There’s been a lot of chatter this afternoon on Twitter about Nick Holmes Free Legal Web project. Today he posted his manifesto (not as scarily Soviet-era as it sounds) that outlines the (rather ambitious, I can’t help but think) goals and dreams of the project. Nick’s ‘plausible promise’ is that he will:

spearhead the development of the Free Legal web — a service that joins up the law and legal commentary and analysis on the web and delivers a useful service to both lawyers and the community at large. I need a commitment from a handful of others with complementary skills and expertise to kick-start the project. All suggestions are welcome and necessary to drive this forward.

The goal is to create a ‘joined-up’ free legal web, in some way making accessible all the officially provided free information (opsi, hansard, etc) as well as blogs, legal wikis, and other free available, but ‘unofficial’ sources of legal information. All in all a very laudable goal, I must say.

This is in line with the goals of the Power of Information Task Force,who are working to public sector information more accessible to the people. (There’s even a £20k prize if you think of something they really like!)

I think that at it’s core this is a really good idea – I’m all for making information more accessible, and taking some of the control away from the legal publishers, who currently hold the legal sector to ransom for their ‘official’ information sources. As Nick says in his manifesto, legal blogs and wikis are producing some fantastic commentary and discussion on legal issues, and are far more timely and accessible than journal articles and books. And it would be great to have a central location for accessing, searching and disseminating information from both the ‘official’ and ‘non official’ freely available legal sources.

The big question that hangs over the project though, is how is it going to be done? Will it simply be a portal site (though this ground is already covered very competently by Nick’s excellent Infolaw.)? A federated search engine? A mashup of rss feeds that you can set-up according to your own interests?

I think this is a fantastic opportunity to make use of semantic web style metadata. I don’t really know enough about the semantic web to start having an intelligent discussion about how it would actually work in practice but a semantic metadata powered search engine/giant mash up might be an idea? A quick web search reveals a number of discussions already in place regarding the construction of legal ontologies for semantic web markup.

A cohesive effort to get people using a shared ontology and semantic markup for the pages would be a great step forward, and would hopefully start paving the way for future (free) uses of legal information on the web.

Lots of concerns spring to mind too though, not the least some very disgruntled legal publishers. The sheer volume of (presumably) volunteer effort will make it a slow going process. Getting the combined online legal community on board might also be a challenge. And getting everyone to come to a decision? Fraught, but not necessarily impossible.

This is a very off-the-cuff response to what is a very ambitious and multi-faceted plan. I’m sure given more thought I’ll be able to think of many more things to say about it. I do, however, think it’s a great and very laudable idea, and am looking forward to seeing how the project progresses!

The European Commission recently released a statement regarding Europeana – the European Digital Library that will be opening in November of this year. I haven’t heard much about this, but the plan is to build a portal to European digitized collections, allowing the public to have access to the historical riches of Europe. It’s quite a neat idea, but I can’t help but think that the goal of having “an Irish art lover to get close to the Mona Lisa without queuing at the Louvre” might be a little far-fetched.

It seems to be very public oriented, looking at broad, thematic areas such as music, crime and punishment, travel and tourism. They’re hoping that they’ll get researchers to use it as well (though why they wouldn’t use the sites/databases of the primary providers is a bit beyond me), but it is primarily aimed at the ‘interested public’, whoever they are.

It’s being funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme, which is a programme to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable, which is a laudable, if rather vague goal. The project is being run from the national library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, and has partner institutions throughout the rest of Europe.

The idea is that it will just be a portal site, with federated search across all the member organisations collections, and with the complete digital object staying on the site it belongs to – the Bundesarchiv or British Library, for example.

I think it’s kinda a neat idea – digitisation is a good idea, at least from an archival point of view, if nothing else – but I’m not entirely convinced that it will be used. I expect it’ll end up languishing, like much of the public-oriented Europa sites, unnoticed, unusable and neglected. I don’t really know who they’re aiming it at – they might get a little further, and make it a little more practical if they did just aim the project at the researchers and academics that are far more likely to use it, rather than pretending that there is this great public desire for digitised historical documents. The public should certainly have access to such things, but it isn’t really high on the agenda for your average European citizen.

It might behoove the Commission to think a little more about who they’re marketing these things to, and how to market it appropriately, before spending all this money on projects that no one will use.