Author: wrandtke

Brian Detweiler, Faculty Services Librarian
Wilhelmina Randtke, Electronic Services Librarian
St. Mary’s University School of Law
Sarita Kenedy East Law Library

Collection Development for an
Institutional Repository through
Collaborations between Departments

Personal Digital Archives
Long term employees often keep born digital university publications organized on their computers. Meanwhile, the law library had not formally collected born digital material over the past decade.
Collection development goal: Interview long term employees and find collections of university material with long term value.
Outcome: Most student newsletters from 2002 to present and several alumni newsletters were obtained in the original digital format. While the law library had these in print, getting the files meant no digitization was needed. Additionally, donors had a personal filing system, and some metadata could be cross-walked or extracted from file names.

Digital Collections
Outside the Library
The law school’s trial advocacy group began a
cameras in the courtroom program in the late 2000s and had digital video of all proceedings held at the Texas Supreme Court over a five year period.
Collection development goal: Monitor digital
collections held outside the law library. Identify material with long term value, and request a copy for the repository.
Outcome: When the cameras in the courtroom
project was transitioned to the State Bar of Texas,
a copy of all original video was retained by the law
library. High quality metadata was included with the donation, so that indexing the collection took minimal staff time. This memorializes the role of the university in bringing cameras to the courtroom, and ensures access to the videos.

ILL Requests for Faculty
Faculty request obscure materials, which arrive in obsolete formats, and faculty services digitizes those for professors.
Collection development goal: Assess newly digitized material for copyright issues and for fit with the repository.
Outcome: A professor wrote a paper about legal ethics in the 1800s. Faculty services digitized several entire books for the professor, many dating from the 1800s. The repository digital copies of several old, previously undigitized and out-of-copyright books, totaling thousands of pages.

Many thanks to Stacy Fowler for assistance with poster layout and design.