Digital Collections

Digital Collections Services

In early 2020, the Technology & Digital Initiatives Department was reimagined as Digital Collections Services. This change narrowed our focus in order to better support an integrated, sustainable, and responsive digital program, building on the foundation and services we developed in prior years.

When the pandemic hit, the sudden shift to remote work, staffing changes, and a hiring freeze would force an adjustment of priorities. Faced with uncertainty as we self-isolated and connected in an unfamiliar Zoom environment, we began shuffling priorities to plan for projects that could be completed remotely and optimistically plan for projects that would resume with the return to on-site. In such a hybrid environment, the two years that follow presented a number of opportunities alongside the challenges.

Digitizing Collections

Just prior to the pandemic, we completed digitization of several historical publications of Yale Law School. This includes early printings of the Bulletin (1869–2001), Directory (1960–1998), and Facebook (1998–2011) of Yale Law School; a series of student publications successively published as the Yale law mirror (1898–1900), The Yale Shingle (1893–1912), and TheYale Law Reporter (1946–1970); and the complete 16-volume, Yale Law Library Publications series which documents the history of the law school and its law library, in addition to annual publications of the Library Readers’ Manual and Guides between 1954 and 2007. We added four digitized volumes of Litchfield Law School student notebooks, which includes three volumes of manuscript notes taken by Henry Cowles Booth between 1817 and 1818 and one volume of notes taken by Russell Jarvis in 1813. We also completed digitization of seven manuscript volumes of Italian municipal statutes, which includes “Appointments of various officials by the two doges Leonardo Loredano and Andrea Gritti (1503–1530)” and the Constitutio pro Consiliariis Reipublicas Venetiarium (1569). Over the course of the year, we completed the second phase of a multi-year collaboration with Law School ITS, digitizing over 1,200 at-risk, in-house recorded media. Treasures found in this collection ranges from early audio recordings of the YLS Film Society, founded by Robert Bookman ’72 and active from 1969–1970, to recordings of Robert M. Cover’s

American Legal History course, in addition to decades of sponsored lecture series and other law school events. In 2021, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, which funded the initial project to digitize Litchfield student notebooks held by the Yale Law Library and the Litchfield Historical Society, gifted us with another grant to digitize Litchfield notebooks held at other institutions. Through a multi-institution collaboration coordinated by Caitlyn Lam and Whitney Bagnall, former Special Collections Librarian at Columbia Law School, the Cromwell grant enabled us to digitize student notebooks from the archives of Wesleyan University Olin Memorial Library, Columbia University Diamond Law Library, Boston College Law Library, George Washington University Jacob Burns Law Library, and Yale University Manuscripts and Archives. When our time on site was limited by the pandemic, outsourcing material to digitization vendors enabled us to digitize 37 volumes of student notebooks, among which includes the notes of Litchfield students, Edward Fenwick Tattnall, William Samuel Johnson, Abraham Bruyn Hasbrouck, James Booth, Ulysses Selden, and Roger Sherman Skinner. Upon resuming on site work, we installed and implemented a Digital Transitions imaging platform for cultural heritage material. Now equipped with some of the most advanced imaging tools for in-house digitization, we are able to expeditiously and effectively digitize collections material that meet FADGI (Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative) guidelines for digitizing cultural heritage materials. Using this new equipment, we completed digitization of a collection of early 20th century legal postcards donated by Lois Montbertrand ’85, fragile issues of the Advocate, a Yale Law student-run newspaper (1969–1970), donated by Hugh J. Moore, Jr. ’69, and posters and photographs of the Yale Law Film Society (1969–1970).

New Digital Collections System

At the start of the pandemic, the University Libraries recognized that digital access to collection materials is paramount in a remote academic environment. The University Library prioritized their plans to build and deploy a new Digital Collections platform to replace our legacy FindIt platform. The new Digital Collections system integrates next-generation image viewing technologies developed under the open standards of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF). Two embedded IIIF-compliant viewers, Universal Viewer and Mirador, provide different dynamic features and functionality for viewing, navigating, and comparison of high-resolution digital content, while incorporating rich metadata display. This new Digital Collections system is now home to the Law Library’s growing digitized collections. Enhanced access to image-based resources will enable us to better unlock content contained in legal books, manuscripts, archival documents, and other special collections material, for use in research and scholarship in new and innovative ways.

Flickr

The Yale Law Library Flickr site was created by former Rare Book Librarian, Mike Widener. Established in 2007, the Flickr library currently contains more than 8,000 digitized images from the Law Library Rare Book collection. In collaboration with our Cataloging department and with the help of library staff, we extracted collection metadata from Flickr and reconciled each image with catalog records for the original objects. This will enable us to better support the collection over time, while enhancing access and discovery of our special collections’ material in a more integrated environment. The data reconciliation work was coordinated by our Technical Services Assistant, Joanne McCarthy, with special help from the library’s book monitors, Peter Bloomfield, John Healy, and Philip Liscio. In a normal year, our book monitors greet library patrons and visitors on site. During quarantine, this project provided them with remote work, and in turn, their flexibility, adeptness, and willingness to help, provided us with the timely support we needed.

Web Archiving

In 2022, we launched our first web-archiving initiative. Through the Internet Archive’s Archive-It service, we launched the Law Library’s official web archive collection. This effort was initiated, in part, in response to an immediate need to archive the Legal Affairs website. Legal Affairs was the first general interest magazine about the law, launched by Lincoln Caplan in 2002, under the auspices of Yale Law School. Although Legal Affairs became a non-profit independent organization, upon its dissolution nearly two decades later, Mr. Caplan gifted the organization’s assets, including the website and magazine content, to the Yale Law School. The archived website can now be found in the Law Library’s Archive-It collection and digitized copies of the print magazine will soon be available through our Digital Collections library. In the future, we envision our web archives collection will provide access to curated, at-risk or vulnerable web content with legal themes and topics of special interest to the Yale Law School community and broader legal community. It will also serve as an archive of the Law School’s websites and affiliated sites. In addition, it archives the Law Library’s legacy website, as the website is slated for a major redesign in mid to late 2022. Aiding and Abetting in International Criminal Law Database

In collaboration with Lucie Olejnikova, Head of Foreign and International Law, we created the Aiding and Abetting in International Criminal Law Database. The data in this database was collected and analyzed by Professor Oona Hathaway, et al. in the course of writing the article Aiding and Abetting in International Criminal Law, 104 Cornell L. Rev. 1593 (2019), and it includes decisions by international courts and tribunals (International Criminal Court, International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, Special Tribunal for Lebanon, Special Court for Sierra Leone, Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, and the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals) addressing aiding and abetting liability in international criminal law. The database is available through the library’s Documents Collection Center. As we emerge from the pandemic and look back on the years that markedly changed our lives and the way we work, we have gained new perspective on the opportunities and challenges presented by a digital environment. We can no longer take our access to physical space for granted. The pandemic provided real-world examples of the ways in which our digital space is central to our mission, as much as a traditional, physical library. Behind the scenes, our digital collections environment is a vast network of integrated systems, digital objects metadata, different file types, interoperability standards, and dispersed locations, through which we can virtually connect people from all over the world to resources that were previously siloed. In many ways, our unit’s transition to remote work was a natural one, as we typically operate in this virtual space. However, remote or hybrid work means that we are increasingly reliant on remote tools to communicate, collaborate, and build human connection. We are still in the process of finding new balance between both worlds, while uncovering new opportunities along the way.