Digital documents in non-library settings

I was talking to my housemate the other evening about her research activities for her job. She is a paralegal for habeas hearings for death row inmates. These hearings require massive amounts of research into defendants pasts, all the way back to childhood. My friend frequently has to travel around the state visiting various correctional facilities and social service agencies collecting any sort of documentation on her defendant's past inside and outside government systems.

She was describing to me the state of the digital collection at a prison in PA, and told me about a particular document, which was hundreds of pages long, saved as a separate pdf file for each page, with incomprehensible strings of characters as the file names. The digitization of files had been done by a staff member also in charge of many of the other administrative functions of the office, and this was clearly not a major part of her duties or where her expertise lay.

This really brought home to me the myriad of important documents that are currently being digitized outside of libraries. And while digitizing academic and historic materials is a worthwhile task for professionals with knowledge in digital libraries, so are the types of government documents that may eventually be used to to decide court cases, including death row cases. I just wonder if many of these government document collections will ever see the attention of someone who is trained in digital librarianship and who also doesn't have myriad other more pressing job duties to attend to (such as those involved in the administrative side of running a correctional facility.)

Is some sort of cooperation on these issues a possible future function for public libraries? This raises funding issues. Also, these are "collections" that are not public in the traditional sense, but it is part of the general public interest of a functional and fair justice system to have these records available to legal researchers. The information science community, which already expends a great amount of intellectual energy addressing the issues of digital collections, might as well include the documents that fall outside its traditional domain but within the "public good" in these discussions.