The Dred Scott Case Collection was the first significant digital library project undertaken by the Washington University Libraries, and was begun in 1998. The project was a partnership between the Missouri State Archives, Washington University faculty members Peter Kastor and David Koenig, and the Library. The primary content of the project were the legal documents stored in the MSA relating to the Dred Scott freedom suit that led to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision (which had its 150th anniversary this year).
As the first major digital library project undertaken by these partners, the project struggled with issues of standards and workflows (some of which are alluded to in a recent article by Shirley K. Baker, Dean of the Libraries and Vice Chancellor for Scholarly Information at Washington University in St. Louis, in Digital Information and Knowledge Management: "New Opportunities for Research Libraries in Digital Information and Knowledge Management: Challenges for the Mid-Sized Research Library"). The main burden of the work was in imaging and transcribing the court records, but as project partners were new to digital projects and many standards were only emerging at the time, transcriptions were only encoded in Word and HTML documents, which provided access to the recourses but left them searchable only by major commercial search engines.
Since that initial project, the University Libraries have created a dedicated unit to support locally-created digital resources, Digital Library Services, and several of its current projects are efforts to migrate existing resources in electronic form to accepted standards. One such project has been our effort to revise the
Owing largely to the work of a graduate student in English (who also had extensive familiarity with legal genres) Crystal Alberts, we found that the documents did not accurately represent their legal function. Titles, for instance, were assigned by project team members to documents through generic descriptive criteria, instead of reflecting the practice in the legal profession of referring to documents by their legal function (i.e., "Notice of Motion to Dismiss").
While converting the documents to XML represented a significant improvement to the resource, and modeling them through the TEI guidelines allowed for a more accurate electronic representation of the texts, we found the TEI was limited in its ability to reflect the structure of legal documents specifically. We therefore adapted the TEI to this purpose. While there certainly are instances of legal texts marked up in TEI, to our knowledge there have been no efforts to adapt TEI to reflect the structure of legal documents in this way, and our work may be of interest to conference attendees with legal materials to digitize.
A further shortcoming of the initial project was its failure to transcribe the documents in their entirety. A critical omission was the neglect of abbreviations which, when deciphered, turned out to point to an additional 25 documents related to Dred Scott, which we were able to identify in the MSA, and have since imaged and marked-up.
This poster would highlight two primary aspects of the "reclamation" project: on the one hand, we would like to emphasize some of the issues involved in migrating older digital projects--especially early attempts--to widely-accepted standards, and discuss some of the unseen benefits of doing so (i.e., in our case, the discovery of additional documents that had been overlooked, due to incomplete transcription); on the other hand, we would describe the different kinds of legal documents reflected in the collection, and the implications of their function for markup, including the modifications we made to the TEI to reflect this function.
Although revised markup in TEI has been completed, the conversion of the TEI to TextClass XML for delivery in DLXS/XPAT is not yet complete, but we anticipate it will be available in mid-September, and certainly in time for the conference. The current site was recently revised by Digital Library Services and is available at:
http://library.wustl.edu/vlib/dredscott/
The main site for the (emerging) Washington University digital library is:
http://digital.wustl.edu/