Association of American Law Schools Annual Meeting January 6-10, 1998 San Francisco
Thinking and Teaching About Law in a Global Context as an Exercise in Common Enterprise

Section on Law Libraries - 21st Century Scholarship:
LegalKnowledge Systems on the Internet

[AALS Logo]

A restatement of AustLII

Moving access to law into the 21st century

Graham Greenleaf, Andrew Mowbray, Geoffrey King, Philip Chung, Daniel Austin

Part A: A future for public access to legal information?

  • Achievements
  • Changing environment
  • Responding to change

    • Part B: The world -wide law library on the internet

    Achievements

  • Quantity of data and databases
  • Quality - 'rich hypertext'
  • Powerful search engine - SINO
  • Extensive indexes to Australian and World law

    • Changing environment

  • 'Self-publishing' legal institutions
  • Alternative publishers - free access and commercial
  • Access problems - how to find distributed law?

    • Responding to change

  • SINO to search law no matter where located
  • 'Targeted web spider' + intellectual index
  • 'Exporting' AustLII's markup tools for use by others
  • New legal services - knowledge-based and user based

    • Part B: The world -wide law library on the internet

  • Project DIAL - testing integration of an index and a web spider
  • World index - with translations
  • DIAL search - with searches repeated over other systems
  • Embedded searches - a 'self updating' index