>> Robert Brammer: Thank
you for joining us.
I'm Robert Brammer,
and we're coming to you
from the Law Library of
Congress in Washington D.C.
In this webinar,
titled Lunch and Learn:
Historical Legal Reports from
the Law Library of Congress,
Senior Legal Information
Specialist Stephen Mayeaux,
Archiving Technician
Jonathan Donovan,
and Junior Fellow Michael
Mellifera will discuss the Law
Library's efforts to
make our collection
of historical Law Library
reports accessible online
and full tech searchable.
You can submit questions at
any time through the Q&A box
at the bottom of your screen,
and our panelists will
answer them at the end.
And so with that I'm going to
turn it over to Stephen Mayeaux.
>> Stephen Mayeaux: Thanks
Robert and thank you all
for joining us this morning.
I am Stephen Mayeaux from the
Digital Resources Division
of the Law Library, and
I'm lucky to be joined
by two very talented colleagues,
also from the Digital
Resources Division.
We are delighted to be
here today and provide more
of an inside look into a project
that highlights the many unique
contributions of the Law Library
of Congress to the body
of research in foreign,
comparative, and
international law.
And I should start by just
asking what exactly is it
that we're talking about today?
I'll start out by saying
that for those of you
who may not know, a major
function of the Law Library is
to prepare written reports on
legal topics with an emphasis
on foreign, comparative, and
international law in response
to requests from Congress, the
executive, and judicial branches
of the federal government,
and others.
And in that regard, the
Law Library is similar
to our sister agency, the
Congressional Research Service,
except that these reports focus
specifically on foreign law.
The Law Library has authored
thousands of these reports
from at least the 1940s to
the present and continues
to write new reports on
contemporary topics every month.
The Digital Resources
Division, in collaboration
with the Global Legal Research
Directorate of the Law Library,
recently began a
multi-year effort to digitize
and publish many
of our previously unreleased
historical reports in order
to make them fully
accessible to researchers
and other members of the public.
And as a disclaimer, I
should note, as we often do,
that these reports are provided
for historical reference
purposes only.
They do not constitute
legal advice
and do not represent
the official opinion
of the U.S. Government.
The information provided
in these reports reflects
research undertaken
as of the date of writing
and has not been updated
unless specifically noted.
So, the many different
report covers
on this slide shows
how the appearance
of our reports has changed
over the years as well
as the extraordinarily
broad range in legal topics
that have been written about
over the years by our staff.
Our more modern publishing
format is shown
in those reports containing
the current Law Library logo
in black and orange.
So, if you were to go
to law.gov right now,
the most current reports
that you see from about 2018
to the present will look
like those, and the reason
for displaying these different
formats is to show that many
of the reports in our
collection may have been treated
differently depending on
the purpose of the report
and the preferences of the
Law Library at the time.
So, some of them, like the
ones you see in the center
of the screen and on the
previous slide, were formatted
for publication, they were
bound, they were catalogued,
and officially added to
the library's collection,
while others may have been
delivered only to the requester
at the time and may never
have been officially added
to the collection
until very recently.
So, an example of
that would be the one
on the bottom left corner about
wiretapping and eavesdropping
in near Eastern and
African countries.
And so this is where the legal
report archive project came in.
This is a project that began
conceptually several years ago,
but it really gained
momentum around 2018 and 2019.
So, we'll spend some
time today talking
about how we got this project
started, where we are now,
and where we're hoping to
go in the next few years.
So, I'll turn it over to
Jonathan Donovan to talk
about the inventory,
file processing,
and storage phases
of this project.
>> Jonathan Donovan:
Thank you, Stephen.
So, with this project we started
with two different
types of documents.
There are paper reports
to be scanned
and born digital reports
to archive as well.
All of the archived reports will
be kept in long-term storage,
but many of them are
also made public.
So, we end up with
four different pathways
for documents based on whether
they're paper or digital
and whether they are slated for
storage or for public access.
And when the project
began, our focus was
on digitizing the paper reports,
but when the pandemic
started its scanning had
to be put on hold.
So, we pivoted to focusing
on the born digital section
of the project, and that
change was very well suited
to allow us all to telework.
The paper section of this
project was mostly contained
within a small storage
closet full of reports dating
from the 1940s to
the early 2000s,
including many older reports
printed on thin carbon paper
that had not been found in
any other printed format.
