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researcher seeking to illuminate the sources and development of doctrine, the absence of sources antedating 1950 or thereabouts represents a potentially serious impediment.^[1]

• Poor hyperlinking and citator functionality. Many open-access sites fail to take advantage of the improved capabilities that hypertext offers over publication of the exact same document in paper form. That is to say, although they reproduce the text of the courts’ opinions as published, they do nothing more than that: it is not possible to click and follow a citation that appears in the text of the court’s opinion and view the cited source, even if the other source is also online. Nor do most sites include any citator functionality whereby the opinion being displayed can be followed forward in time to locate references that cite it.^[2]

• Authentication against official referents. Reading an opinion hosted on the official site of the issuing court sends a powerful message that the text is authentic. Reading the same opinion on the site of a large proprietary publisher sends perhaps a different message, but not one that would cause most users to question the fidelity of the reproduction. Reading the same opinion on an open-access site, however, may prompt uncertainty as to the provenance

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http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/boundvolumes.html (last visited Dec. 18, 2009).

1995, roughly speaking, marks the point at which the courts of appeals began posting electronic copies of their own decisions online. Because these reported decisions were “born digital”—that is to say, created and disseminated initially in electronic form—storing and organizing them online entailed no digitization expense, which led to their rapid proliferation. In contrast, digitizing and archiving earlier works has frequently entailed substantial labor and expense. See, e.g., Markoff, supra note 57.

1. By way of an isolated counterexample, the Library of Congress’s American Memory Project has undertaken a massive and praiseworthy digitization initiative aimed at early American source texts. Of particular value is its collection entitled: A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html (last visited Jan. 4, 2010). Although this site hosts scanned images of a number of valuable texts not widely available elsewhere, such as documents produced by the Continental Congress and a number of works from the first years after the ratification of the Constitution, the Library of Congress has imposed a substantial technological impediment to easy access and use of the voluminous materials in its collection. In many instances, users may only view a single page image on screen at a time, and may only navigate forward and backward a page at a time, or jump to a specific, known, page number. Furthermore, for many of the most valuable works in its collection, the Library provides only page images, not text, making it impossible to (for example) copy-and-paste the language of early legislative enactments into another document. The present author’s Early United States Statutes project represents one effort to build upon the Library’s scanned document repository and make it more useful. http://homepages.uc.edu/~armstrty/statutes.html (last visited Jan. 4, 2010). For another such effort, see infra notes 143–148 and accompanying text.
2. The AltLaw and Google Scholar sites, as already noted, are exceptions to this general rule. See supra notes 52–54, 59–60 and accompanying text.