Glassmeyer: Electronic Legal Copyright, Citation, and Preservation Information Integrated with Open States Legislative Data Report Card

Sarah Glassmeyer, JD, MLS, of CALI, has posted a spreadsheet that integrates the Open States Open Legislative Data Report Card ratings with the National Inventory of Legal Materials (NILM).

The NILM, compiled by the American Association of Law Libraries, lists data about each U.S. state’s online legal materials regarding copyright assertion, authentication, preservation, official status, permanent public access, uniform citation, and enactment of the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act.

For more information on the NILM, please see:

• Emily Feltren‘s December 2012 AALL Washington Blawg post, Update on the National Inventory of Legal Materials
• Emily Feltren and Tina S. Ching‘s February 2012 VoxPopuLII post, Protecting Access One Entry at a Time: An Update on the National Inventory of Legal Materials.

HT @sglassmeyer

New Lists of U.S. State Legal Resources Available on Web

Two new resources provide metadata describing U.S. state legal resources available on the Web:

• 2011-2012 Preliminary Analysis of AALL’s State Legal Inventories

[The American Association of Law Libraries' (AALL’s)] Digital Access to Legal Information Committee and Government Relations Office analyzed 6 primary online legal resources [Administrative Code, Administrative Register, Statutes, Session Laws, High Court Opinions and Appellate Court opinions] included in AALL’s state legal inventories to answer the following questions about each title:

• Is it official?
• Is it authenticated?
• It is preserved?
• Is permanent public access mandated by statute?
• Is there a copyright assertion or other use restriction?
• [...] whether the state is employing universal citation
• [whether the state has] introduced or enacted the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA)

• The Analysis and the data linked from it are not subject to copyright, according to Sarah Glassmeyer.

• State Regulations Online
• This table has been created by the Sunlight Foundation (click here for a description of the table). For each state, the table lists whether the regulations are readable in a Web browser; whether the regulations can be downloaded in bulk; and information about the laws governing online availability of regulations.

HT @sglassmeyer and Matt Rumsey

Colorado Enacts Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act

Colorado has enacted the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA), according to a 27 April 2012 announcement by the Uniform Law Commission.

According to the announcement, Colorado is the first state to enact UELMA, which has also been introduced in California, Connecticut, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Tennessee.

UELMA is a new, proposed, uniform, U.S. state statute requiring states that enact it to authenticate, preserve, and provide permanent public access to legal information that those states publish in electronic formats.

Professor Barbara A. Bintliff of the University of Texas School of Law is the reporter for UELMA.

For more information on UELMA, please see Professor Bintliff’s VoxPopuLII post, entitled The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act Is Ready for Legislative Action, and Alan S. Kowlowitz’s recent report, Opening Government’s Official Legal Materials: Authenticity and Integrity in the Digital World.

Ching and Feltren on the National Inventory of Legal Materials

Tina S. Ching of the Seattle University School of Law, and Emily Feltren of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) have posted Protecting Access One Entry at a Time: An Update on the National Inventory of Legal Materials, on the VoxPopuLII blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, the authors describe the National Inventory of Legal Materials, an effort by U.S. law librarians to create a listing of all legal information resources in the United States, in order to facilitate efforts to authenticate, preserve, and make those resources more accessible to the public. The inventory is related to several projects, including the Law.gov legal open government data movement and AALL’s efforts to authenticate and preserve digital legal information, including the effort to persuade states to enact the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA).

The authors report that at least 7,000 resources had been added to the inventory as of last summer. Among the findings arising from analysis of those resources are that:

• U.S. state governments are not authenticating newly created digital legal resources;
• “Twenty-five states assert copyright on at least one legal resource, including Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island”;
• “Eighteen states require preservation and permanent public access of at least one legal resource, including Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington”; and
• “Ten states charge fees to access the official version [of their legal resources], including Kansas, Vermont, and Wyoming.”

The authors report that the first stage of the development of the inventory, focusing on state legal resources, has been completed. The current stage of the development of the inventory, focusing on U.S. federal legal resources, is currently underway. “Emily Carr, Senior Legal Research Specialist at the Law Library of Congress, and Judy Gaskell, retired Librarian of the Supreme Court, are coordinating this project.”

For more information, please see the complete post.

HT @stephdavidson.

Bintliff on the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act

Professor Barbara A. Bintliff of the University of Texas School of Law has posted The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act Is Ready for Legislative Action, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Professor Bintliff — who is the Reporter for the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA) — explains the provisions of UELMA — a new, proposed, uniform, U.S. state statute requiring states that enact it to authenticate, preserve, and provide permanent public access to legal information that those states publish in electronic formats. The statute is intended to “ensur[e] the trustworthiness of online legal resources and preserv[e] … electronic [legal] publications to provide for continuing accessibility.”

The post also examines the policy principles that inform the Act — especially the Act’s “outcomes-based” approach, intended to accommodate technological change and to afford states substantial flexibility in complying with the Act — as well as the origins of the Act in the American Association of Law Libraries’ 2007 National Summit on Authentication of Digital Legal Information.

Professor Bintliff explains that UELMA is scheduled to be introduced into a number of U.S. state legislatures in January 2012.

This post will be of interest to policy makers responsible for digital legal information resources, the government and legal technology communities, the legal community, legal information professionals, and advocates of improved public access to legal information.

New on VoxPopuLII: Eiseman: Time to Turn the Page on Print Legal Information

Jason Eiseman of the Yale Law School Library has posted Time to Turn the Page on Print Legal Information, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In his post, Mr. Eiseman poses the question, “Is there a good reason why judges should not be blogging their opinions?” In his response, Mr. Eiseman discusses a range of timely issues related to the transition to digital legal publishing, including the costs of print publication, the official status of digital legal information, authentication, preservation, citations and identifiers, and open access to legal scholarship.

This post will be of interest to legal professionals, legal publishers, and the legal technology community.