The Law Library of Congress has been archiving legal blogs, or ‘blawgs’ since the beginning of March 2007. And as recently noted by Dan Cohen on Twitter this has become an ‘impressive’ resource. It’s been a year or so since the Legal Blawg Archive was first released to the public collecting “unique, born digital content” from almost 130 law blogs.
“The Legal Blawgs Web Archive is a selective collection of authoritative sites … [containing] journal-style entries, articles and essays, discussions, and comments on emerging legal issues, national and international. … This collection is part of a continuing effort by the Library of Congress to evaluate, select, collect, catalog, provide access to, and preserve digital materials for future generations of researchers.“
The collection can be browsed by name, title and subject. There are over 260 subjects including constitutional law, criminal law and procedure, intellectual property and technology & law. And if you’d rather dive right in there’s a keyword search that lets you search by name, title, subject, abstract and the year the blog was captured. The Court is among the listings but only posts from late 2008 seem to have been archived*.
This is a fantastic initiative from the Law Library of Congress and well worth visiting and supporting.
* According to David S. Brooks, one of the digital archivists working on the project, The Court continues to be archived monthly. The Web Archives Team then make the collected posts publicly available at the end of the year. This is an archive after all and they do not want to compete with the live site. [FTK 07Apr2010]