Notes & Comments: Unique Resources for the Law School Institutional Repository
Speaker(s)
Session Description
Institutional repositories provide law schools the opportunity to make unique resources available to their patrons and to the public. The University of North Carolina School of Law's Kathrine R. Everett Law Library is in the process of adding a digitized backfile of notes and comments from the school's flagship law journal, the North Carolina Law Review, that were otherwise quite difficult to access online. More than 1,700 individual notes or editorial comments were described and are in the process of being posted to the Carolina Law Scholarship Repository law journals collection. Many of the notes chart the development of substantive legal doctrine in this state and offer insights to practitioners as well as to academic researchers. Some notes, especially early ones, are authored by prominent professors and jurists. Other notes are authored by students who would become leaders in the state's legal community.
In this session, after learning whether your school has similiar unique and useful resources sitting just below the surface, you will get a sense of the specific workflows the repository manager at UNC developed (warts and all). You will also learn a bit about how the project was organized and how institutional stakeholders, including the editors of the law review, were consulted. Specific technology used included Acrobat Pro and Excel, as well as very simplistic Python scripts for cleaning data from Hein's CSV files. This session is ideal for any librarian who works with or manages an IR -- specifically a BePress Digital Commons instance -- or for librarians in a public-facing role who may wish to advocate for similar collections at their institutions. Be prepared to leave the presentation ready to take on a new project that has distinct starting and ending points and that can be accomplished without undue effort.
Presenter: Aaron Kirschenfeld, Digital Initiatives Law Librarian and Clinical Assistant Professor of Law, Kathrine R. Everett Law Library, University of North Carolina School of Law