Harvard Law Library sacrifices trove of legal volumes to digitize them

Thanks for stopping by! Do you happen to know what type of license the materials will be under when they open up access?

I am an English teacher, and about 80% of my students are professional lawyers, so I wonder how free I will be to use this material in my classes. I already use Harvard Law School's free case studies, they're great, and under CC license if I remember correctly.

Is anyone considering if there are metadata issues that may be lost somehow through this process and that should be included through some sort of coding process? I don't have an answer, but I am wondering essentially if there is a deliberate effort to circle the question "Are we missing anything?"

Too inefficient. Opening up the books and slicing off the pages cleanly would be more effective, and we already have age-old matching techology from bill counters and card sorters.

Vinge's book scanning reminded me a lot of DNA shotgun sequencing(1). I wonder if that's what he modeled his method on?

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_sequencing

Eh, its an overly sentimental way to look at things. Yeah on the surface it sounds like these books are being damaged, but in reality they're being given new life. Before you'd have to be physically present at Harvard to access these tomes, but after digitation they'll be available and searchable by anyone over the world. People might actually stumble upon the information via a related search instead of having to know of the existence of the specific document. This also increases their shelf life dramatically because they'll be spread digitally instead of being at the mercy of one fire or flood.

The URL says "Harvard Law Library sacrifices a trove for the sake of a free database", and the title of the print article is "Sacrificing a Legal Trove for the Digital Age", so perhaps the submitter did not editorialize the submission title. Maybe the online title has just changed since submission.

Presumably they found it more important to preserve the pages than to preserve the volume binding. The FAQ for the linear book scanner indicates that Prototype 1 mangles pages in some way (tears or folds) in about 45% of books it scans.

Moreover, it used to be common to create bound volumes by binding multiple issues of a serial together. (In some cases the bindery would crop pages to fit!) The binding is often so tight that the volume cannot open flat enough for a full scan. Separating the pages from the spine allows for the entire page to be imaged without distortion.

Edit: Incorporated correction. I had accidentally stated the claim more strongly than the FAQ supported; however, my point does not depend on the claim being as strong as the form in which I had stated it.

Probably because the books are far less important than the information.

That being said, they are probably throwing away an opportunity to sell the books as novelty or decorative items. But who knows, maybe the cost-benefit is just not worth it.

It sounds like that machine gets one page every 11 seconds -- maybe 360 per hour? We're getting more like 8,000 per hour.

The rule of thumb apparently is, best case, books you can't cut the binding off cost 5-8x as much to scan as books you can.

Those guys do really good work. It would be nice if this effort (the Harvard one) coordinated with the Free Law Project.

You would be surprised at how relevant some of the old case law is. Mainly because it goes straight to the heart of certain issues - i.e. What does it actually mean to 'own'something. These fundamentals don't change, but of course, this modern world does put stress on some of these principles, for example have I really stolen from you if you still have the item? (Digital copying)

Old cases are valid so long as the laws haven't changed, there hasn't been a new ruling that overrides that, and the situation is similar. Judges aren't completely bound by precedent either if the situation means it shouldn't apply they're able to rule differently and explain why in their judgements. The concept of precedent is really important in law because of all the vagaries and rules surrounding laws and how their applied, it also supports the even application of the law so that laws and their effects are more predictable.

It also makes cases easier for to argue by mapping out the corner cases of the law and legal concepts and keeps every lawyer from having to be an absolute expert in every facet of every case they're litigating. The same applies to judges.

Precedents do have a limited lifetime but it's not measured in years, if someone is being tried under the same law as existed 100 years ago old rulings can be just as relevant as one made last year.

> As an Engineer, old books are far less useful than new ones.

This isn't always true. Many of the fundamentals of civil engineering, mechanical engineering, mathematics, power engineering, chemistry, physics, even computer science, are not supplanted by more recent texts. In fact, when I was a computer science and math student, I lamented many of the modern texts (math and physics ones being the most egregious) for their overly fluffy delivery, compared to my father's and grandfather's and mother's math textbooks from (at the time) 20 and 60 years earlier. I would use theirs to study because they were much better at conveying the topics than the recent calculus or statistics or whatever book we were given.

Now, in industry, and in the software industry in particular, this is more applicable. So much is changing so fast, but the basic concepts (functions, types, network theory, latency versus throughput, even multi-process computing) are the same, but the technologies we use and how they present or make use of these fundamentals change rapidly so my 199x book on javascript is only barely applicable to what we have today.