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+.

Yates & Shapiro, Establishing a Sustainable Legal Information System in a Developing Country: A Practical Guide

Professor Dr. Kenneth A. Yates of University of Southern California Rossier School of Education and Charles E. Shapiro have published Establishing a Sustainable Legal Information System in a Developing Country: A Practical Guide, Electronic Journal on Information Systems in Developing Countries, v. 42, article no. 8 (2010). Here is the abstract:

In this paper, a practical systems analysis approach is described for the planning, development and implementation of the information technology required to have a sustainable legal information system in a developing country. Considerations involved to create, compile and distribute the country’s governing laws in electronic form are described. Alternative database search and retrieval options are discussed, as well as issues relating to distribution of the database online, on local media, or on both. Based on a reasonable set of assumptions and general requirements for a developing country, a model legal information system is then presented. By using the approach suggested in this paper, a developing country can fully evaluate the cost-benefit tradeoffs, as well as all other tradeoffs, in determining the most appropriate information technology to use for the creation, compilation, and distribution of its laws in electronic form.

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!