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

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+.

Glassmeyer: CALI partners with law schools to build online tools for low-income litigants

Sarah Glassmeyer, JD, MLS, of CALI has posted Law Schools Team Up with CALI to Harness Skills of Law Students, Develop Online Tools for Low-Income Litigants, at the CALI Blog.

The post contains a press release, which begins:

The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI®) will announce at the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Schools in New Orleans on January 6, 2013 that they have reached agreements with faculty members from six law schools to develop course kits as part of the Access to Justice Clinical Course Project (A2J Clinic Project). Participating law schools include Columbia Law School, Concordia University School of Law, CUNY School of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, UNC School of Law, and University of Miami School of Law.

Each participating faculty member will develop and document a course model that uses A2J Author® to teach law students how technology tools can be used to lower barriers to justice for low-income, self-represented litigants. CALI will use those course models to assist other law schools in establishing A2J Clinical Courses as a permanent part of their law school curriculum.

A2J Author is a software tool developed by CALI and the Center for Access to Justice & Technology at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law to deliver greater access to justice for self-represented litigants by enabling lawyers and law students to rapidly build user-friendly web-based document assembly tools called A2J Guided Interviews®. These A2J Guided Interviews allow users to complete court documents by presenting a series of easy-to-understand questions while graphics virtually lead users along the path to the courthouse, where these documents can be filed. [...]

HT @caliorg

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

CALI’s Free Online Course on Digital Law Practice

CALI, the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction, is offering a free, online course on digital law practice, from 10 February – 6 April 2012.

The Twitter hashtag for the course is #tdlp.

The course will address topics including management of a virtual law office, electronic document automation and standardization, court technology, unauthorized practice of law, unbundling of legal service, and lawyers’ use of social media.

The instructors include Stephanie Kimbro, Marc Lauritsen, Richard Granat, Ronald Staudt, Kingsley Martin, Sarah Glassmeyer, William Hornsby, and Ernest Svenson.

For registration or more information, please see the course Website.

Conference: The Future of Law Libraries: The Future Is Now?

A conference entitled The Future of Law Libraries: The Future Is Now? will be held 16 June 2011 at Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Click here for the conference Webcast.

Twitter tweets from the conference are archived here in .csv format.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #foll11.

Click here for the conference program.

The conference will cover the following topics:

• The Law.gov legal open government data movement
• Open access law journals
• Open legal collections
• Collaborative work in law libraries
• e-Casebooks and open legal educational resources
• Human resources requirements for law libraries

New on VoxPopuLII: Glassmeyer on Innovation & Collaboration in Legal Information Services

Sarah Glassmeyer of the Valparaiso University School of Law Library has posted The Loris in the Library, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Ms. Glassmeyer addresses factors that may be inhibiting law libraries from adapting to the new digital information environment. Ms. Glassmeyer encourages law librarians to embrace technological and policy innovation — such as the Law.gov legal open government data movement — and to collaborate with publishers, computer scientists, and others on developing systems that improve legal information services.

This post may be of particular interest to law librarians, legal publishers, and developers of legal information systems.

Glassmeyer on Radical Trust & Legal Information

Sarah Glassmeyer, Reference and Access Services Librarian at the University of Kentucky College of Law, has written an interesting post about the authentication of digital legal information, entitled Radical Trust and Legal Information.

Glassmeyer argues that concern over authentication of digital legal resources published by free access to law services such as the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University (LII) is overstated. Glassmeyer argues that free-of-charge legal resources published by reputable institutions like the LII should be considered reliable if they accurately reproduce the data in the original versions of the resources published by the government, even in the absence of formal authentication.

Glassmeyer analogizes the confidence that the legal community should place in respected free access to law services, to the “radical trust” that Web 2.0 services — and their readers — place in user generated content.

Glassmeyer’s post is the latest contribution to the recent, lively discussion of authentication of digital legal information. Other contributions to this discussion include John Joergensen’s recent post on embedded metadata and authentication at the Hacked Librarian blog, and the conversation about authentication at the Law.gov panel at last week’s Princeton Open Government Workshop.