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Technology and Policy Issues with Acquiring Digital Collections

By Roger V. Skalbeck and Iva M. Futrell
December 28, 2006

Undeniably, one of the biggest content growth areas for electronic information resources is with the digitization of print materials. For well over a decade, lawyers have had full-text access to court cases, statutes, regulations and thousands of news sources the day they are published. What wasn't available until fairly recently was electronic access to deep historical collections of materials such as law reviews or legislative documents, let alone court filings or records. For materials of this nature that were available, they could rarely be obtained as scanned documents in collections that are easy to use.

Companies from Google to The Thomson Corporation, from Microsoft to LexisNexis, are all undertaking large digitization projects focusing on better access to paper-based resources. Undeniably, many law firms have a need for some of the digitized products on the market today, and there will soon be many more sources available.

In acquiring access to new digital collections, law firms and other information consumers need to think about issues of cost, technology requirements and ease of use. Beyond that, merely acquiring a new collection will not ensure that all people who need the information will know it exists when the need for that information arises. This article addresses several topics relating to digitized collections, framing the discussion by first discussing two legal-specific digitization projects available for private law firms.

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