Standard Compliant Content Collection and Dissemination

Mariya Badeva-BrightAfricanLII

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Identifying Collections

• Sources of Law• Ideally: – The Constitution – Legislation, primary and subsidiary– Case law, starting with the highest court of record

and including specialist courts and tribunals, e.g. Labour Court, Competition Commission, etc.

• Prioritizing according to audience and need

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Arrangement on the website• Legislative documents collection. Subsections here may include

Numbered Acts, Consolidated Acts and Subsidiary Legislation• Case law collections organized per court, special court or tribunal• Government Gazette – the part of the Gazette containing the official

legal texts, such as legislation, regulations, commencement notices, etc.• Other

– Law Journals – Law Reform publications– Academic and other paper series – Various policy documents, papers and studies produced in the legislative

process– Legal Notices – Government Gazette and Court – Cause list– Practice Directions – Hansard – Parliament/Government Printer/ Nartional Archives – Finding aides

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METHODOLOGIES

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Content collection plan

• Current material• Completeness– All judgments and legislation

• Is it possible?• Is it needed?

– Reportable and non-reportable• Historical material– Availability– Impact– Cost

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Content Audit

– 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.

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Quality Control

• Completeness – Important cases and legislation are published– All current judgments and legislation are available

• Complete and correct metadata• Complete and correct attachments• Removal of duplication• Standards compliance– MNC– Case naming

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COLLECTION PRINCIPLES

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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.

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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.

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Currency

• Current cases are prioritised for upload.• Daily batches of judgments are processed

whenever possible.

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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.

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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 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.

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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.

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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.

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Anonymization

• In principle courts should 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.

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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 if 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 Law Reports, or consulting law school books and reading lists for cases most used in law teaching and subsequently in practice.

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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.

• 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

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Court summaries

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

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THANK YOU