 Part of what's going on with Carl's project, which we'll talk a teeny bit about, is trying to create a national inventory of legal materials, a spreadsheet of your database of all primary legal materials at the state and also at the federal level at some point. And it started off with California, and the folks at Stanford started off doing inventory through NoCal, a double A double chapter for California. And double A double L recently has kind of joined in to encourage, created these working groups for librarians in different states to join. Because double A double L's been very involved over the years in concerns about access to a ton of legal information, issues about authentication, permanency. And Joan's been very much involved in that. So she's going to give you a little bit of an introduction into what double A double L's done in the past with some of these issues. And I'm going to go into a little bit about the world that we've been doing, Joan and I and other people in Massachusetts on our own inventory as part of this larger project. Well, it sort of started, it says 2003, but I know it started in 2002 because I was one of the state authors for the state by state report on permanent public access to electronic government information. And double A double L was aware of the fact that with the event of electronic information it was possible to make more legal information accessible. The problem was to make sure that it was permanent. At least that was the first thing we were looking at. And here in Massachusetts we were making it all permanent because we weren't making any of the electronics, so that worked pretty well. And that was pretty good because what happened was by 2007 double A double L did their state by state report on authentication of online legal resources, I guess it was called. And by then five states had already stopped their paper administrative registers and went strictly to electronic sources. The problem with that is that they hadn't thought at all about the notion of permanency or authenticatability. So in 2007 double A double L held a national summit on authentication of digital legal information. And this was, they presented the findings from their survey and they invited lots of players from federal and state government and from all branches of government. And people who were really interested in this issue and one of the best things that came out of that in my opinion was the fact that one of the participants was one of the national commissioners of my uniform state laws. And she asked them to make a study group, which they did. And the study group made a proposal and the conference of commissioners has now got a working group on drafting standards for the authentication and preservation of electronic state legal materials. And that's part of what you've been asking for is a solution. Some of the players have already, some of the big players have already started. The commissioners have followed their procedures to develop standards that will allow that to happen. What else is on our team that we did? Oh, you want to click on the lovely, I don't want to show up there now. I want to show the lovely pamphlet because I hope that's one that AAOL did in 2007 adopt principles on access to electronic legal information you can flip to page two. And we decided that these five, these things are all, we think these are all essential and we're trying to get this information to all the makers of legal information to make sure that they know that what they produce has to be accessible. I have to tell my favorite story that I just love this story. It has to be a long time ago, but when the Massachusetts Register was not very old, like it was about eight to ten years old. I have a patron who needed some regulations and she couldn't find them anywhere and I called the agency on the phone and they said they'd send them to me and I asked why their rates weren't in the CMR. And I'm talking the paper CMR in those days and she said, well, we change them so often we decided it's better not to publish them. And I said to her, how do you expect anyone to follow them if you don't publish them? And luckily for me I can't remember what agency this was. It had to be a small agency that I didn't deal with often, but I thought, oh my goodness, you know, that was really the biggest case of inaccessibility I'd ever seen. But if you're old enough, as some of us are, the CMR didn't exist until 1978. So before that he really did just call all the agencies and ask them for their rates the way he still had to call most of the agencies to ask them for their opinions. But it has to be reliable that the official status is something that used to be given when everything was in paper. It's very difficult now to figure out what's official and what's not and harder. It needs to be comprehensive. And that it has to have to be to the future. When you're really older you have lots of stories to remember, but I remember when the Secretary of State of Massachusetts decided to improve the way the CMR was updated. And it really was an improvement in the updating of the CMR, but it totally destroyed historical copies of the CMR. And I know in my library we have like a six month to a year gap where we just actually don't know what the rates were during that time period because we didn't do a good enough job of preparing for that change. So that can be multiplied by zillions of times as more and more stuff moves electronic and is very fragile and temporary. So luckily double A double L is working on a lot of fronts including the working groups to go back to the PowerPoint to bring us back to what we did. And I'm going to put this on so people can follow the links to all the documents as of that time. So Joan and I and a few other people in Massachusetts have started working on the inventory. It's very, very much still a work in progress, but we thought when