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

Malamud on Law.gov & Reforming Government IT

Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org discussed the Law.gov legal open government data project with Hari Sreenivasan on PBS NewsHour on 8 September 2010.

Carl also gave the keynote address, about reform of U.S. federal government information technology (IT) practices, at the 2010 Gov 2.0 Summit on 7 September 2010. Carl’s keynote may be of particular interest to the legal informatics community because the address focuses on the U.S. National Archive and Records Administration’s ERA: Electronic Records Archives system, which is intended to be the principal platform for preserving digital U.S. federal legal information. Click here for Carl’s congressional testimony about ERA.

Carl’s address also calls for the U.S. federal government to require use of open IT systems, as the Government of India is also considering.

Click here for Jim Stogdill’s response to Carl’s keynote.

Digitizing the World’s Laws: Authentication and Preservation

A paper entitled Digitizing the World’s Laws: Authentication and Preservation, was given by Claire M. Germain at the 76th IFLA General Conference and Assembly, held 10-15 August 2010 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Here is the abstract:

Many countries now provide online access to statutes, codes, regulations, court decisions, and international agreements. Digital law issues that have emerged include authentication of official legal information and preservation for long term access, particularly for born digital legal information which has no paper equivalent. This article is part of a chapter forthcoming in “International Legal Information Management Handbook” (Ashgate 2010).

HT @GovDocsGuy.

Fröhlich et al. on Digital Archiving (Long-Term-Preservation) at the Austrian National Archives

Susanne Fröhlich and Berthold Konrath, both of Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, and Alexander Leiningen-Westerburg of Siemens, gave a presentation entitled Digital Archiving (Long-Term-Preservation) at the Austrian National Archives: A Status Report = Digitale Langzeitarchivierung im Österreichischen Staatsarchiv: Ein Statusbericht, at e-Government Konferenz 2010, held 16-17 June 2010 in Villach, Austria.

Click here for the slides of the presentation.

Thanks to Ms. Fröhlich for sending the URL for the slides.

PeDALS (Persistent Digital Archives and Library System) and Legal Information

The Persistent Digital Archives and Library System (PeDALS) Project is a major U.S.-based digital preservation project, that is of interest to the legal informatics community. A primary objective of the PeDALS Project is to develop a system for preserving digital records of state and local government agencies, including legal records.

The partners in the PeDALS Project include:

• Alabama Department of Archives and History
• Arizona State Library Archives and Public Records
• State Library and Archives of Florida
• New Mexico State Records Center and Archives
• New York State Archives
• New York State Library
• South Carolina Department of Archives and History
• South Carolina State Library
• Wisconsin Historical Society

Technologies and standards utilized in the project include OAIS, PREMIS, and LOCKSS. The project also utilizes automated business rules — applied by means of a business rules engine — to process digital records.

For more information about PeDALS, please see the project’s Website.

HT Victoria Reich.

Greenberg on Preserving Legislative Digital Records

Pam Greenberg of the National Conference of State Legislatures has published Preserving Legislative Digital Records (2010). Here is the abstract:

In the last decade, technology and the Internet have opened access to the legislative process and created new ways for citizens to interact with their elected representatives. Legislative documents are created, tracked and transmitted electronically, and an unprecedented amount of information is being made available to the public online. This transition has made legislative work more efficient and has enhanced transparency, accountability and access.

But this digital revolution has also placed our legislative legacy at risk. Legislative records are created with software and hardware that become obsolete in only a few years. Documents are created in digital formats that deteriorate more quickly than paper. The authenticity of records is often subject to question, and information is essentially lost amid the sheer volume of records that are digitally created and stored without a practical means of access.

A national partnership [called A Model Technological and Social Architecture for the Preservation of State Government Digital Information Project], created through the Library of Congress and led by the Minnesota Historical Society, is working to ensure that legislative records will be trustworthy, complete, durable and accessible over time. This publication provides options, advice and simple, low-cost tools and practices to help with these goals, with an understanding that there is no single model for all states and no single solution. Each state must address and answer questions about the preservation of its records. Each state holds the keys to its legislative legacy.

HT Neil Beagrie.

Marx et al. on Digital Sustainable Publication of Legacy Parliamentary Proceedings

Professor Dr. Maarten Marx and Anne Schuth, both of the Universiteit van Amsterdam Informatics Institute, and Nelleke Aders of Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, will present a paper entitled Digital Sustainable Publication of Legacy Parliamentary Proceedings, at dg.o 2010: The 11th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, to be held 17-20 May 2010 in Puebla, Mexico. Here is the abstract:

We address the problem of publishing parliamentary proceedings in a digital sustainable manner. We give an extensive requirements analysis, and based on that propose a uniform XML format. We evaluated our approach by collecting and automatically processing proceedings from six parliaments spanning almost 200 years in total. Most of this data is real legacy data consisting of scanned and OCRed documents. The approach scales very well and produces high quality data.

All documents are transformed into UTF-8 encoded XML files with extensive metadata in Dublin Core Standard. The text itself is divided into pages which are divided into paragraphs. Every document, page, and paragraph has a unique URN which resolves to a Web page. Every page element in the XML files is connected to a facsimile image of that page in PDF or JPEG format. We created a viewer in which both versions can be inspected simultaneously. A search engine for the complete collection is available online.

    

New Legal Digital Preservation Archive Agreement Between LIPA & OCLC

A new agreement to facilitate the long-term preservation of digital legal information was announced today by the parties to the agreement, the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) and OCLC.

The agreement provides for “a discounted pricing program to allow [LIPA] member libraries to use CONTENTdm and the OCLC Digital Archive services as part of LIPA’s Legal Information Archive,” according to Margaret K. Maes, LIPA’s Executive Director.

Ms. Maes explained, “The Legal Information Archive is a collaborative digital archive established to preserve and ensure permanent access to vital legal information currently published in digital formats. It is an expansion of The Chesapeake Project, the pilot digital preservation program established in 2007 by the Georgetown University [Law] Library, the Maryland State Law Library and the Virginia State Law Library.”

LIPA invites libraries interested in preserving legal information to join their organization and participate in the Archive.

Click here for more information about the Chesapeake Project.

For more information on the agreement or the Legal Information Archive, please see the announcement, or visit the LIPA Website.

Call for Papers: iPRES 2010

A call for papers — with workshop submission deadline of 18 March 2010, and a extended submission deadline for papers, tutorials, and panels of 12 May 2010 — 5 May 2010 has been issued for iPRES 2010: The 7th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects, to be held 19-24 September 2010, in Vienna, Austria.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

• “Theoretical, Formal and Conceptual Models of Information and Preservation
• Trusted Repositories: Risk Analysis, Planning, Audit and Certification
• Scalability and Automation
• Metadata Issues for Preservation Processes
• Business Models and Cost Estimation
• Personal Archiving
• Innovation in Digital Preservation: Novel Approaches and Scenarios
• Training and Education
• Domain-specific Challenges: Web, GIS, Primary/Scientific/Sensor Data, Governmental & Medical Records
• Case Studies and Best Practice Reports: Systems, Workflows, Use Cases

For more information, please see the call for papers.

Video Available for Princeton Open Government Workshop Panels & Law.gov

Videos are now available for all of the workshop panels and the Law.gov panel from Open Government: Defining, Designing, and Sustaining Transparency (POGW), a workshop held 21-22 January 2010 at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP).

Click here for a summary of the legal-information-related discussion at the workshop.