The library purchased a number of new online resources over the summer that enhance the core research collection that we can offer to online-oriented researchers, while aligning with our collection strategies by imposing little in the way of upkeep or other continuing costs. Foremost among these is the Making of Modern Law treatises collection, from Gale Cengage, frequently referred to as MOML. While the “MOML brand” has more recently been expanded to a number of other secondary-source and primary-source law collections, this post is about the “original” treatise resource, that has been on the library market since 2005.
MOML is an online repository of English and American legal treatises published between 1800 and 1926 — covering the historical era of the “classic” treatise writers and comprising a core historical collection for understanding the origins and doctrinal development of modern law in the Common Law jurisdictions. Multiple editions of many of the most important works are included in the collection, further facilitating bibliographic comparison and other historical research. Over 22,000 individual works are present, including those originally photographed for the older Nineteenth Century Legal Treatises and Twentieth Century Legal Treatises microfiche collections.
The purchase included cataloging, so all of the specific treatise editions included within MOML are individually cataloged in the Case libaries’ catalog, at catalog.case.edu. So ‘ordinary’ catalog-based search for specific historical works will be effective in locating them, exactly as if we had them all in original printed formats. MOML’s own web interface also facilitates keyword searching across the works in the collection. The sophistication of the search interface, and underlying text indexing, is not without its limitations. However, the large majority of these works are unavailable in those online legal research platforms that feature highly-sophisticated full-text searching (even HeinOnline, itself no great shakes for full-text searching, includes only a much smaller collection of historical treatises). The mass-digitization efforts, such as Google Books’ library partnerships, also do not include nearly all of these works. They also suffer from rather poor bibliographic scrupulousness while the target MOML user needs intact editions with complete and accurate bibliographic metadata. As with many (most?) closed library-licensed databases, the contents of MOML are not crawled by, and do not generate results in, general search engines like Google.
The reading interface of MOML has its drawbacks. While navigating works (including navigating search results) the user views page images in a sort of image-driven ‘page turner.’ This is cumbersome. Each page turn requires new image files to be loaded and displayed in the browser. These scans are of very high quality, but their loading is also very slow, even over high-end broadband. Paging online through large portions of a book (a frequent use case for this corpus) can be an exercise of frustration. The experience is still worlds better than working with microfiche, and is far cleaner and more convenient than working with the printed originals even for those with ready access to those few, huge, law libraries that would possess any large portion of the works. But use of an OCR’d-text-only type of display while browsing or navigating search results would have avoided these problems. (Underlying OCR obviously exists, to drive keyword searching. Using it for portions of a “fast” display would have risked exposing the inevitable OCR errors, but would have avoided the performance-related headaches of the existing interface.)
On the bright side, MOML handles download and printing of works about as well as any large, institutionally-licensed, book collection can, given the limited range of business models so-far pioneered under current licensing and rights-management constraints. PDFs are generated on the fly from the underlying page images for individual pages or for page ranges. Compared to some resources, the “allowance” for page ranges is generous: up to 250 page images can be downloaded into a single pdf. As with the images in the browser-based viewer, the resulting pdfs are of relatively high quality, revealing typographic and other details of the original printed works with high fidelity.
There are several other collections available on campus that serve as good companions for MOML. One that I relied upon recently in my own work is Gale’s own Eighteenth Century Collection Online, provided on campus by KSL, which includes a number of historical legal works from the period predating the MOML works.
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