we were having this event today we'd share some of the things we found so far and I remember really that Earth's shatteringly new. We kind of already knew that they existed. And we're just kind of raising issues that we think are important for people to know about Massachusetts in general. So where are we looking at in this inventory? We're looking at the scope of the content. So for example if something's available on a government website, is it just the current edition that they made available previous editions? The format, are they making the content available only in HTML? Are they making it available in PDF? Are they making it available in XML? Which could be used for various purposes. Copyright assertions that publishers try to make on works. There's a general notion in Massachusetts that legally copyright is not an issue on state materials as it can be in other states. But when you look at a lot of publications there are a lot of copyright assertions. In terms of use sometimes different publishers, they might make their content free available on their website, but they might be onerous terms of use so that it's caused to just the earlier if you wanted to try to take that content and do something that you'd be limited. The costs involved in trying to maintain certain type of materials or access certain materials. The issues of digital authentication and permanent access which Joan raised currently, I don't think Massachusetts is dealing really right now depending on legislation with the digital authentication issue. And we're also just kind of looking at the whole sense of access in general, just how usable are these materials that are on the web for real people trying to use them. So overall impressions I have thus far and I think Joan would share them with me is that Massachusetts is doing an okay, I'd say okay not great but okay job of making current material available, but there's not as much access to older material except where libraries or other entities have maybe stepped in and had efforts to make that content available. One of the things that's frustrating about Massachusetts is a very diffuse system, so the content might be available but it's available in many different places. There's not a centralized portal or place or office or something that's responsible for pushing the material out or creating standards so that everybody's doing things the same way or on the same page. And as I mentioned before the other thing that the impression I have is there's a lot of copyright statements on materials. Now what that actually really means legally is kind of a separate issue, but it's interesting when you look at the various materials, especially things like municipal ordinances and such that have copyright notices on them. So one of the things I wanted to raise and I'm going to actually show you the website because it illustrates how butter is the SJC website for reports. So one of the things is you can get SJC decisions for free but only in certain formats and one of the big concerns is that if you want to actually access the advance sheets to the SJC decisions, which have the head notes and the proper pagination of the citation for citating the official reports, it's actually by subscription because West actually does the printing for the advance sheets and they also provide I think the content for this particular service. And I think this is the link to the pricing for it. Yeah, so you can see this is a different pricing if you wanted to try to get the pricing for it. You have to pay $175 a year if you have only up to 15 attorneys in your organization, but it can go up to $510 if you have a larger firm or organization. So that to us is problematic because should this content really be behind the paywall and I think the SJC or the people responsible would argue that there is this opinion archive and there are other forms of the decision available but really to have them not available with the head notes for that interim period of time before they're in the bound volumes is problematic. The other thing is a lot of the lower courts, some of the lower courts actually, there are different issues of the precedential value but still people have interest in looking at lower court, trial court decisions and even though they're available, a lot of times they're not available necessarily from the court itself. For example, superior court decisions, you can get slip opinions from social law library back to a certain point in time. And other than that, you actually have to pay for something like the Massachusetts Law Reporter, which is a commercial service that's put out or have access to Lexis and Westlaw to access such content. And again, that's problematic because you have a lot of people in the superior courts that might want to access that content that are limited. Moving on to the legislative branch of government, Massachusetts does make its general laws in Massachusetts available. Their print edition is actually published with West, which I'll show you an interesting issue in a second. If you look at the website, you'll see huge disclaimer on the top. So somebody trying to use it, an actual patron using it in a person in real life pro se trying to use it gets this very daunting message. Yeah, yeah, you can use this but you really can't rely on it. And definitely the law would actually like this because this really isn't an authenticated version of the text. And they're very concerned part of what they want to do with these working groups is do this inventory to make sure that websites where the information is not authenticated. It is clear to the person using it that it's not the official version. But from a user perspective, that's very discouraging I think in terms of the usability of the information. Also has a nice little suggestion about contacting a lawyer. And the other concern is, well, first they don't have previous