Legal URL Citation Archive
Project Pilot
This pilot project is currently focused only on Columbia Law Journals.1 Its aim is to eventually become a centralized archive of all online sources cited in all domestic law review articles in the form they existed as of the date they were cited by the journal and/or author.
In this age of technology, digital publishing is a reality legal scholarship has to face. Digital publishing includes what is conventionally understood to be electronic publishing (a means of distribution of information directly in electronic format), as well as that which is conventionally understood to be digitization (a means of conversion of paper materials into electronic format).
However, in the present state of digital publishing legal scholarship, which requires reliability -- accurate and continuing access to the same body of work – is under perpetual threat because of two recurrent phenomena:
- the constant possibility of alteration of the content of online sources (as demonstrated by the ubiquitous "last modified" mention for almost every online citation), and
- the threat of their disappearance.2
Under these circumstances, and with the Bluebook's effective encouragement, the use of URL citations in law journal citation has created a new factor of unreliability in scholarly law publications. Thus, it has become essential that cited online sources should be stored and accessible in a permanent archive, similar to a "mirror site." The archived materials will reflect the state of the source as of the date of the citation, in a permanently accessible and unchanging fashion.
Dana Neacsu
Reference Librarian
Columbia Law School
1 Columbia Business Law Review; Columbia Journal of Asian Law;
Columbia Journal of Gender and Law;
Columbia Human Rights Law Review; Columbia Journal of East European Law;
Columbia Journal of Environmental Law; Columbia Journal of Law and Social Problems;
Columbia Journal of Transnational Law; Columbia Law Review;
Columbia-VLA Journal of Law and the Arts; Columbia Journal of European Law;
Columbia Science and Technology Law Review; and The National Black Law Journal.
2 See the data contained in E.D.
Neacsu "Legal Scholarship and Digitization: Has Anything Changed in
the Way We Do Legal Research?," paper presented at "Not a Box
but a Window: Conference on Law Libraries and Legal Education in a
Virtual World," Toronto, February 24, 2001, accessible at <http://www.law-lib.utoronto.ca/conferences/future/archives.htm>;
to be published in Legal Reference Services Quarterly.