But we came to the conclusion that 1. That would be really, really boring and 2. We would be completely useless because our job is to always keep adapting to the needs of the school.

(Besides, any school trying to keep doing the same thing for another 100 years would probably go out of business pretty soon, as you point out.)

Go to faculty offices and see what ideas they have that they aren’t sure how to implement. In my experience, faculty suddenly remember quite a few resource or tech issues that have been bugging them for months. Check in with student organizations and see if they’d like their own custom legal research presentations. Stop by the clinic and see if they have any Westlaw or Lexis questions. Talk to IT and ask if they need any testers for new products. You’d be amazed at how much business you can drum up and how it leads to great projects and relationships down the line. Maybe you’ll get nothing for the first few walk arounds, but eventually someone will say “I’ve been meaning to ask you…” and you’re off.

The best thing about this step is it requires no planning. If people are around, great. If not, they’ll be there another day. And you’ll learn more about what your users really want from their library.

I think your image along with accompanying text does a passable job of describing what you perceive as an attempt to illustrate a portion of your present working environment. I think it’s useful as a snapshot in time of your thinking, but I see no path forward in it. It is truly a snapshot in time. It’s not a subway whose cars are moving in any direction.

I’d be interested in seeing what you might do to combine that perception with a a path forward toward the Digital Public Law Library of America that you propose in a later article, “Disrupt My Industry. Please.” I.e., where is disruption needed? In broad strokes, what changes do the disruptors need to make at each location in your image to connect more lines to more locations?

How might the Epicenter of Suck be transformed into something better?

— Paul E. Merrell, J.D.

This branch of law in the U.S. just may be the most sorely neglected in regard to public digital access to the law. The official repository of a given treaty is set by the treaty itself and the official repository is frequently not available on the Web. And treaties in the U.S. must always be interpreted subject to any reservations made by the U.S. during the ratification process, but reservations are even more difficult to find than treaties and frequently are not available.

There is a further problem with implementing statutes that (almost?) invariably incorporate the treaty by reference, without repeating its text and usually without information as to reservations, producing what should be absurd, large swaths of the U.S. Code that are not contained within that Code.

Even worse, you frequently hit formerly very large paper documents that have been scanned into PDFs that defy searchability. A good portion of the U.N.’s treaty reservations records are available online only in such form, often hundreds of pages in a single scanned PDF. So to search them, one needs to download them, use some program capable of converting the scanned PDFs into a searchable format, e.g., a recent version of WordPerfect, and then index them prior to conducting the search.

I could go on and on about the difficulties of searching international law that either governs directly or should be taken into account when interpreting U.S. statutory law, but my point is that any Digital Public Law Library of America of necessity needs to include international law.

Paul E. Merrell, J.D.