editions. So if you wanted a previous compilation from a previous year, there are instances where people want to know the status of the law from let's say four or five years ago. You can't do that on their website. You can look at the session laws back to a certain period of time but not the codified version which is generally the more usable version for generally applicable laws. And the other thing is the time date which I'm not sure maybe some of my colleagues from the state libraries know why it's not as up to date as 2009. I didn't know that something to do with there are certain rules about effective dates in Massachusetts. How many days before statute actually effective and I didn't know if that was part of the reason why the current see currentness might be an issue. But that's another issue in terms of the usability of the website. So it's there and people can use it but it's not necessarily the most ideal way for people to access the information. The other interesting thing is the copyright statement and it's a statement that it's copyrighted by Massachusetts and Thomson Reuters. And then when you go further it didn't bother putting the text up but in the preface part it talks about how the editorial editions, it talks about all the different things that aren't in the original general laws and it's implied that West has added them. So it's a whole issue of what if we as a library wanted to go ahead and just scan the general laws and then make them available on what kind of copyright claims can they put on the editorial information and what would we have to be concerned about. But it's interesting because people generally patrons have the impression that the general laws are copyright free public domain and like I said in Massachusetts copyright on the primary legal materials is considered to be a non-issue but this is our official code put out jointly printed by West with some little bit of editorial, very little. And in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts so it's interesting to see the copyright notice there. Maybe Carl or others would have thoughts about that when we get on to discussion. And then Joan's going to talk a little bit about her impressions. Well, yeah, the first thing is that there is a searchable CMR that the state runs on the web. And of course not official and they want to share 110 bucks to search it and I don't know why. And good luck for us the trial courts have put links to all those rigs that are out there on the free web from the agencies but they're not in a searchable form, they're just there. And then there is the problem that Carl mentioned this earlier. Somebody mentioned it earlier. But that the CMR itself is full of all sorts of standards that cost thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to buy and that you can't produce and there needs to be, it's not just the needs to redo law, we need to redo the way standards are paid for in this country. Basically the revenue scheme from all the standards organizations has been, it's not showing up, it hates me. I always thought it would take a long time to upload because it's a big beauty and that's a good reason. But this is just a page from the CMR, I'm actually about six or eight pages from the CMR that lists all the different standards referenced in the building code. Or I actually didn't use the building code, I used the plumbing code, one of the codes. And if you have to go out and buy all these standards, which you have to do, it's thousands of dollars. I don't know how anybody complies with our rigs because I don't know any plumber who can afford to buy all this stuff. So it takes me back to the, you know, why do we publish, why do we pass these laws or these rigs if we don't want people to follow them? And older rigs. Oh, I mentioned that earlier that you can't get, well there's actually a microfiche version of the old CMR that you can buy, you can't get them electronically, you can't get an older version of the code and you can't even actually get to all of the mass registers. There is actually a, there's still about 20 or 30 issues that I've never found in the mass register that now that you take them apart and file them, when everyone did that, when they came out, I don't know if anybody saved a perfect copy that we had. Do you have one? I love them. I love them because there would be times in my life when I said, don't patron, I can't help you and I don't know where you can go to get help. You never, you know, if you saved a complete set, thank you. I tried to get my library too, I was overruled in my library, they thought that was a silly thing for me to want to do, so go figure it out. Dr. Romney under him is the one who actually started the chart. I do believe it was free before Governor Romney, so it's a free access of money. Well, and that's, I mean, part of the, when I did it back in 2002, when I was getting all the information for the survey, money was the big issue, that a lot of the Massachusetts information is in databases and it's dynamically generated web pages and it's awesome information that they could make available but don't want to and that at the time in 2002, my concern for them was, were they saving it in some way? Was there a way to find out what had been in the databases at certain times? And the state library had come to RAID and said yes, or RAID, meaning the people of Massachusetts, not me personally, that they started archiving stuff on disks or on floppy's or on CDs or something, just because they said this information will be lost if we don't just start saving it. And so they have a lot of it saved, but there's, again, no money to make it publicly available is the problem. And content that patrons need all the time, it's very real-life, affordable content. D, Marty, is there any sense of how much money they actually make from the CMR service? I mean, I can't imagine it's that much. I have