Case Study on Enhancing Accessibility to State Legal Content in Massachusetts and Michigan

During a time when "access to justice" is recognized as vitally important, this workshop will show how libraries in two states worked with LLMC and Google Books to tackle this problem and provide online access to their state’s vital legal documents. Wayne State, using Cooley Law’s collection and their own, collaborated with LLMC and Google to digitize the Michigan state records and briefs. This is an initiative that has been desired by the law libraries in Michigan for more than 10 years. Likewise, Social Law Library augmented their collection with Northeastern's and worked with LLMC and Google to digitize the microfiche archive of the Code of Massachusetts Regulations and Massachusetts Register. These vital materials were inaccessible to all state agencies during the pandemic and this project was a priority to the Boston Area Law Libraries Consortium (BALLCO) as well as the Massachusetts Attorney General.

This program is sponsored by the Government Documents SIS.

Target Audience:

New and experienced librarians who want to learn about digitization initiatives that make state government content accessible.