The Harvard Law library (which contains reference to most of US law cases since the US colonial times) is getting digitized and will be available for search for the public. In what is a development that will redefine the law industry, legal references in the US will finally be more searchable and available and far more in the past than now. This will redefine the legal publication industry, as well as the tasks of thousands of junior legal staff that until now had sometimes to search manually through thousands of pages to support their cases. Also, a lot of the digitized databases were only available at very high cost.
This paper from the NY Times explains the detail and analyses the consequences of that project. While a lot was already available in digital format, it came at a steep price from specialized companies. As explained in the paper, those companies do support the initiative with a deal that will make the data only progressively available to the general public over the next eight years, time for them to redefine their business model and develop some advanced tools on the basis of the raw data that they can sell for a profit. Still, the trend is here to make the information free and available for all.
Even the information that was standing on shelves for the last two centuries is now getting free. We are decidedly moving towards an era of free and available information, where most of the information ever produced by humans on a support will be available to all, anywhere.
