Crowdsourcing and Open Access v2.0: Harnessing the Power of Peer Production to Disseminate Historical Records and Legal Scholarship

At last year's conference (http://wiki.cali.org/calicon08/index.php?n=Sessions.412) I demonstrated how Internet-savvy users and organizations could enlist anonymous collaborators online to help make legal research materials freely available. This presentation expands the inquiry to consider whether crowdsourcing tools can aid in the dissemination of historical records and, of particular interest to law faculty, legal scholarship. There are both normative and financial reasons to pursue such "crowdsourced" efforts. The normative reasons revolve around fostering transparency and democratic legitimacy and fulfilling the university's public service mandate. The financial reasons are still more compelling: opening up efforts to archive information to public participation is a way to distribute among the broader internet community at least a portion of the costs that might otherwise have been borne by the originating user or organization alone. I will use two examples drawn from Wikisource, an open-access library of public domain (or freely licensed) works, to illuminate the power of "crowdsourced" efforts to archive and distribute historical and scholarly works. First, I will highlight the efforts of the Wikisource community to digitize, and make available in full text, the earliest volume of the United States Statutes at Large, a work not freely available anywhere else online. Second, by way of "walking the talk," I will discuss my recent experiment in disseminating my own legal scholarship by the same means, yielding a product that seems superior in a number of respects to more familiar large-scale scholarly repositories such as SSRN.