Work Has Begun on the National Inventory of Legal Materials, Related to Law.gov

[NOTE: Click here for an update on the National Inventory, from Erika Wayne (15 June 2010).]

Work has begun on the National Inventory of Legal Materials, a component of the Law.gov legal open government data project, according to Erika Wayne of the Stanford University Robert Crown Law Library.

(Click here for background information on the Law.gov project.)

The Twitter hashtag for the National Inventory is #NILM. Click here for archived Twitter tweets about the National Inventory.

According to Wayne, the National Inventory will consist of a list “of all primary legal materials” in the U.S. — “describing, detailing, and cataloging where one can find the laws of our Federal and State systems — and also of certain secondary legal resources that “are created as part of” administrative, legislative, or judicial law-making processes, ranging from “briefs and filings of attorneys to congressional testimony.”

Wayne states that, in order to “create this list, we will need the collaboration of librarians and researchers across the country” to engage in tasks including “the creation of the categories that we would use for collecting the information” and “the data entry itself.”

Wayne announces in her post that the first project related to the National Inventory will be organized by NOCALL, the Northern California Association of Law Libraries, which has established “a task force dedicated to creating a micro-inventory, focusing on California materials. We are using a shared spreadsheet and just beginning to fill out rows and columns.”

Wayne concludes, “If you want to help on the inventory, please let us know. What NOCALL is starting can and should be replicated in other areas.”

For more information, please see Wayne’s entire post.

[This post was last updated 15 June 2010.]

[NOTE added 2 March 2010: National Inventory of Legal Materials: A Call to Action is now available; per @evwayne, it "offers guidance and suggestions for creating the inventory."]

[NOTE: On 28 February 2010, a request for comments on an inventory of California legal information -- a prototype for the National Inventory of Legal Materials and a component of the Law.gov legal open government data project -- was issued by Erika Wayne. Click here for more details.]

[NOTE: On 22 February 2010 the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Government Relations Office announced that they and Erika Wayne of the Stanford University Law Library have begun to organize working groups to build the National Inventory. HT @caminick.]

Tags: Erika Wayne, Free access to law, Law Library of Congress, Law.gov, Legal informatics conferences, National Inventory of Legal Materials, National Inventory of Primary Legal Materials, NOCALL, Northern California Association of Law Libraries, Open data, Open data and law, Open government data, Open Government: Defining Designing and Sustaining Transparency, Public access to legal information, Stanford University Robert Crown Law Library