The Georgetown Law Library will be holding a symposium on the topic of preserving the research value of blogs on July 25, 2009.
We believe that blogs have become part of the canon of legal scholarship and that future legal researchers will turn to blogs as sources for their scholarship. This conclusion, however, presents great challenges for future researchers of material currently populating the blogosphere. How will these future researchers of today’s blog scholarship find valuable, historic blogs? How will they be assured of perpetual access to this scholarship? How can any researcher be confident that documents posted to blogs are reliable?
This symposium will bring together academic bloggers, librarians, and experts in preservation to brainstorm and debate these topics and to develop best practices to ensure that the value of blog scholarship is not easily lost.
Our first panel will lay the groundwork for these discussions by presenting librarians’ and legal scholars’ views on the future research value of today’s blogs. Will future legal scholars turn to legal blogs as reputable and reliable sources of information? In this panel, experts on legal research will analyze the much-debated issue of whether future legal scholars will be interested in the analysis found in blogs or the documents posted to blogs. In addition, the panel will also address the rise of legal blogs and blogging as a phenomenon.
Our second panel will assemble a group of national experts and leaders from a variety of backgrounds to share their perspectives, experiences, and visions with respect to the problem of blog preservation. Specifically, this panel will discuss who is responsible for blog preservation; how will we begin the process of prioritizing and collecting legal blogs; and what are the current standards, as well as the technological, economic, and social considerations that must be addressed, in Web harvesting and digital preservation.
Our third panel will be devoted to examining the issue of the reliability of legal documents uploaded to blogs. From Newsweek’s posting of the “Torture Memos” to ScotusBlog’s postings of Supreme Court briefs, news agencies and bloggers regularly upload legal documents to support their stories. Although these web sites and blogs are often the only sources for these documents, few electronic documents have any verifiable proof of reliability. Future researchers wanting to rely on these documents must be aware of this issue and must be able to confirm that the posted document is complete and unaltered from the version authorized for publication by the author. This panel will discuss this issue and the current standards for proving the authenticity of a document in order to foster a system for preserving the value of blogs and documents found on blogs for future researchers.
The symposium will conclude with a working group break out session to create a uniform standard for preservation of blogs for bloggers and librarians.
Our late director, Bob Oakley, firmly believed that librarians have an obligation to ensure access to information and was committed to meeting the challenges posed by information in a digital form. In this spirit, we dedicate this symposium to him.
Details about the symposium can be found at www.ll.georgetown.edu/ftls/.