Joergensen Profiled as Web Pioneer

Digital law library developer John Joergensen of the Rutgers Camden Law Library was profiled last week as a “Web pioneer” by Kevin Riordan in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Rutgers law librarian a Web pioneer,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 1, 2011.

The article describes John’s innovative work developing the Rutgers Camden Law Digital Collections, which provide free Web access to the full text of U.S. federal and New Jersey court decisions, statutes, ethics decisions, and legislative history materials.

Congratulations to John!

Joergensen on Metadata for Digital Law Reviews

John Joergensen, creator of the Rutgers-Camden Law Library Digital Collections, has posted Law Reviews: Scanning the Backfile, at the Hacked Librarian Blog.

The post describes his scanning methods, and also gives a detailed example of the Dublin Core metadata, marked up in RDF, used to describe the digital files. The post also reflects input from Staffan Malmgren, creator of the Swedish free access to law service lagen.nu.

CALI Taxonomy Being Marked Up in RDF Linked Data

The legal taxonomy of the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction (the CALI Taxonomy) is being marked up in RDF as Linked Data, in a cooperative effort between CALI, the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School (LII), and the Rutgers University Camden Law Library Digital Collections, according to Tom Bruce, Director of the LII, and John Joergensen, creator of the Rutgers Camden Digital Collections.

The CALI announcement is the second recent Linked Data announcement relevant to to the legal community. Earlier this month the Library of Congress (LC) announced that in 2010 it will publish a Linked Data version of the LC Name Authority File, which contains thousands of names of government agencies from the U.S., the U.K., and many other jurisdictions, as well as names of thousands of law-related individuals.

The CALI Taxonomy and the LC Name Authority File will join several other law-related authority files, including the LC Subject Headings, which are available as Linked Data. (Law-related subject authority files are commonly referred to as legal ontologies.)

These Linked Data authority files can be integrated with full text collections of legal resources — such as those of the legal information institutes or digital law libraries — or with collections of legal metadata — such as those of the legal scholarly repositories — to render the meaning, or semantic level, of the names and subject content in those resources intelligible to machines.

As Dr. Adam Wyner of University College London explains in his recent articles on legal ontologies and XML for legal documents, this rendering of the semantic level of legal information processable by machines is what is generally meant by the phrase “the legal Semantic Web.”

New Blog on Developing Digital Law Collections: Hacked Librarian

John Joergensen, Esq., the award-winning digital law library developer, and creator of the Rutgers University Camden Law Library Digital Collections, has launched a new blog, called Hacked Librarian, focused on the details of creating digital legal collections.

The first post, Supreme Court Documents, lays out the procedures John uses to process U.S. Supreme Court decisions to make them available in the Rutgers Camden Federal Courts Database.

I understand that John plans to use this blog to publish a range of procedures used in processing documents for the Rutgers University Camden Law Library Digital Collections. This blog complements the Cornell Legal Information Institute’s LexCraft Wiki, where developers of digital law collections share technical information and advice. Both Hacked Librarian and LexCraft are excellent resources for those developing or maintaining digital legal collections.

Cornell Digital Law Library Meeting

During the week of October 13, 2009, a very rewarding informal meeting of digital law library developers, administrators, and researchers took place at Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute. The gathering was graciously hosted by Dr. Tom Bruce. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a number of issues respecting free access to law, legal information institutes, and digital law libraries. Photos of the meeting are available here and here. Among the participants were:

• Professor Daniel Poulin, Director of CANLII & LexUM Laboratory;
• Marc-André Morissette, Chief Analyst at LexUM Laboratory;
• Pierre-Paul Lemyre, Head of Products and Business Development at LexUM Laboratory and a Ph.D. student at University of Montreal Faculté de Droit, studying the effects on legal systems of free access to law & legal information institutes;
• Daniel Shane, Software Developer at LexUM Laboratory;
• Elmer Masters, Director of Internet Development at CALI;
• John Joergensen, Reference & Circulation Librarian at the Rutgers University Camden Law Library, and developer of the Rutgers University Camden Law Library Digital Collections;
• Stuart Sierra, Assistant Director of the Program on Law & Technology at Columbia Law School and developer of AltLaw: The Free Legal Search Engine; and
• Sara Frug, Brian Hughes, Daniel Nagy, & David Shetland of Cornell’s Legal Information Institute.