no idea and we don't use it, so... You know how we won the federal register fight? When we finally found out the total revenue the government printing office was making on all the official journals of government, the federal register code of federal regulations, total revenue was $220,000, including $17,000 that we expect. So the minute Congress figured that out, they said, why are you bothering us with this? Drop the paywall. That's all it took. Technology decision from the state of Massachusetts. If you go and ask RAIDs, now I'll be talking a little bit about this. Our constitutional system of government, they have all these constitutional offices, they control their own electronic domain. The CMR is not controlled by the executive department of the governor, but by the secretary of the commonwealth office. So if at the time the Romney administration, these territories were imposed, they would have been imposed by a separate elected official, the secretary of the commonwealth. And it's one of those things that I'll be talking a little bit about in a second, that we don't have any central contents that can come up with rules about open access across the entire constitutional office. You do have the state archivist who was in the state archivist. The secretary of the commonwealth office, not under the governor. Right. And they're the people that are really in charge of making sure, I mean, everything that gets thrown away has to go through their office. I mean, you have to get permission to toss your stuff inside. It's awesome. There are laws in place that provide for permanent preservation of these materials. And it is through the secretary of state's office, not through the governor's office. Okay, so the other thing we noticed was looking at the agency decisions. They're really all over the place, as Joan suggested before. She did a little research and she did confirm that most agencies still are only, the decisions are only available for inspection. They're not really published. I'm looking up here because my screen went out, so just bear with me a little bit. The agency is very greatly in terms of the availability of the content and it's available in a lot of different forms, print on the web, commercial services. A lot of the older content in particular, it's got tied into commercial publishers. And that's one of the things that struck me in terms of going back to the issue again of what if you wanted to do some great project first on clinical or something like that and take the decisions and make them available. You would really only be able to do it easily for a certain period of time for the ones around the website, the agency that do make them available on the website because for earlier, even though the decisions in some cases go back into sometimes even the 70s or the 80s, there are issues because land law publishing has published a lot of them and they have a commercial electronic service and then a print service and they claim copyright on the content, so again maybe it's an issue, how relevant that really is. But it struck me in doing the inventory that for current material you're fine but for older material it's a lot less accessible without the costs and for this kind of information a person doesn't necessarily need just like the current five years or ten years they need to know what the whole body of law is for particular agency. And the other thing that we haven't done yet but that I'm really anxious to do once we've actually gotten through the whole inventory is it's been just an impression because I haven't really had time to really look at it carefully but there seems to be a lot of differences in the scope of the decisions that are covered in the different sources in terms of the land law publications versus the things that are on the website so it would be really interesting to do some statistics to see like how many decisions are available in each type of sources for a given agency. The other thing we did is, oh go ahead. I just want to say not just agency decisions but Massachusetts is actually a pretty good space in terms of other executive things. In a lot of the other states once a new governor or attorney general takes office they try to remove all evidence of their predecessors which means removing executive orders into attorney general opinions and we're a pretty good space here because our stuff is still up there even from previous administrations which is amazing and awesome so somebody is paying attention I hope and listening and keeping stuff available and not taking it away because it's not just getting it all there it's keeping it there, that's a big issue. And it's just really interesting because like for example I know when I was looking at the housing appeals committee decisions there was this big disclaimer on the website saying if you want all available decisions you must go to Lexus or Westlaw or land law and these are only the recent ones and it's just very interesting from a patron perspective to see that information presents it that way. So we're also trying to do an inventory of local laws, municipal and ordinances town by laws but because we just started the project of course we haven't had time to go through all the different municipalities and towns so we just tried to do a quick survey of a few of them and what was really interesting is that what was Carl's found in other places in other states is there are a lot of copyright claims on the content and what's really interesting is the people that were helping with the project there were a lot of discrepancies between what was claimed on a given website or publication versus what the vendor themselves said so for example I can't remember what town it is but one town on their website they claim copyright but when the person helping me contacted the towns clerk office they say oh no we don't have copyright and then vice versa another town