AALL exhibits opened this morning at 9 to the strains of a mariachi band, which is probably standard in the Southwest. The hall looks pretty full and there’s a good balance between the established legal information providers and smaller, newer companies. As of yesterday, according to AALL staff, there were 2020 attendees and 104 companies exhibiting.
I went to the session on treaties (Treaty-making–Really, Part II) at 10 a.m. Part I referred to a session given in Boston last year. Speakers Bob Dalton (State Department), Brian McKeon(US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations), and Bob Gee (Law Library of Congress) did a superb job of explaining treaties — how they’re different from agreements, where you can find them, what the role of the Senate is (advice and consent, only the president can ratify), and loads of other technicalities. They promised that the presentations would be available here .
Thomson Gale, according to the program, was hosting a Town Meeting on Digitization. Turns out it was invitation only, but Gale graciously allowed me to attend, even though I didn’t pre-register. Fred Shapiro said we were moving from the 1st wave of online, characterized by text, current information, and cases/statutes, to the 2nd wave, with images, historical documents, and books, treatises, briefs, etc. Mike Widener, from the University of Texas, talked about how digitization expands the role of librarians and lets us add finding aids to the collection. All this new data generates new reference questions and changes acquisitions. There’s a push to look at fringe materials. There’s “artifactural” value in the marginal, handwritten notes captured by the digitization of historical materials. He’d like to see something that indicates the physical size of the digitized document. Warren Billings, of the University of New Orleans, noted that we still don’t have search capability for scanned copies of handwritten documents. Wonderful though digitization is, he wondered if, in the future, it would mean scholars would never leave home to do their research, never visit “strange and wonderful” libraries.
Questions from the audience were about how to read handwriting from the 18th century (it’s a learned skill, apparently), how law review corrections (sent as tip-ins) are handled in the electronic product (didn’t really get a good answer to that one), quality of digitization (not too good when done directly from microform), and the importance of historical newspapers (no argument from anyone on this one).
I got so interested in all this food for thought that I never did get any lunch. Oh well.