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AFRICANLII

Guidelines for Organizing and Developing a National Content Collection

Manual for National LIIs

Mariya Badeva-Bright

10/24/2011

This document was produced as part of the training of national Legal Information Institutes in the AfricanLII network.

Guidelines for Organizing and Developing a National Content

Collection

A Legal Information Institute publishes legal materials needed to conduct core legal research as well as appropriate secondary legal materials, such as law journals, law reform commission publications, and academic and other research paper of use to the academic or practicing lawyer.

The medium of the Internet, along with the flexibility of software and the storage capacity of servers, permit the publication of all available and all types of content on NATIONALLII.

Content collection

Identifying information types for inclusion

A Legal Information Institute publishes primary legal materials needed to conduct core legal research as well as appropriate secondary legal materials, such as law journals, law reform commission publications, and academic and other research paper of use to the academic or practicing lawyer. However, the limited resources that NATIONALLIIs have at their disposal mean that LIIs have to prioritize the collection and publication of content on the NATIONALLII website.

When organizing a national collection of primary legal materials, NATIONALLII will be guided by the doctrine of sources of law applicable to the national legal system. That is to say, that for a civil law jurisdiction, legislation collection on all levels should be prioritize, while in a common law one – a comprehensive collection of case law, along with a good collection of legislation, is important.

Content is then prioritized for inclusion based on the particular needs of the audience/the users that the LII is serving. This may be current legislation, comprehensive case law, or law journals and law teaching aides, should the users that support the LII would request.

Therefore, the national collection will focus on sourcing and publishing the following:

1. The Constitution 2. Legislation, primary and subsidiary

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3. Case law, starting with the highest court of record and including specialist courts and tribunals, e.g. Labour Court, Competition Commission, etc.

In terms of organization of the collection on a software level, the following broad categories for NATIONALLII will be created:

1. Legislative documents collection. Subsections here may include Numbered Acts, Consolidated Acts and Subsidiary Legislation

2. Case law collections organized per court, special court or tribunal

3. Government Gazette – the part of the Gazette containing the official legal texts, such as legislation, regulations, commencement notices, etc.

4. Othera. Law Journals b. Law Reform publicationsc. Academic and other paper series d. Various policy documents, papers and studies

produced in the legislative processe. Legal Notices – Government Gazette and Court f. Cause listg. Practice Directions h. Hansard – Parliament/Government Printer/

Nartional Archives i. Finding aides

How NATIONALLII prioritizes content for inclusion on the website is based on the priorities that the LII has established. These priorities are incorporated in a content collection plan.

Content Collection Plan

Guided by the collection principles as set out, a LII must develop and execute a content collection plan.

Content Collection Development October 2011 • 2

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Current materials

The strength of NATIONALII lies in the ability to publish court decisions and legislation as they become available without the lengthy processes and delays surrounding print publications.

It is, therefore, of paramount importance that a LII collects current material, in a comprehensive manner and in electronic form, preferably documents in Word, or any other Office application, format. PDFs and scanned documents should be accepted but as a matter of strategy data sources should be addressed to change and forward electronic documents, which can be processed with ease.

Therefore, the primary targets of the collection plan are:

Currency

Establishing a working mechanism for the collection of current case law and legislation on an ongoing basis – as judgments are handed down, or as legislation is passed.

Practical tip: Follow the programme of Parliament and the various committees, or obtain the court roll/cause list or other information available from the Courts’ Registrar to establish the periods of issuance of judgments and/or legislation.

Completeness

Ensuring that ALL judgments handed down and legislation passed is uploaded within 24 hrs of availability. A LII does not discriminate between Reportable and Non-Reportable Judgments. The reason for this is two-fold:

- a LII cannot rely on the court to always correctly identify matters as either reportable or non-reportable

- publishing all judgments on the Internet ensures that the public is able to scrutinize the decisions of the judiciary, which in turn provides a platform for increased

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transparency in the workings of the judiciary.

Ensuring that all new legislation (principal acts and updates) are published on the website as soon as they are published in the Government Gazette.

For current legislation, it may be a useful exercise to do a preliminary scan of availability of legislation on the Internet. The AfricanLII has published a catalogue of links on www.africanlii.org/catalog where websites offering free access to legislation have been listed.