An initial inventory found
over 4000 paper files,
which we first organized
by requester,
and after the initial round
of organization we determined
that many of these reports were
actually individual coupons
of larger, multinational
reports on a single topic.
So, while it was
possible to conclude
that these separate
reports belonged together,
they were combined
into a single document.
And in some cases,
these combined reports may never
have received an official title
or a final cover sheet, and in
those cases we provided titles
of these reports that
describe the contents.
However, in other cases,
we may only have been able
to locate one or more reports
that were presumably part
of a much larger
report at some point.
It's possible that those missing
reports have been lost to time
or that they were
never finalized,
and many of those
cases involve reports
from the 1960s and 1970s.
In other cases, some paper
reports were determined
to be duplicates.
So, in the end, after
combining reports
and removing the duplicates, we
estimate that the total number
of unique paper reports is
closer to 2000 than 4000,
and as you can see
from the slide,
960 of those have
been published online,
with 200 being digitized now,
and approximately
500 still to review.
So, in addition to
the paper reports,
we also have born digital
reports going back to 1987,
and when I started working
on this project two years ago
I began with the inventory
of these born digital files.
The set of folders
we inventoried
for this project
contained over 100,000 files
that had been created over
the course of 30 years,
and that included not
just completed reports
but also duplicate
copies, in progress drafts,
request e-mails, memos, and all
sorts of other Law Library files
that fell outside the
scope of our project.
So, the first goal was to go
through those files and identify
which ones represented unique,
completed Law Library reports.
Often this required looking
at changes in the text
and comparing the dates
of each file to identify
which was the completed
version that the library sent
in response to the
original research request.
For each of those reports,
we created a PDF
copy for the archive.
In some cases, that just
involved copying an existing
PDF, but many of the
other reports were
in other file formats,
including lots of Word
and Word Perfect documents.
So, Word was able to
open most of those files,
but many of them required
some amount of reformatting
for text to display properly.
So, we created new Word doc
versions of those older files
and made any formatting changes
in that intermediate copy
before saving a new PDF
for the archive.
Charlotte Stichter, who is
editor of the Law Library,
was also instrumental in
creating the archiving project
and then establishing
the guidelines
for the whole process, and
if you look at this report
on human cloning laws created
in 1999, you can see an example
of some of the reformatting
we did.
The original Word
Perfect file would open,
but it displayed
the text in a font
that was unusual
for the Law Library.
So, in creating the new PDF
for the archive project,
we converted the text to
a more standard font based
on those guidelines
from Charlotte.
In a few cases, especially
with the older files,
we had documents that
were just-- couldn't open.
So, we met with Amanda May
from the Preservation
Reformatting Division,
and with Kathleen O'Neill
in the Manuscript Division,
and Kathleen found a few
computers in manuscripts
that could open most
of those older files
with the correct formatting.
So, in that case, reaching
out to people outside
of the Law Library was really
very helpful to the project.
While we were creating
these archival copies,
we also recorded information
about the reports themselves.
Within the Law Library,
each research request is
assigned a tracking number,
which you can see in the upper
left corner of the documents,
and we record these
numbers for each report.
But it has also been
helpful for us
to assign each archival report
a unique document number
specifically for this project,
and that number also tells us
which of those four pathways
of the doctrine it belongs to,
whether it's paper or digital,
public, or long-term storage.
Many of the older reports
were untitled or only titled
with the name of a country.
So, in those cases, I wrote a
tentative title in brackets just
to help us keep track
of the subject.
And one of the interesting
things about looking
at several decades of reports
has been seeing the huge number
of research subjects the Law
Library has written about.
Some subjects are very common,
especially those related
to family law, and those might
generate multiple research
requests each year.
Other reports deal with
a developing legal trend.
So, we have a series of
reports that have been updated
of expanded periodically.
Some of the subjects that
generated several reports
over the past few decades
include human cloning,
computer security,
and deregulation
of TV and the internet.
There are other cases where a
research request is very unique,
and the library may have
only written one report
on that subject.
And you can see some of those
more unique subjects here
as well, including mining in
outer space, Absinthe laws,
and gambling on ships in Canada.
So, looking through these
reports didn't really like going
through old newspapers or
magazines because each one is
such a snapshot of
what was going
on at the time that
it was written.
Our goal has been to archive
every finished report,
whether it's published or not,
but before we publish
anything we want
to make sure we're protecting
the privacy of the requester
and anyone who might be
connected with the report.
