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The Future of the Law Library (and How to Stop It)

By Robert J. Ambrogi

Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain, author of the book, "The Future of the Internet -- and How to Stop It," was the keynote speaker yesterday kicking off the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Libraries in Washington, D.C. I was not there to hear his speech, but Georgetown Law Professor Rebecca Tushnet was and she reported on it on her blog, Rebecca Tushnet's 43(B)log. Just last week, Zittrain caused somewhat of a stir with an op-ed he published in the New York Times, Lost in the Cloud, in which he discusses the dangers of cloud computing and how the law might help minimize them. Based on Tushnet's recounting of his talk, Zittrain also sees danger in the library -- not in the library as we traditionally imagine it, "a fortress, protecting books against people who might mess them up," but in the library as it is more frequently becoming, "a place to go to get on the Internet." (I am quoting Tushnet there, who I assume was paraphrasing Zittrain, not precisely quoting him.) The danger for libraries is precisely the danger he warned of in his New York Times op-oed. As library archives move more and more into...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on July 27, 2009 (boomark / email).