National Inventory of Legal Materials: A Call to Action

February 2010

Background

Many of the legal research materials that are considered primary are not freely available. What is freeoften carries the warning that it cannot be relied upon or is not official. For every state, there are differentvendor relationships when it comes to publishing legislation and regulations and in the assertion of copyright over that material.

Law.gov

is “an effort to create a report documenting exactly what it would take to create adistributed registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States.”A first step toward Law.gov is to create a national inventory needs to be created cataloging allprimary legal materials, and then some. This inventory can serve as a packing list of sorts,describing, detailing, and cataloging where one can find the laws of our federal and statesystems. And, Law.gov presents an opportunity to define what legal materials should be freelyavailable, not just the ‘primary’ legal materials. For example, the inventory could note theavailability of items that are created as part of that process (from briefs and filings of attorneys tocongressional testimony to many items in the “public record”, etc).

http://public.resource.org/law.gov

For purposes of this inventory, please refer to the excellent definitions of “primary authority” and “public record” as provided in

The Legal Research Dictionary: From Advance Sheets to Pocket Parts

, Second Edition by Elyse H. Fox.Primary Authority :The Law itself; authority that issues from one of the branches of federal, state or local government as part of its function, or thatissues from the constitution. Primary Authority includes the constitution (of a country or a state) or the charter (of amunicipality); legislation enacted in the form of statutes or joint resolutions (by state and federal legislatures) and ordinances(enacted by municipalities); treaties; decisions and opinions issued by adjudicative tribunals (either judicial or administrative);rules issued by administrative agencies or the chief executive; and rules of court.Public Record:Generally, a document relating to the conduct of an administrative agency, prepared, owned or used by the agency (such as adriver's license or a deed to a house). Used to provide information to the public or to record a transaction. Also includes courtrecords (including opinions of cases). Created by the administrative agency or by the individual (such as voting records). Publicrecords are widely available both in print or online, either free or for a fee.

Creating the Inventory

How to create the inventory? One way to build this list/document/database is to have librariansand researchers from across the country collaborate. A great deal of volunteer effort will beneeded -- from the creation of the categories to information organizations to the data entry itself.To test the process, it is helpful to have a prototype. BecauseNOCALLmembers were inattendance at the first Law.gov workshop, NOCALL is developing the first inventory – aninventory of California law.The NOCALL group is using a shared Google spreadsheet. Through the Google spreadsheet,they have a simple form that volunteers can use to fill out a selected group of categories.

The categories or columns for the first state-specific inventory include: title, publisher (past andpresent), government branch, URL, price, copyright assertion, official status, contactinformation, and other fields.The most important fields for Law.gov data collection are related to the price and copyrightassertion. When the inventory data gathering is completed, it will be a useful metric for Law.govto state the percentage of state/municipal materials that claim copyright protection or share theaverage price of primary legal materials.Although these categories are of primary importance to Law.gov, it is useful to includeadditional fields. Making the inventory as complete and robust at an early stage will make itmore flexible and useful going forward.With that in mind, individual working groups might determine that other categories should beincluded, or that current categories are not sufficient. To make this process as conversationaland educational as possible, it would be useful to have

all

of the working groups share a commondiscussion space (list-serv, Google group, blog, etc) dedicated to the 50 state inventory project –distinct from other committee work. In NOCALL, the team communicates via a Google group,and all are welcome to join this group

; there would be enormous benefits from a 50 state group.

To view the NOCALL spreadsheet, go to:https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AkcI6qiWO8VWdEttbzdwdllwcFhDNkFYa2lhanlNbXc&hl=en To view the NOCALL form, go to:https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dEttbzdwdllwcFhDNkFYa2lhanlNbXc6MA And, a blank template of the same inventory: blank template:http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tSkXiBIDRSafzGXbNOCNIsw&output=html

nocall_law_gov@googlegroups.com

Furthermore, when new librarian groups embark on their state-specific projects, they would bewell-served to start with a simple approach. For each title, take a single sheet of paper (or blank word processing document) and write down all the information that might be useful for thisinventory; after filling out similar profiles for a few other titles, determine what appropriatefields are needed to map to these documents.Ideally, for each state inventory, there should be one or two leaders. These individuals would beresponsible for granting permission to the shared content and spreadsheet; managing the contentand encouraging volunteers to add to the resource.One of the first tasks for any state inventory is to determine how to divide up responsibilities.With NOCALL’s effort, individuals in the working group are tasked with particular branches of government. Another individual could be the point person for copyright questions and anotherfor pricing questions.

Perfect should not be the enemy of the good on this effort – fields can beduplicated, information can be completed later – the most important factor is getting folks tocontribute as much content as they can, now.One easy task (one that is still underway in the NOCALL project) is to identify all themunicipalities in the state. (Many of these lists exist on the web at major university librarysites.) And, once all municipalities are identified, volunteers can divide up the list and startentering the information about these municipalities and their codes.Further, pricing information for many of the commercially produced products should bothinclude the cost to purchase the product, plus annual supplementation costs.

Next Steps

The NOCALL project thus far has employed fairly simple tools (spreadsheets, word, Googlegroups, etc). However, the hope is that once enough content has been collected on the NOCALLproject, NOCALL can call in the support of very technical friends to make the content into asearchable, web-based database.The improvements to data viewing should not slow down the efforts to create the inventory. If these enhancements do arrive before all of the other working groups have completed their tasks,the job of data entry might be improved.

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