So, within the Law
Library, supervisors
and the research directorate
review all the archive reports
to identify which are the best
candidates for publication.
For reports that we
do want to publish,
even though the original
requester will not be
identified, we do our best
to contact that requester
and get their permission to
publish whenever possible
because we want to share as
much research with the public
as we can while ensuring
that respect the privacy
of everyone involved, as
well as the preferences
of the original requesters.
And now I will turn it
back to Stephen to talk
about the publishing process.
>> Stephen Mayeaux:
Thanks Jonathan.
So, once a report has been
determined to be suitable
for publication, we
follow a unique process
for publishing reports
via the library's digital
collections framework.
In most cases, these reports
don't have a pre-existing
bibliographic record.
So, we start out by creating
what we call a stub record
in our catalog that really just
contains minimal information,
like title and date,
and that provides us
with just enough information
to attach to the digital item
and to make publishing possible.
And this is really where
it's important to highlight
that this larger publishing
process is greatly enhanced
through a joint effort
between the Law Library
and the U.S. Government
Publishing Office, or GPO.
So, once these reports are
published with minimal amount
of data, they're
actually shared with GPO,
who provide a full
bibliographic record
for these newly available
reports.
And then the full reports,
the full records are
distributed via OCLC,
and then they're reimported back
into our integrated
library system.
In addition to their
availability on loc.gov,
these reports are also
discoverable through the Catalog
of U.S. Government Publications.
Overall, the publishing effort
was not significantly destructed
by the pandemic in the last year
because we were lucky enough
to have already scanned many
of the paper reports prior
to the disruption of
our on-site operations.
And so much of the publishing
process that I described,
as well as the review and
the quality assurance work
on our end, was able to be
accomplished via telework,
and the same goes
for the collaboration
between the Law Library and GPO.
Thanks to widespread telework,
we were able to remain
in contact with GPO
throughout the pandemic
and to keep the work
flow running.
So, here's an example of how
the final published report looks
in the libraries digital
collections framework.
You can now access nearly
1600 of these reports,
most of which were
published since March 2020,
and you can get there by
visiting loc.gov/collections
or just through a web
search for Publications
of the Law Library of Congress.
You can see the full
URL on the screen,
and it will also be
placed in the chat.
And now that we've spent some
time talking about the process
of publishing the reports
themselves, I'm going to turn it
over to Michael to talk about
an exciting new crowd sourcing
campaign that seeks to make
these newly available reports
more accessible to researchers.
>> Michael Mellifera:
Thank you Stephen.
The two digitized paper
reports on the left,
Governmental Procurement
of Domestic Products
Under Japanese law and Divorce
Among the Akan of Ghana,
are the only known
copies of these reports.
As we encountered reports like
these, it was important for us
to ensure these historic
documents were not lost to time.
A powerful tool in preserving
these reports is software known
as Optical Character
Recognition,
which automates the
text data extraction
from scanned documents into
a machine-readable form.
The purpose of OCR is to
make digitized paper reports,
key word searchable, and
useable in machine processes,
such as machine translation
and text-to-speech
for screen readers.
You can see on these
scanned pages that many
of the historic reports
were printed
on onion skin carbon copy paper,
and sometimes even
include handwritten notes.
This presented challenges for
OCR software due to the bleed
through effect and
legibility issues.
Another challenge is that some
of the reports contain foreign
languages other than English,
as you can see in the
right most report,
which presented challenges
due to limits
of multi-language
support for characters not
in the Latin alphabet.
OCR doesn't always work
perfectly, and study suggest
that human transcription
is often more reliable.
So, to address the large
number of legal reports
that were not susceptible
to machine reading,
we proposed a crowd sourcing
project with By the People
to enlist the help of
the public to transcribe
and make these reports
more discoverable.
By the People is a volunteer
engagement program hosted
on crowd.lock.gov, where we
invite the public to transcribe,
review, and tag digitized pages
from the Library of
Congress' website.
Anyone with an internet
connection
and interest can contribute
to making these rich
materials accessible to all,
including people who
are not fully sighted.
The transcription process
involves uploading materials
on to crowd.lock.gov
where volunteers can
transcribe and then review them.
The completed transcriptions
are then returned back
to the Library of Congress'
main website with the materials.
In total, 655 legal reports
were included in this
By the People transcription
phase.