Any collection from the Internet should be coupled with a detailed inquiry into the holdings of a local well-stocked library or other holdings of legislative information, e.g. Parliament, the Judiciary library or the Solicitor and Attorney General. The check should best be complemented by comparing responses from several sources of legislative material to establish proper versioning.

Similarly, other content types, Bills, journal articles, etc. should be included in the on-going content collection and publication plans to provide the documents within a reasonable time-frame and depending on publication times for each type.

Historical material

The content collection must further be expanded to include past judgments and legislation. A strategic decision needs to be made as to how far back and which decisions should be prioritized for inclusion into NATIONALLII databases. This decision wil be founded on reasons, such as availability, imapct and cost, that can be assessed only on a national level in the particular jurisdiction.


http://www.africanlii.org/catalog


For example, SAFLII’s strategy has set a goal of obtaining ALL high court decisions from South Africa dating back to 2005 and then going onwards. Prior to 2005 only reportable or actually reported decisions will be published. Courts of high importance for the country or the region, such as the Supreme Court of Appeal is for South Africa, may warrant the planning and sourcing of funds for more complete digitizations. For example, SAFLII digitized and published all decisions of the South African Supreme Court of Appeal from 1984 onwards and made available all Constitutional Court decision since inception. This was done to increase the impact of the SAFLII website both nationally and internationally, which would ultimately feed into its sustainability.

Online access to legislation remains one of the most problematic issues for researchers in African law. Access to both current and historical legislation is a very high impact project that a LII must undertake. Legislation is sought by both national and international users of the LII website.

It is recommended, as far as historical legislation is concerned, that the LII tries and obtains any consolidations of legislation that may have been produced by the nation. Key acts, such as the ones in the areas of commerce, trade, contracts, family and property law, along with investment, mining and minerals legislation should be prioritized.

It is recommended though, that at some point, the LII develops and motivates for a Government Gazette archive digitization project to include all laws that have been passed in the jurisdiction. This will serve as a basis of a complete legislative system for this country.

Content Audit

A content audit investigates the availability of material for collection nationally. It is constructed in a way so as to be executed at different organizations, orginators of primary legal materials. Further distinction is made based on a primary material type, source and electronic availability. Critical questions to be answered are:

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What legal material is available from a particular data source?

In what format are the documents available? How far does the material date back to? Can the material be broken down into years for

convenient processing? Could important past, reportable, decisions be

easily identified and prioritized in the content collection plan?

What rights to allow re-publication does the holding institution have? Who holds rights and who is entitled to issue a permission for digital republication.

A sample questionnaire matrix is included in Appendix A to assist with the identification of backlog collections for scanning and/or batch uploading.

Collection Principles

Comprehensiveness

No distinction is made between, so called, “Reportable” and “Unreportable” cases. All are published on NATIONALLII.

Where possible, a case should be traced back and judgments from the various instances should be published, for example, if a judgment from the Supreme Court refers to an earlier judgment of the High Court – the earlier judgment should be obtained and published on NATIONALLII. Linking between the two judgments can be arranged either by the Editor of the NATIONALLII or as a strategy goal – courts should be encouraged to implement citation strategies at a judgment/court level.



Authoritativeness

NATIONALLII sources materials directly from the court/tribunal/legislative body whenever possible. This is the basis for creating TRUST in the information and service offered by the NATIONALLII.

An often committed mistake is to publish judgments containing the seal and signature of the judge, contained in PDF files. The security of PDF files is a misconception – those can easily be manipulated once downloaded on a user’s computer. The best strategy for creating trust in the authoritativeness of the material published on NATIONALLII is the communication to users of the clear and transparent cycle of the judgment publication.

Alternative sources of legal documents will be considered subject to reliability/ authority of source and/or validation of content from another source.

Currency

Current cases are prioritised for upload.

Daily batches of judgments are processed whenever possible.

Language policy

Judgments are published in their original language.

Translations thereof, if available, should be clearly identified.

Case names are designated in the original language of the judgment.

Authenticity

Where judgments have been scanned PDFs of the image should be made available through NATIONALLII for purposes of comparing the content of the scanned judgment with the

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content of the HTML and DOC versions published on the NATIONALLII website/

Judgments consisting of the opinions of several judgments in the same matter will be combined in one document by NATIONALLII, irrespective of their receipt as separate documents from the Registry or Court Library.

