Quietly, somewhere in the back of Windward Community College at the University of Hawaii, the machines are whirring away, archiving law books for Kathleen Richman. Kathleen is the executive director of Hawaii-based LLMC, a nonprofit library cooperative that scans books to fiche, with twin goals of preserving law books and government documents on film, and making copies available in microfiche, and more recently, online. Many libraries are downsizing their print collections, but that creates a major problem: how do we preserve older, out-of-print law books? With fiche or digital collections, government repositories and law libraries can save space in their physical collections while inexpensively increasing the scope of their holdings.
