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Litchfield Unbound: Unlocking Legal History with Metadata, Digitization, and Digital Tools

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2016

Jason Eiseman ,
Whitney Bagnall ,
Cate Kellett  and
Caitlyn Lam
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Extract

Notebooks written by students at the Litchfield Law School are among the primary sources for understanding the influence of English law in this country. The notebooks provide rich documentation of how the common law and elements of English law were presented, explained, and compared with American law in a formal classroom setting during the Early Republic. The digitization project described here, the first large-scale digitization initiative undertaken at the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale Law School, with the cooperation of the Litchfield Historical Society, is intended to organize, describe, and analyze those notebooks with a web site containing a database, bibliography, inventory, and links to images. The Litchfield student notebook project was intended not only to create digital surrogates of important historical sources, but also to inform future digital legal history projects at the Lillian Goldman Law Library.

Type
Articles
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 34 , Special Issue 4: Digital Law and History , November 2016 , pp. 831 - 855
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2016 

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