Open Sources

I haven’t been posting to SLAW lately, due to end of term burn out, and travelling on university business. In my latest trip, I took with me the most recent issue of “The Walrus” for December/January. Now that Saturday Night has fizzled out, it has become my Canadian magazine of choice. So I’m not hesitant to plug it. In addition to some great articles on hydrogen fuel in Iceland, Japanese tea ceremonie in Halifax, etc., there was an article by Jeremy Keehn, “An open-source history of open source” – its a great one page graphic. Its worth checking out.

While I’m in this Penguillyesque rambling mood, the self-same meeting above was of the Legal Information and Preservation Alliance, which I believed I mentioned in the past:

http://www.aallnet.org/committee/lipa/

The discussion was mostly around digital preservation, in the course of this it became apparent that the biggest growing concern in academic law libraries is wholesale tossing of print book and journal collections in favour of databases such as the “Making of Modern Law” [http://www.galeuk.com/trials/moml/] in addition to the plan of Google and large research libraries (Harvard, Yale, Oxford, etc.) to digitize their entire collections.

This appears to be largely an institutional space issue; however, there are issues with the inadvertant tossing of unique and valuable print titles into the dumpster.