Intellectual Property Law

A Big Day for Open Access, But More Work Remains

By Tim Armstrong, Derek Bambauer, and William McGeveran.

Via BoingBoing comes news of another big crop of United States Court of Appeals decisions being scanned and made publicly available by public.resource.org. They are scanning the entire Federal Reporter (First Series), which includes late-19th and early-20th century United States case law. Enormous PDFs (and even more enormous TIFFs) of the scanned volumes are available here. A few of the volumes have been OCR’ed, with the rest to follow. The OCR text is much in need of cleanup, as this illustrative page shows. But public.resource.org has lots of experience at this, as you can see from what they’ve already accomplished with their scans of F.2d and F.3d.

The move from paper to digital is a daunting challenge, and one we should all be pleased to see farsighted organizations tackling. It’s a simple enough problem: Knowledge stored in books is available only to those with access to the physical medium in which the information is contained. Knowledge stored online is available anywhere. Books are pricey, but bits are free, or nearly so. The staggering quantity of paper documents that don’t exist at all in digital form (including, as of last year, 99.94% of the textual holdings in the Library of Congress) is an impediment to learning. Projects that do something, anything, to bring formerly print-only information into the digital age surely deserve applause for that reason alone.

So it feels a little churlish to point out one of the shortcomings of public.resource.org’s Federal Reporter scans. The scanning process produces graphic files (enormous graphic files, at that) which can be OCR’ed and turned into error-filled text, which can in turn be cleaned up and turned into error-free text. But what’s missing at the end of that process is one of the strongest comparative advantages of information sharing in the digital world: hypertext.

Full post as published by Info/Law on March 17, 2008 (boomark / email).