|
TheBuzz Erika Engle |
Kaneohe nonprofit
company building a
virtual law libraryFor 27 years the Kaneohe-based nonprofit Law Library Microform Consortium has transferred volumes of law books onto microfiche. Some 91,000 volumes, in fact.
In partnership with the University of Hawaii, Wayne State University Law School and the University of Michigan, it is now putting the volumes online.
LLMC-Digital's goal of 100 million online pages will make it the biggest digital law library, according to Executive Director Jerry Dupont. It will continue to offer microfiche copies.
It is size that matters and space that's at stake. "Space is behind much of what we do," Dupont said.
Arriving in Hawaii from Michigan in 1973, he was on the founding faculty of the University of Hawaii Law School. Part of his job was to build a law library and he was determined not to reproduce the one in Michigan.
It had 400,000 volumes. A building large enough to house them in Hawaii would have cost $20 million back then, he said.
By 1976 he became interested in microfiche technology and soon LLMC was established by Dupont and Donald Gordon, a fellow founding faculty member, who had returned to Wayne State as a dean. Books were filmed for UH. Other law libraries were approached and soon sales of microform books were funding more filming. The consortium has now grown to 900 law libraries, which are saving cubic-foot-upon-cubic-foot of shelf space.
Putting books on microfiche reduces the space requirement to 3 percent of what was used before, Dupont said. Librarians at law firms accountable for use of every square inch in expensive downtown offices find the space and dollar savings attractive, he said.
So far just over two-thirds of American law schools have signed up for the new online library, as have 15 large mainland law firms.
"What we are looking for at the moment are charter members," Dupont said. "They'll get discounts in price that will be locked in for five years."
The beta-test site is open for free at www.llmc.com but after Sept. 1 the subscriber-only site will replace it.
For large organizations the annual subscription will cost $5,800. For law firms with 10 or fewer attorneys the fee would be $720 -- less than the firm's phone bill, Dupont said.
The fees are vastly lower than for the big dogs of online legal information, such as Lexis-Nexis or WestLaw.
"Remember, we're a charity. We've got to figure out ways to give this away," said Dupont.
The missions are also different. The big legal engines are used for "Google searches for the needle in the haystack," he said.
"Librarians like the fact that with the technology we're adapting, the first thing they get is the actual picture of the original book." Most users know exactly what it is they are looking for, although the data will be searchable, Dupont said.
Another difference between LLMC and other organizations is that the Kaneohe-based site is comprised mostly of documents in the public domain vs. those requiring licensing. Some are quite historical, however, dating to the ninth century.
Pretty sexy stuff, but Dupont says historical records are about 5 percent of the site's content.
See the Columnists section for some past articles.
Erika Engle is a reporter with the Star-Bulletin.
Call 529-4302, fax 529-4750 or write to Erika Engle,
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210,
Honolulu, HI 96813. She can also be reached
at: eengle@starbulletin.com