On October 14-15, the following topics were discussed:

• Professor Poulin, Marc-André Morissette, Pierre-Paul Lemyre, & Daniel Shane discussed information acquisitions, text-processing methods, the treatment of images in court decisions, and administrative matters, respecting CANLII;
• Dr. Bruce, Daniel Nagy, & Sara Frug of Cornell’s LII, & Elmer Masters of CALI discussed their use of Drupal to present a variety of types of content, their text processing methods, and the costs and benefits of cloud computing;
• Dr. Bruce, Daniel Nagy, Elmer Masters, and Tim Stanley & Nicolas Moline of Justia discussed using OpenID & OAuth to enable streamlined authentication & access to online legal resources;
• Dr. Bruce, Professor Poulin, and others discussed various methods of legal metadata standardization, including encouraging courts, legislatures, and administrative agencies to adopt publishing standards, and the development and promotion of OAI4Courts as a means of standardizing metadata for court documents, to enable sharing and aggregation of such metadata in open repositories;
• Stuart Sierra described his methods for automated acquisition of US Federal Court decisions, as well as his text processing and data management techniques at AltLaw;
• John Joergensen described his methods for automated acquisition of court decisions, text processing, procedures for digitizing print and microfiche legal documents, and digital preservation techniques, at the Rutgers University Camden Law Library’s digital collections.

On October 16, the following topics were discussed:

• Prof. Poulin discussed the former challenges of adding secondary sources to CANLII, the new possibilities of adding commentary and user generated content to CANLII, and his desire that CANLII be a generative system, in Professor Jonathan Zittrain’s sense of that term in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It;
• Dr. Bruce, Prof. Poulin, Elmer Masters, and all the participants discussed their plans for sustaining innovation in the coming years at LII, CANLII, & CALI, and for developing business models and strategies;
• Dr. Bruce emphasized the need to develop standards to enable sharing of metadata and legal information objects among digital repositories, and to educate reporters of decisions about the need to enable information sharing in legal digital publishing;
• The LexUM team discussed two different approaches to taxonomies that they have tested respecting CANLII;
• Pierre-Paul Lemyre demonstrated several LexUM Web 2.0 projects, including Le Code civil du Quebéc annoté, which allows users to add annotations, and the CANLEX set of APIs for CANLII, including the RefLex API, which hotlinks legal citations in a user’s document. Prof. Poulin & Pierre-Paul also discussed Lexacto, a search engine enabling practitioners to index and retrieve content on particular legal topics, whether that content is located within or outside their firm. Some of this new technology will be tested at the Supreme Court of Canada;
• Marc-André Morissette demonstrated a drop-down table of contents-based document management system for legislative materials, called LexView, with the Canadian Criminal Code as a prototype. He said that similar technology would be applied to the Nova Scotia Annotated Civil Procedure Rules and continuing legal education materials for British Columbia;
• Dr. Bruce, Elmer Masters, John Joergensen, and the Cornell LII team discussed implementation of OpenID, the possible sharing of taxonomies, and possible collaboration respecting data for updating the U.S. Code;
• In a wrap-up discussion, each participant identified the most valuable information they acquired during the meeting. John Joergensen initiated a new discussion about the need for the legal information institutes to consider new issues in light of the institutes’ maturation and acceptance as key actors in the legal information infrastructure, and underscored digital preservation as one such issue. Dr. Bruce & Prof. Poulin reflected on their careers leading legal information institutes and how their personal roles had changed as their organizations had grown and matured.
• The participants agreed to meet again next autumn, either in Ithaca or in Montreal. Everyone thanked Dr. Bruce and the Cornell LII team for their gracious hospitality.

Many thanks to Dr. Bruce & his team for their gracious hospitality and stimulating discussion.