We build open source tools used at Harvard and beyond that preserve and expand access to knowledge.
Learn more about the lab on the LIL website.
Our Projects
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Perma.cc
Perma.cc helps scholars, journals, courts, and others create permanent records of the web sources they cite.
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H2O Open Casebook
H2O is a platform for creating, sharing, and remixing open course materials.
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Caselaw Access Project
The Caselaw Access Project offers free, public access to over 6.5 million decisions published by state and federal courts throughout U.S. history.
Our Team
Read our staff bios on the LIL website.
Christian Smith
Software Engineering Manager
Christian discovered the craft of research when his open source work with cryptography led to academic collaboration and an engineering role at MIT. Years prior he witnessed the impact of technology on law as a student at Berklee College of Music, when dotcom era file-sharing networks disrupted the music industry. At LIL, he aims to empower the engineering team, help invent breakthrough library tools, and improve access to justice.
LIL Blog Posts
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WARCbench: A Swiss Army Knife for WARC Processing
June 9, 2026
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Sustaining Open-Source Web Archiving Infrastructure: Takeaways from IIPC Conference 2026
The Perma team recently attended the International Internet Preservation Consortium ’s (IIPC) Web Archiving Conference, held this year at the KBR—Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels. A recurring theme was that web archiving depends on collective stewardship of the open-source tools, institutions, and people that make preservation possible. At a moment when the web […]
June 5, 2026
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An Automated Data Monitoring Toolkit and the AI Benchmarking Exercise at the Public Data Project
This post is being shared on both the dataindex.us newsletter and the Library Innovation Lab Blog.
June 2, 2026