Format

Judgments will be collected in all machine-readable formats, including audio.

The preferred format is RTF and HTML. Judgments are converted to HTML as this format allows for automated hypertext insertion and speedy download by users. RTFs are provided for ease of re-use of the judgment content by users.

PDFs are mandatory for scanned judgments. They serve as a verification version against the OCRed and proofread versions of judgments published on NATIONALLII.

Corrections to judgments

Corrections should be clearly indicated on currently published version of a document on NATIONALLII. A notice such as this:

Editor Note: This judgment has been corrected by the court and this version was put in place on [date]



The notice is to be placed on all versions of the judgment, in the very beginning of the document. The past version of the judgment should be kept on file if needs to be consulted by users and/or the judge.

Anonymization

In principle courts are responsible for ensuring privacy requirements with respect to personal information in judgments are met. However, a LII has a responsibility to redact certain judgments off personal and private details to protect the identity of vulnerable groups of society. See further section on Judgment Anonymization.

Retrospectivity

Priority is given to current decisions, i.e. 2005+ must be collected and published.

In principle there is no cut-off date for earlier decisions, but more recent cases will be loaded first, depending on availability.

It may aide users, the collection plan for NATIONALLII includes a list of important past reported judgments, still standing precedents, which are prioritized for scanning and uploading on the service. This creates tremendous value for users with less effort and financial commitment on the part of the LII. A good starting point could be either the electronic publication of the discontinued Malawi Law Reports, or consulting law school books and reading lists for cases most used in law teaching and subsequently in practice.

MNC

No judgment will be loaded on NATIONALLII without a Medium Neutral Citation being assigned to it. Please see below for explanation of the MNC standard.

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Paragraphed judgments are preferred, however NATIONALLII does not insert paragraph numbers. NATIONALLII should include this on its list of policy engagements with courts of the land. Electronic citation and full utilization of electronic judgments depends on the use of pin-point citation: a combination of the MNC and paragraph numbers in a particular judgment.

Court summaries

Where court summaries are available NATIONALLII should collect them for publication.



Appendix A – Judgment Audit Form

JUDGMENTS INVENTORY

REGISTRY 1

REGISTRY 2

REGISTRY 3

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A. ELECTRONIC INVENTORY

A.1 How is the material saved?

Word document

PDF format


Court Coverage (years)

e.g. 2000-2011

Regsitry1 Total Regsitry2 Total Regsitry3 Total

High Court

Supreme Court

Commercial Court

Industrial Court

Other


RTF format

All the above

Other

B. HARD COPY INVENTORY

1. LOCATION & STORAGE & CASE INVENTORY

1.1 How are the judgments stored? Fill in one or more of the following:

Storage System per court

High Court Supreme Court Commercial Court

Industrial Court

Boxes: Reportable and Non-reportable

How ManyCoverage (years)

Available judgments per BoxNo. of pages per judgment

Total

Bound How Many

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Volumes/ Case files

Coverage (years)

Available judgments per BoxNo. of pages per judgmentTotal

Looseleaf How ManyCoverage (years)

Available judgments per BoxNo. of pages per judgmentTotal

1.2 In each of these courts, where are they stored?

N.B. Please indicate the location, e.g. Library, judges’ chambers, archive

Centrally

Different places



If different locations can you indicate where, e.g.:

Library

Judges Chambers

Court Archive

Other

2. QUALITY OF PAPER AND PRINTING

2.1 Paper quality

Good

Flimsy

How old is the paper?

2.2 Text presentation

Handwritten

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Typed (typewriter)

Typed (computer)

3. ORGANISATION

3.1 Do you have a list of all judgments and their case numbers that can be used as a checklist?

Yes No

3.2 Do you have a list of terms frequently used by the Court to describe the judgments?

Yes No

3.3 Do you have a standardized form of case numbering? Yes No

3.4 If yes, please supply example

4. GENERAL QUESTIONS



4.1 Can the material be removed for off-site scanning, shipped to South Africa and back to Malawi?

Yes No

4.2 Can a bar code be added on the back of the judgments to assist in separating each individual judgment as they are sent out for scanning?

Yes No

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Guidelines for Organizing and Developing a National Content Collection€¦ · Web viewGuidelines for Organizing and Developing a National Content Collection. ... This document