I was privileged to join around 30 librarians and others in The Future of Today’s Legal Scholarship Symposium, held on Saturday, July 25, at the Georgetown Law Center. This symposium, designed to honor the memory of Bob Oakley, the late director of the Georgetown Law Library, aimed to bring together academic bloggers, librarians, and experts in preservation to brainstorm and debate the use and preservation of blogs for historic and legal research and to develop best practices to ensure that the value of blog scholarship is not easily lost.
The morning began with a talk by Bob Berring, Walter Perry Johnson Professor of Law, UC Berkeley, Boalt Hall. He discussed four vectors that impact legal scholarship. The first is cognitive authority - what makes something an “authoritative source?” In the past we accepted Shepard’s, West Key Numbers, law reviews, etc., as authority based on our belief that someone somewhere with knowledge had vetted and filtered the information so that it was reliable. In this age of Wikipedia and Google we can now get unfiltered information. So what makes something authoritative? Prof. Berring’s second vector dealt with legal scholarship - in the U.S. we first relied on legal treatises as authority, then moved to law reviews. Now we appear to be moving to shorter forms, one of which comes from legal blogs, his third vector. He certainly sees some blogs, such as SCOTUSblog (www.scotusblog.com/wp/), as authoritative, but at this point doesn’t see them replacing more formal legal scholarship, such as law reviews. Prof. Berring’s fourth vector is the future - the need to preserve information, something that was so important to Bob Oakley.
Following Prof. Berring’s presentation, we heard from a panel on the Future Research Value of Blogs; the panel consisted of Chris Borgen, Associate Professor of Law, St. John’s University and co-founder of Opinio Juris (http://opiniojuris.org), an international law blog devoted to discussion, debate, and reports concerning international law; Lee Peoples, Associate Professor of Law Library Science, Associate Director of the Law Library, and Director of International Programs at Oklahoma City University School of Law; and Margaret Schilt, Faculty Services Librarian, D’Angelo Law Library, University of Chicago. Borgen discussed some of the background of blogs and how writing and working with one has changed over the years. He gave five useful attributes of legal blogs: to be the first draft of a first draft of history; to spot issues; to publicize issues, articles, etc.; to build community; and to create a place for feedback and discussion of issues. Blogs are not a place for deep writing and reading. As an example, he discussed the impact the legal blogosphere had on the issues surrounding Guantanamo, Abu Ghrab, and torture - blog authors got to the issues quickly, didn’t have editorial boards worrying about controvery, had deep expertise in the issues involved, and were able to use the collective wisdom of several experts.
Peoples discussed how blogs are actually being cited in legal opinions and in scholarship. He noted that 40 judicial opinions had cited blogs as of July 2007 and that since then an addition 29 opinions had cited blogs. Some citations were to support legal reasoning or analysis, while others were cited as a factual source or for a document. He then discussed how blogs are supposed to be cited according to the Bluebook (Rule 18.2.4) and how most opinions do not follow this format. He then discussed some of the unanswered legal questions involved with citing to blogs: is blogging an ex parte communication? independent judicial research? can judges take judicial notice of blog content? What can attorneys do in the future if the blog is gone? Even if the opinion quotes directly from the blog, how can one determine the context without the blog post itself?
Schilt agreed that blogs can be important to legal scholarship and noted the increasing citation to blogs in law review articles. She asked who was going to maintain these references, as the law reviews don’t. Do librarians have an obligation to archive these records? Traditionally, we have said yes, but she wonders if it’s necessary, given that some of this will wind up in traditional scholarship. She used the example of preserving workshop and symposium discussions which aren’t traditionally preserved; only the papers presented area archived. We can’t rely on the authors to preserve the blogs either, even those that are most like personal papers.
The next panel, Blogs and Reliability, consisted of Tom Goldstein, a partner in Akin, Gump, and the man principally responsible for SCOTUSblog; Toby McIntosh, Director of Editorial Quality Review, BNA; and Mike Wash, Chief Information Officer, U.S. Government Printing Office. Goldstein began by stating that blogs are “utterly unreliable.” This is true of SCOTUSblog, even though he’s put in $100,000 of his money into and has a full-time reporter and staff and his and his firm’s reputation depends on its accuracy. If, under these circumstances, he isn’t concerned with reliability and future access, then no bloggers are. McIntosh discussed the differences between blogs and established publications such as those published by BNA. Wash discussed the development of the FDSys program to preserve and maintain government documents and explained how a system like this could be applied to blogs.
The third panel on Blog Preservation, consisted of Carolyn Hank, Triangle Research Libraries Network Doctoral Fellow at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Linda Frueh, Regional Director, Washington D.C, Internet Archive; Victoria Reich, Director of the LOCKSS Program (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), Stanford University; Laura Campbell, Associate Librarian for Strategic Initiatives, Library of Congress; and Donna Scheeder, Director, Law Library Services, Library Of Congress. Much of what these presenters spoke about was a bit over my head in terms of methods of archiving and maintaining web materials. Hank’s presentation, however, was a fascinating study of blogger perspectives on digital preservation.
Following this panel, the attendees broke into working groups led by Maureen Sullivan, Maureen Sullivan Associates, to discuss guidelines for working with blogs now and in the future for librarians, bloggers, preservationists and researchers. Questions we considered included:
While the attendees could not resolve all these questions, we did come up with some specific ideas. For example, we could begin conversations with the blogging software designers to discuss these issues and see if there are ways to easily set copyright permissions and archiving tools within the platforms. This would make it easier for bloggers to establish their preferences. The organizers of the symposium are working with these ideas and plan to propose a uniform standard for preservation of blogs, a document to be shared by bloggers and librarians alike.
The symposium was fascinating and informative. Webcasts and presentations of the symposium are available at www.ll.georgetown.edu/ftls/schedule.cfm and www.law.georgetown.edu/webcast/eventDetail.cfm?eventID=872. If you are at all interested in this area, I highly recommend that you take the time to watch the webcast. The symposium truly honored the memory of Bob Oakley and his belief that librarians had an obligation to ensure access to information.