Blog Legalinformatics reports that 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-Andr? 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 Facult? 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-Andr? 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.
To see what was discussed over the rest of last week please link to
http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2009/10/18/cornell-digital-law-library-meeting/
