The Future of Today’s Legal Scholarship: A Symposium in Honor of Bob Oakley

The Future of Today’s Legal Scholarship:
A Symposium in Honor of Bob Oakley July 25, 2009 Georgetown University Law Center Georgetown Law Library About The Future of Today’s Scholarship: A Symposium in Honor of Bob Oakley
The time to debate the role of blogs in legal scholarship has passed. As we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century, one of our oldest and most conservative disciplines has clearly embraced the era of electronic publishing. Blogging has indeed transformed legal scholarship. Now it’s time to move the dialogue forward.

The Future of Today’s Legal Scholarship is a symposium that brings together academic bloggers, law librarians, and experts in preservation to tackle the bigger, more imperative challenges that will influence legal scholarship and democratic access to legal information for generations to come.

We must determine how to prioritize, collect, archive, preserve, and ensure reliable long-term access to the burgeoning amount of legal scholarship being published through new, informal channels on the Web.

The Future of Today’s Legal Scholarship aims to accomplish this objective through non-conventional means. This symposium is an active, idea-based exchange inviting the participation and contribution of attendees alongside that of expert presenters and panelists.

This unique symposium will seek answers to the questions:

1. How can quality academic scholarship reliably be discovered?
2. How can future researchers be assured of perpetual access to the information currently available in blogs?
3. How can any researcher be confident that documents posted to blogs are genuine?

The symposium will include a working group break-out session to create a uniform standard for preservation of blogs, a document to be shared by bloggers and librarians alike.

Laura E. Campbell of LC and Linda Frueh of the Internet Archive are scheduled to participate. The Law Library of Congress has initiated and led a project in that Library to capture scholarly legal blogs. They expect to make them available on the website by the end of this month.

For more information about The Future of Today’s Legal Scholarship Symposium, contact:

Jennifer Locke Davitt Head of Faculty Services Georgetown Law Library (202) 662-9145 jnl8@law.georgetown.edu

or
Kumar Percy Jayasuriya Associate Librarian for Patron Services Georgetown Law Library (202) 662-9151 kumarj@law.georgetown.edu

Contact Information