire in revolutionary times,
Vendors have gotten a little heavy handed. And we’ve outgrown them in many ways.
And more to the point, they are bleeding our coffers dry and taxing us to death! So yes, one might say that these are the times that try librarians’ souls. However, even prior to the recent economic troubles, libraries have been dealing with shrinking budgets and rising subscription costs. We’ve been making due, by limiting acquisitions and services. But finally we have been pushed too far. In the past two weeks
Libraries have finally had their battle of Lexington and Concord
Or maybe it was a Boston Tea Party. I wasn’t a history major so I’m not exactly sure which one
But anyway, here’s what’s happening in California right now. Nature publishing group, publishers of Nature family of scholarly publications among other things, raised the site license for the University of California system by 400%, or a little over a million dollars a year. At a time, mind you, when faculty and staff are being furloughed due to budget cuts. Like I said, this has been happening for years. And libraries have been making due. But not this time..
UC libraries said no. And then Nature Publishing pushed back, and insinuated that UC got a sweetheart deal among other things. But the libraries stood their ground and said “Hell no.” And not only did they say “Hell no”, but they reached out to the UC faculty while doing so. And this is where it gets good. Sit in your office and eat popcorn
As you watch the press releases and blog posts fly good. Because when I say that they reached out to faculty, they didn’t just send an apologetic “we’re going to have to cancel subscriptions or cut back library hours” email. Oh no. Using Nature’s publishings own data and information,
They pointed out to the faculty that their scholarly output, the material that makes up the bulk of the content of these journals, amounts to about $19 million dollars in revenue for Nature publishing. And that’s just uc faculty. No only that, but the faculty provides hundreds of hours of free labor by acting as editors, peer reviewers, and advisory board members. So faculty, and by extension the university, have been giving Nature publishing all of this millions of dollars of product and effort…which Nature then sells back to the university.
As one librarian recently pointed out, this isn’t much different than the movie and book “fight club” where characters made soap from liposuctioned fat which they then sold to the rich women that had the lipo in the first place. After pointing these facts out to the teaching faculty, the libraries asked the faculty to join them and break this cycle. The library suggested that they faculty boycott Nature publishing in all ways.
So. Here’s my challenge to the teaching faculty in the room: if you haven’’t already, join this revolution. Stop relying upon commercial vendors to disseminate your work. Put your scholarlship in open repositories. Only submit to OA journals. Encourage your institutions’ publications to become open and Durham Statement compliant. Quit all of your editor and advisory board gigs and hassle your colleagues to do the same.
Write a case book for CALI instead of a large publisher. Or at least only assign oa casebooks and articles to your students. Perhaps at some point we will find similar open publishers for treatises and practice materials. I know I know BELIEVE ME I KNOW about the promotion and tenure hustle and that you need real publications. So you need to also encourage your colleagues to accept these alternate publbication streams. This is not going to be an easy or fun process.
But it must be done. Because I’m telling y’all now, we cannot continue the way we are going. And if libraries have to keep fighting this battle all alone, we will lose. Our collections will become decimated as will our ability to provide anything but the most basic of services. Your research abilities will suffer and your students will be turning even worse papers than they are now.
But if we stand together, and the free law people are able to provide accurate and authentic primary law, and the law schools are able to provide stable sources of journals and maybe some other secondary materials, and the IT professionals build and support the systems that do this, that will us some leverage when we negotiate with vendors and open up library budgets to purchase lots of other things that we can’t provide for ourselves as well as allow librarians to concentrate our time and effort towards user education and services.
So again, my name is Sarah Glassmeyer and I am a librarian. This is the kind of librarian I am. If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, here is my contact information. Thank you.
By - Monday, April 26, 2010 - 5:26pm
I’m currently investigating the whys/hows/best practices of digitizing law journals and creating an institutional repository. (Have I mentioned lately how much I like my new job? Because I really like my new job.) IRs and Open Access are topics that I really like in theory, but have very little actual practice with. So, it’s very exciting to me in a very geeky sort of way that I’m getting to spend time looking into these subjects.