We released the By the People
crowd sourcing campaign as part
of Law Day in 2021 and
organized the campaign
into 24 projects based
on broad legal topics.
This campaign has been
a huge success so far,
with nearly all 6100
pages receiving an initial
transcription and 80% of the
collection now fully completed.
We would like to encourage you
to help us review
the remaining pages;
to help us cross the finish
line and make this trove
of historical legal research and
analysis available to new users.
Now, I'll turn it
back over to Stephen
to close us out for the webinar.
>> Stephen Mayeaux:
Thanks Michael.
So, now that you have a
sense of what we've done
over the last couple years,
I'd like to just take a minute
to preview what we have to look
forward to in the near future.
As of now, we have approximately
1500 more born digital reports
that we plan to release over
the new two fiscal years,
and we also have several hundred
more paper reports to digitize,
including some that may need
to be added to a future phase
of the ongoing crowd
sourcing campaign
that Michael just discussed.
Also, an important
thing to note is
that this project focuses
primarily on reports
that were not already part of
the library's known collection,
and even with the future
publishing of the reports
that I mentioned, there is
still many bound catalog reports
that are already part of the
library's print collection
but which are not currently
prioritized in this phase
of our digital project.
So, it's possible that
another future phase
of the project might involve
digitizing those reports
that are available to
researchers on site
but are not currently
accessible to those
who can't make it
to Capitol Hill.
And, of course, we learned
over these last few years
that there may in fact be
historical reports offered
by the Law Library that
we don't know about.
And so lastly, I'd like
to just end with a call
to our colleagues
at law libraries
and other academic
institutions around the country.
We know that some institutions
may have collections
that would fill in some of the
gaps in our own collection.
And so if you know that your
collection contains historical,
legal reports offered
by the Law Library
that may not be available
elsewhere,
please get in touch with us.
We'll provide our
contact information
on the slide at the end.
And this slide just
summarizes where you can go
to find more information
about this project.
The first bullet point
is just another link
to the online collection.
You can access any
of these resources
by visiting the URLs
listed above,
or by doing a web search
using the titles in quotes.
Also, we've done a little bit
of promotion in recent months.
You can see our recent
blog post by searching
"Historical Legal Reports" in
our blog, In Custodia Legis,
and you can even listen
to a recorded interview
that we did just last week
for the Federal News Network's
Federal Drive program.
So, we'll now open it up for
questions from the audience.
Please feel free to type your
questions in the Q&A box.
I see we've got one question
from an individual asking
about the public crowd
sourcing [inaudible].
Yes. If you go to crowd.loc.gov
you'll see the link there,
but I'll provide a more
direct link in the chat.
Thanks.
>> Robert Brammer: Okay;
any other questions please
type them in the Q&A box.
>> Stephen Mayeaux: Ah;
a question about where the paper
docs were being stored before
you started the project.
This is really interesting.
These were stored on site
in the Madison Building
in a small records closet
on the second floor.
So, over time they've moved
to a couple new places.
They've been first
organized by requester,
and then once they were prepared
for digitization
they were sent to--
to the Adams Building
to be digitized
by our digital scan center.
So, they moved around a little
bit throughout the Library
of Congress campus.
>> Robert Brammer: Thank you.
Any other questions?
Okay Stephen.
It looks like you got
another question in the Q&A.
Thanks.
>> Stephen Mayeaux: Okay; what
kind of advertising do you do
for the crowd sourcing campaign?
What type of audience
is doing crowd sourcing?
This is really a good question,
and it's one that I have
to admit I'm not as well tuned
to the different audiences
that do crowd sourcing.
This is the Law Library's
second campaign that we've done.
The first one was
very different.
It was a collection of Spanish
legal documents from the 15th
to the 19th centuries, but
really we've been lucky
to be able to tap into
a pre-existing group
of individuals who were
already very active on the
By the People platform.
So, and to some degree we
benefit from the hard work
that our colleagues
have already done
in the library cultivating an
audience for crowd.loc.gov,
but we've also had a few
reports in this campaign
that contain foreign
language material.
So, in those cases, what we
have especially a few documents
that are translations,
foreign language translations
of the U.S. Constitution;
we've been asking for those
who have a background in
Chinese, Korean, Russian,
and Armenian to help us with
transcribing those documents,
and we've had some luck in
recruiting the volunteers
with language backgrounds to
help with those, but if anyone
on the call has a background
in a foreign language we
are especially in need
of transcription and review
help with those documents.
