Report: Harvard Law School Digitization Project Publishes Nearly 7 Million Court Cases Online (Caselaw Access Project)

From The Harvard Crimson:

The Caselaw Access Project published nearly seven million cases from the Harvard Law School’s collections online on March 8, concluding a nine-year process to digitize the HLS Library’s archive of court cases.

The Caselaw Access Project, also known as CAP, aimed “to make all published U.S. court decisions freely available to the public online in a consistent format, digitized from the collection of the Harvard Law School Library,” according to the project’s website.

The recent release of cases has culminated in “360 years of United States caselaw” accessible to the public, according to the project’s website. This includes all “official, book-published state and federal United States caselaw through 2020,” with the first case dating back to 1658.

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As part of the process, 40,000 books containing case files were retrieved from Harvard Law School’s collection in the HLS Library and a repository in Southborough, Mass. The CAP team then used a variety of tools to de-bind the books, effectively scan case files at a rate of 500,000 pages per week, and wrap the books in plastic to be sent to a limestone mine in Kentucky for preservation.

The scanned files were then translated into machine-readable documents and uploaded to the Ravel website. Ravel’s website made sifting through documents easier with their “data science, machine learning, and visualization” systems, according to Harvard Law Today.

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Direct to Caselaw Access Project

See Also: Research Tools: Caselaw Access Project Launches “CAP Search” Interface (April 3, 2019)

See Also: Harvard Law School Library Project to Provide Free Online Access to U.S. State, Federal Court Decisions Named “Caselaw Access Project” (August 10, 2016)

Filed under: Digital Preservation, Libraries, News, Open Access, Preservation, School Libraries