Glassmeyer: Free Law Users Group

Sarah Glassmeyer, JD, MLS, of CALI has launched Free Law Users Group, on the pbworks platform.

Here is the description:

This group is for sharing news and developments in the Free Law world. Primarily it will serve as a conduit for connecting librarians to the law tech and developer communities, in the hope that librarians will be able to increase involvement and share their skills and knowledge. It is also hoped that individuals in the Free Law, Open Law and Open Gov developer worlds will join in and see that librarians aren’t so scary and can be a valuable resource in their projects.

This website is a wiki. Please feel free to add anything of relevance. It will really only succeed if the community takes charge of it. This also means it is a constant work in progress so check back often!

HT @sglassmeyer

On a related note:

Tim Stanley of Justia has started a new Free Law discussion group on Google+.

New on VoxPopuLII: Vibert and Anderson on JurisPedia

Dr. Hughes-Jean Vibert of Institut für Rechtsinformatik, Universität des Saarlandes, and Kerry Anderson of the African Legal Information Institute (AfricanLII), have posted JurisPedia: Perspectives, on the VoxPopuLII blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, the authors describe JurisPedia, the free, international, multilingual, crowdsourced legal encyclopedia, and how it applies principles of crowdsourcing to legal information in many countries. The post describes the development of the English-language version of JurisPedia and its hosting by the Southern African Legal Information Institute (SAFLII) and then the African Legal Information Institute (AfricanLII).

The authors describe the motivating principles of JurisPedia — particularly the principle of shared law — the potential tension between inclusiveness and quality control, and the service’s Creative Commons license. The post tells of the recent addition to JurisPedia of Google Custom Search functionality enabling searching of the laws of 80 countries. Finally, the authors discuss how JurisPedia provides legal information in multiple languages to individuals in particular nations, and how JurisPedia can ease ordinary citizens’ access to the laws of most countries of the world.

For more information, please see the complete post.

LexCraft: A Wiki Space to Share Best Practices for Legal Information Systems

LexCraft, run by Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, is a Wiki where developers can “record, refine, and promulgate best practices for electronic legal information publication. It’s a place to note both big things (like the OAI4Courts standard, now under development on LexCraft) and small things (like … everything you [need to] know about US Code section numbering).”

“LexCraft is about crafting things with legal text.” It’s “a place to look for [or share things like] a stopword list for legislation in English, a writeup on a search engine specifically adapted for legal text, or the profile of the research group that developed it, or a bibliography of papers on text retrieval as it specifically applies to legal text. So it’s part cookbook, part collection of profiles and bibliographies, part code library…”

Legal information systems developers are invited to participate in LexCraft. To join, please register here. Thanks!