had no copyright claim on their website yet when they were contacting them about pricing information and things like that they were told oh you can't just go ahead and copy it because we have copyright on it so it's really interesting the different information that's conveyed and I think how much thoughts put in by the vendors and the publishers and the notices that they put out but again it goes to the issue of what if you just wanted to take this content and try to make available in some other way because in some of these instances there are also terms of use on the websites that you can't actually do things with the content and also a lot of these sources are online now but there are a lot of disclaimers that the online version is not official and it's very out of date even more so a lot of times than the mass general laws and if you want to get a print publication you actually in some instances if it's not sold through the vendor you have to actually like a unit code or something you actually have to go to the town clerk's office to actually purchase so even from a library's perspective if you want to have the content in your library just trying to acquire it can be difficult and the costs aren't insignificant they seem to be ranging between $100 and $300 so this is just a list of the biggest commercial publishers and vendors in Massachusetts it's been really interesting Alexis I was noticing with the attorney discipline reports again they're claiming copyright on the content which is really interesting so those are sort of the bigger issues that we found doing the inventory and I would love to have conversation with the librarians here about whether they'd be interested in participating or any other issues they think that we're going to encounter that we haven't discovered already and if you're interested I can also show you what the inventory itself looks like Does anybody have any questions or comments? Does anybody want to help with the inventory? It's very interesting from a librarians perspective I mean like I said I went into this knowing I knew about the CMR, I knew about some other things but when you actually, you know when you help people with real problems that's when you notice these issues coming up with the structure of the content or the availability of the content If I should write you one I can show you what this spreadsheet looks like and hopefully I didn't feel comfortable because we're so early in the process and like Joan and I said it's not ready at all for the prime time and I don't even think it's ready for like good night cable station or anything like that but I'm going to show you what this spreadsheet looks like but the other thing I wanted to mention is that I think there's a lot of, to the librarians that are here I think there's a lot of potential to create synergy with other projects that we're working on for example in Massachusetts we have this B2F2 program going on a collaborative collection developer program with a different area academic law school libraries and it might be something that there might be certain types of data that we have this master inventory that we're using for purposes for Carl for AALL that we could use it for other purposes for example I thought it would be interesting in some instances especially with the ordinances where you know not a lot of libraries in a certain area are going to have a copy of like a local town ordinance except maybe for like the public library in the area I thought it would actually be interesting to go in and list which particular libraries might have a particular publication or if we're going to be canceling certain titles we can have lists of who who's the record holder for that particular title Somehow we've got to get past that and say you could be involved in the working committee even if you're not a AALL member I think that would be fun I think that message is out there and that you can take on a small part or whatever so I think we need to answer Yeah let me make that message really clear this was actually started by Paul O'Neill and Erica Wayne at Stanford it is very much a grassroots activity and we're very fortunate that the AALL is assisting in that on the other hand this is very much grassroots and I would encourage anybody to adopt a jurisdiction and make a statement as to what the state of that jurisdiction is and to do so in any way that is comfortable and I mean it could be the spreadsheet but if you prefer a Microsoft Word document or an email message I think the important point is to get the information out there and this is an awareness raising campaign so you don't have to be a member of anything in order to participate This is the spreadsheet looks like so this is very still much in the early stages but these are all the different things that we're trying to look at which is why you can see it's in her time assuming project but I do think that having worked on it now for a little bit that it can have a lot of applications so I think once we actually have that and I also think we could do really interesting things which I wanted to do but I just I didn't feel that that data was valid enough to do with visualizations in terms of the information like I would look to do with administrative decisions some sort of visualizations to explain like where the content is available for certain date spans and things like that but I think that the potential here for libraries to use this and just all sorts of different type of people the general public to use it is really great and speaking of standards I'd like to have us develop standards for this I mean we're looking at a spreadsheet that I filled in and I'm not sure of all of my data some of it I'm sure of and some of it I'm not and I would love to get more input from more people especially the agencies that are involved and people just other people's opinions of who really owns the data or