>> Robert Brammer: Okay;
it looks like you just
got six other questions.
>> Stephen Mayeaux: Let's see;
a question about the
corporate author.
I admit I will provide a link
to a bib record in the catalog.
I don't know exactly what the
corporate author reviewed.
It's most likely the Law Library
or the Global Legal
Research Directorate.
I'll provide a catalog
link to put in the chat.
Hopefully that'll help.
Let's see; a question from Lynn.
Once all the current
documents have been digitized
and transcribed,
do you anticipate making
other documents available
for transcription?
Yes, really good question,
and that is something
that we're working on now.
We are, as I think the
earlier slide said;
we have about 500 more
that we need to review,
and we have about 200 that
are being digitized currently.
So, it's quite likely that many
of those documents
will have some
of the same OCR issues
that Michael showed.
So, we do anticipate in
future, perhaps in another phase
of crowd sourcing
making those available.
Is there a background note on
the authors of the reports?
No. In many cases, many of these
reports were written by authors
who worked at the
library many decades ago.
So, we don't necessarily
know much about the authors,
but you can, thanks to the
bib records, you can search
for all reports written
by a particular author.
But at the time, at this time
we don't have much background
information on the authors.
There is a little
bit of information
for current authors
on our website.
So, if you go to law.gov there
is a little bit of information
about many of our current
foreign legal specialists.
Let's see; are you transcribing
foreign language documents
that the Law Library published?
Yes. So, in this round of crowd
sourcing there are a few dozen--
There are a few dozen
reports and translations
that contain foreign
language information,
and we are transcribing
and reviewing those.
>> Jonathan Donovan:
Hey; this is Jonathan.
I'll just jump in and
say that of the documents
in the crowd sourcing
project so far
that are fully non-English
language,
a lot of them are translations
of the U.S. Constitution
into a different language.
We have other reports that
have, you know will contain text
in a different language,
but those are kind of the--
I would say that's our
main set of reports
that contain non-English
text is those
constitutional translations.
>> Stephen Mayeaux: Oh,
and I see someone very helpfully
provided an example of a record.
Yes, that is an example of
a record for a 1976 report
that we digitized and published.
I believe this is one
that is in our collection,
but I'll provide another one.
Here's an example.
Let's see.
So, here's another
example in the chat.
The documents that are in
English only, do you plan to,
at some point in the future,
have someone transcribe
those documents
into other languages,
such as Spanish?
Other languages such as Spanish.
No. Currently the crowd
sourcing program is mostly
a transcription.
It is a transcription program.
So, there isn't a translation
aspect to the project,
but that's only because
that's the scope
of the transcription platform.
So, it's a good question,
but it's not something that's
currently part of our plan.
Question about the
privacy procedure
for notifying original
requesters.
Will you do this
for all documents?
Okay, good yes.
So, for every report
where we are able
to notify the original
requester we do.
If we can find them through,
through current office holder
or we collaborate with
other organizations
that can help us get in contact.
For ceased requesters,
in those cases,
the discretion is ultimately
up to the Directorate
of Legal Research.
So, when we cannot locate the
original requester then it falls
to our research directorate
to make a final determination.
And if permission is given,
how do you mask the requester?
That is-- That's
a good question.
That's something that
we can do usually
by simply removing any
information on the cover
of the page that may have
indicated who the requester was,
and then in most
cases, actually,
the reports are written without
any reference to the requester.
So, it's not-- There's not a
whole lot of work for us to do,
but we do a round of review just
to make sure that
that's the case.
What about links in documents?
We, in many cases, the
links may have expired.
In more current contemporary
reports,
we do use Perma.cc
links, but for those maybe
from the early 2000,
early 2000s,
especially the born
digital reports,
some of those links
are no longer active.
That's a good question.
>> Robert Brammer: Okay;
thank you for joining us.
I want to mention that
next month on July 15th
at 11am we will be
hosting a webinar
to discuss the Constitution
annotated.
This is a document by the
Congressional Research Service
that summarizes U.S.
constitutional
and the leading U.S.
Supreme Court decisions
that interpret them.
Please visit the Law Library
of Congress' Legal Research
Institute at law.gov to register
for this and other
upcoming webinars,
and thanks again for joining us.