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Harvard Law School Library: ein Gigant wird neu organisiert

Eine Fakultätsbibliothek mit zwei Millionen Bänden macht für sich allein bereits sprachlos. Zum Vergleich: Damit macht eine komplette Universitätsbibliothek hierzulande eine gute Figur. Tränen der bibliomanen Rührung fließen bei diesem Satz:

The law library's reorganization is one piece of a larger project to modernize Harvard's entire $165 million, 1,200-person library system.

Mehr zum Hintergrund der aktuellen Re-Organisation der monumentalen Law School Library findet sich übrigens hier.

Die Bibliothek setzt zunehmend auf Open Access:

The law school faculty adopted an open access policy in 2008, and one benefit has been its impact on the bottom line.

Palfrey explains: "When Laurence Tribe writes an article for a law review, he's not trying to make any money off of it. He is seeking to improve the understanding of a legal doctrine or a legal theory. And yet on the other side of that, the publishing apparatus works at cross-purposes. [It] charges us money for our own work to reacquire back into libraries, and likewise, doesn't make it freely available to people who might in fact use it." On a practical level, open access works like this: A faculty member publishes her work in a peer-reviewed journal, but retains the copyright and deposits an author's final version (post-peer-reviewed, but pre-copyedited and pre-formatted) in the repository known as DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard), where anyone can access it on the Web.

Und schließlich darf man gespannt sein auf diese Entwicklung:

Jeff Goldenson, the laboratory's designer and multimedia communications specialist, is experimenting with a Web application he developed called Stack View, which would allow the virtual browsing of library shelves. The Harvard Library Laboratory is also striving to make the library's holdings more visible on Google and is developing a project called Shelf Life, which, as described by Dulin, "has the goal of exposing the richness of Harvard library holdings on the Web in a new and different way." An early demo version is expected this summer.

Full post as published by jurabilis - German bLAWg from Berlin. on June 29, 2010 (boomark / email).