This is something I’ve been needing to do anyway, because here in LawLibraryLand, we have an extra reason to get familiar with the topics. Early last year, a group of law library directors got together and created The Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship. The call to action in the statement is as follows (with my emphasis added for the highlights):
We therefore urge every U.S. law school to commit to ending print publication of its journals and to making definitive versions of journals and other scholarship produced at the school immediately available upon publication in stable, open, digital formats, rather than in print.
We also urge every law school to commit to keeping a repository of the scholarship published at the school in a stable, open, digital format. Some law schools may choose to use a shared regional online repository or to offer their own repositories as places for other law schools to archive the scholarship published at their school.
Repositories should rely upon open standards for the archiving of works, as well as on redundant formats, such as PDF copies. We also urge law schools and law libraries to agree to and use a standard set of metadata to catalog each article to ensure easy online public indexing of legal scholarship.
As a measure of redundancy, we also urge faculty members to reserve their copyrights to ensure that they too can make their own scholarship available in stable, open, digital formats. All law journals should rely upon the AALS model publishing agreement as a default and should respect author requests to retain copyrights in their scholarship.
I’m not a signatory to statement. I’m not really against it, but I guess when it came out I got stuck on the idea that a “stable digital format” was an impossibility and then just discounted the rest of the statement. Then I didn’t really think too much more about it.
This, I admit, was maybe not the best reaction to it.
So, anyway, that happened.
Well, now it’s my job to figure out how to get compliant with the Durham Statement (or at least as close as humanly possible since I’m pretty sure that whole “stable digital format” thing still hasn’t been figured out yet.) I decided to see how other schools and institutions were putting up their journals. The Durham Statement FAQs directed me to Directory of Open Access Law Journals and the Science Commons Open Access Law Project.
However, I knew that there were more law journals online than that, and I wanted to get as many examples as possible to see what other people were doing. At this point, my inner scientist kicked in and I went into data collection mode. I should note that data collection mode is easily confused with “Oh my God, Glassmeyer, are you totally insane?” mode. Don’t feel bad if you get them mixed up.
I found a list of online law reviews from this “Free Full-text Online Law Review/Law Journal Search Engine” created by the ABA. (Remember the name of that page. It will soon become important.) I transferred that list to a spreadsheet and edited out the ones that were not affiliated with a law school, which amounted to a little over 350 journals. I then decided that I was going to collect just some very basic information about each online journal: Date coverage, Searchability, if it was Indexed, if they provided PDFs and, if possible, determine what software (e.g. BePress, DSpace, etc.) they were using.
I made it through 50 journals and decided to pause because (a) I was going insane staring at that spreadsheet and (b) at just 1/6 of the way in I’ve already noticed some disturbing trends that I wanted to blog about. (Hello new “works in progress” post tag!) As I said, when Durham came out , I was primarily concerned with the “stable digital format” part. However, I see now that public indexing and metadata parts are way more requiring of emphasis and encouragement.
I guess, because I’m a librarian, I just assumed that when a school mounted its law journal up on the web, it would at the very least have a basic search functionality built into their law journal online archives. If they wanted to get really wild and crazy, they’d have an index. This is not the case at all. Again, I’m just 1/6 of the way through my survey, but if trends hold, only about 15-20% of the journals are searchable. And indexed? HA! Maybe 5%?
Just for an example of what I’m talking about, here is the Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal which appears on the Science Commons Open Access site linked above. Unless I want to browse through all of the issues, I’m going to have to use a vendor-based index (which will cost money) or google scholar (which doesn’t always allow for the most sophisticated of searches) to get at the content this journal contains.
So, I guess my point is, I am concerned that these online journals are becoming PDF dumping grounds with little to no metadata or access points contained within them to assist with the “access” part of “open access.” I hope that law schools, in their attempts to becoming compliant with the Durham Statement, don’t forget to include the access points to their journals.
