Digital preservation of law reviews: Two ways

Abstract

Purpose This paper will aim to explain two strategies for digital preservation of law reviews, informing law librarians of the options which might best suit their needs. Design/methodology/approach On November 7, 2008, the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship was released to the public. One of its main tenets – that law schools and libraries “stop publishing journals in print format and rely instead on electronic publication coupled with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats” – was an open call to law libraries to start thinking about digital preservation strategies for their law reviews. The Legal Information Preservation Alliance responded to the need by developing the Law Review Preservation Program, an initiative, which archives law reviews hosted on the Bepress Digital Commons (DC) platform in Controlled LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) or CLOCKSS. Findings For those law libraries without subscriptions to DC, there is an open-source, freely available alternative solution for ingesting digital law reviews into any preservation platform. This application, called the Submission Information Metadata Packaging, or SIMP tool was developed at the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah, initially as a solution for ingesting content into the Ex Libris Rosetta Digital preservation platform, as part of a CONTENTdm digital asset management workflow. Though the development of the SIMP tool was inspired by Marriott’s need to ingest digital files from CONTENTdm to Rosetta, they built it to work with any Digital Asset Management System and Digital preservation platform. Originality/value Digital Preservation of law reviews is in its infancy. This is one of the first articles of its kind to provide specific solutions and technical advice for law libraries.