UHLC Nota Bene

Earlier this week, the Library of Congress announced that it was making over 25 million of its catalog records available for free bulk download. These records will be available at data.gov and on the Library of Congress website at http://www.loc.gov/cds/products/marcDist.php . Previously these records were only available individually or by subscription. This new free service of the LOC will be an invaluable resource for anyone doing bibliographic research. The records are in the MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging Records) format, the international standard for bibliographic data. To learn more about MARC records, see this tutorial on the LOC website.      

Perma.cc solves the problem of link rot for law schools, courts, and universities.  Link rot occurs when the hyperlinks cited in scholarly papers and court opinions no longer lead to the webpages they’re meant to reference. Perma.cc creates a permanent, archived version of a website and assigns a permanent URL to that version. The archived version of the cited content will then be permanently available—even if the website modifies, moves, or deletes the page’s originally cited content. Perma.cc was developed by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, and its founding supporters included more than sixty law-school libraries, along with the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Internet Archive, the Legal Information Preservation Alliance, and the Digital Public Library of America.   Here at the University of Houston Law Center, our law review and journals have been creating Perma links since the summer of 2016, and all are very satisfied with the user experienc...

In our last entry, we discussed the current legal battle between the Daughters of the Republic of Texas and the State of Texas over the materials archived in the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library. As mentioned in the previous post, the Daughters of the Republic of Texas served as the custodial stewards of the Alamo complex from 1905 to 2011. The uneasy relationship between the State of Texas and the DRT began long ago, at the dawn of the 20th century. The San Antonio de Valero mission was founded in 1718 and the construction of its famous chapel (what most people think of as “The Alamo”) was completed in 1744. After its abandonment in 1794, Spanish soldiers occupied the mission during Mexico’s war for independence. The mission was occupied by Mexican soldiers in 1803 until December 1835, when the company surrendered to Texan forces. The siege of the Alamo began on February 23, 1836 and continued until all Texan combatants had been lost, on March 6, 1836. For the next forty y...

This week the Daughters of the Republic of Texas  (DRT) filed a lawsuit against the General Land Office of Texas. The petition , filed in the 407th Bexar County District Court, alleges that the General Land Office and the State of Texas have illegally claimed ownership of the DRT’s library collection as an unconstitutional  taking of private property.  The dispute arose after the Texas Legislature, in 2011, turned over responsibility for the “preservation, maintenance, and restoration of the Alamo complex,” (Act of May 30, 2011, 82nd Leg., R.S., ch. 1046, § 2, 2011 Tex. Gen. Laws 2676 ) from the Daughters of the Republic of Texas to the state’s General Land Office (GLO). In June 2010, the Office of the Attorney General began an investigation of the DRT’s management of the Alamo. Once the investigation began, public scrutiny and highly publicized structural problems at the Alamo prompted the Texas legislature to act and end the DRT’s stewardship of the Alamo before th...

September 22-28 is the 31 st annual banned book week, an awareness campaign that celebrates the freedom to read in America. Though individual books in American are not banned by specific laws,   they are none the less often restricted by other entities. Many of the cases regarding these “banned” books center on a school library restricting access to the material in some way. Historically, in cases where a book is removed or restricted from a school library due to the graphic nature of the content or language, courts have usually sided with the judgment of the school board ( see, e.g. Presidents Council, Dist. 25 v. Cmty. Sch. Bd. No. 25, 457 F.2d 289 (2d Cir. 1972)). Yet, when book removals appear from the facts to be motivated by political or religious censorship, courts have typically ruled that this violates the challenging student’s First Amendment rights ( see, e.g. . Minarcini v. Strongsville City Sch. Dist., 541 F.2d 577 (6th Cir. 1976)).  The United States S...