Will future generations will be able to retrieve the primary legal documentation being stored electronically today? What is the role of decision-makers and who are the stakeholders? How can the authenticity of digital legal records be guaranteed and do they require different standards of authentication than other electronic documents?
Judy Meadows (left), state law librarian of Montana; Claire Germain, professor of law at Cornell University; and Law Librarian of Congress Rubens Medina.
To increase awareness of these issues among law librarians, Law Librarian of Congress Rubens Medina; Judy Meadows, immediate past president of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL); and Claire Germain, Edward Cornell law librarian at Cornell University, met Aug. 17 with members of a recently formed task force in Ithaca, N.Y., to plan a national summit conference for March 1999 in Washington to address these questions.
To broaden participation in the task force, invitations will be issued to judges, legislators, regulators, members of the practicing bar, academics, librarians and archivists, court administrators, official printers, public and private publishers, Internet providers, webmasters and computer science engineers.
Ms. Meadows and her AALL successor, James Heller, director of the law library at William and Mary College, in late June appointed members to the AALL/Law Library of Congress Task Force on Preservation and Access to Digital Legal Information. The task force will provide a forum to discuss authentication and preservation of official primary law in digital form; assist in developing standards and guidelines; convene a conference to inform other stakeholders of the work of the task force and discuss proposed standards and policy guidelines; present to the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) suggested standards; and serve as a resource for NISO as it studies the issues.
Other task force members attending the planning session were Marie-Louise Bernal of the Law Library of Congress, Carol Billings of the State Law Library of Louisiana, Richard Danner of Duke University School of Law, Jay Greco of Cornell Law School, Kevin King, Supreme Court of Oklahoma, Janine Miller of the Law Society of Upper Canada Great Library, M. Kathleen Price of New York University School of Law and Daniel Rosati of the William S. Hein Co. Unable to attend the meeting were Nicholas Finke, director of the Center for Electronic Text in the Law, University of Cincinnati, AALL Executive Director Roger Parent and Marc Wolfe, National Archives and Records Administration.