who's doing what with it you know this is based on what I could figure out but I've been known to make mistakes in my life there was a time when I was young and had made no mistakes but now that I'm whole I've made quite a few so tell me about the Code of Massachusetts Regulations it's $110 is two questions is copyright being asserted and has anybody forked over $110 and just crawled the site and made it available you sound like an undergraduate help sign that right just in jail it's available on their website now I've called it and several older versions they have on the site budgetary information and the proposed bills that they're going through okay that's not the paid CMR though that's the legislative website the secretary's website the legislative website is great but is that the same as the CMR I know the CMR I'm shocked that there isn't an undergrad someplace how many universities are there in Boston most of our law students access it on Lexington Westlaw or through our subscriptions at social law libraries so most of the people who would want to break in have access to the data through some other paid vendor so that people haven't seen the need because the law students being on Lexington Westlaw is the same as being free even though in the real world nothing could be further from the truth but citizens of Massachusetts don't have access to the CMR well they actually I was in the title of the law we have access in our law libraries to the social law version because the legislature pays money to the social law to put it up and create it so we negotiated that and said it's public money creating so the answer is in 17 locations as you show up physically you can actually have access now you might correct me when I just said that going into the libraries can access to the social law but that's still sort of paid for I'm going into your libraries they can access it through westlaw as well that is correct it's physically show up in your library at one point the social law was charging us and we walked back and said wait a minute I'm interested in the person who is scraping the legislature website so are you making those available or are you kind of a 50 state project no my plan was to make them better for them and analyze them and also do an essential analysis especially over time and then I wanted to see if I could see bills actually impact and trace it back to the impact on one version of the law but as again I just scraped and done some basic cleaning of the day the single most powerful thing we've been able to show people in Washington, in the White House and Congress and the judges is something called OregonLaws.org when the State of Oregon sent us a takedown notice for having the Oregon Revised Statutes all we had was a big zip file and we went to testify and they waved the certions of copyright and about six months later a 2L at Lewis and Clark who had a COPSI undergrad took the Oregon Revised Statutes and created this just absolutely amazing beautiful user interface with semantic searching it's got everything you could possibly want and that's an example of the kind of innovation that happens when bulk access is provided to the data we've also seen the same thing on the Federal Register there's been a whole bunch of groups out there like GovPulse.us and Thread.org that have taken the Federal Register and done some really amazing things with them and that hits home when you show that to a judge because they go, wow, this is way better than what they had So I have a question for everyone else, the copyright expertise what do you think about the notices that there are, like, the general laws one? I, well, Thumb alone is going to deal with this Jamie Boyle has dealt with it Professor Pat Samuelson dealt with it look, I'm not a judge I'm not even a lawyer, I'm a law school dropout but in my reading of the public policy of the United States if you start at Wheaton v. Peters and you move along and look at the Supreme Court decisions is that there is no copyright in the law now, there may be copyright in a driver's ed film from a state but the law and at all levels my understanding and this has not been definitively ruled is that there's no copyright in that one of the big questions is do we need to amend the copyright law to make that more explicit one sentence, section 105 amendment that says the law has no copyright but certainly for the state legislatures that assert copyright themselves, right not over a vendor, that's a more complicated situation but when the state asserts copyright over their state statutes that seems rather speculative it seems so counter to me it's counter intuitive that if we want people to follow the laws you have to make them no I don't still understand why that's all of a sudden some wonderful revenue stream for them you know this issue is so easy to explain it's something that if you're sitting in a bar having a beer and you turn to the guy and ask him to explain what's going on and get it to you right and the common reaction on that is that's really stupid it's also interesting I think because I think that publicly people who work in Massachusetts government are joking correctly but I mean I have an impression in Massachusetts the public records laws are pretty good I mean the stuff is clearly staff toy required to be made available and then the issue is just how accessible is it really so you know you can have these wonderful public records laws where yet theoretically somebody has the right to go in and get the information but if you're not actually making it available that's a separate issue so maybe we need to be doing more in the state to strengthen those requirements because that is not publishing requirements but not as many I guess as there could be now you know there's one other important thing to remember when we went and discussed the issue with the Oregon Legislative Council he told me something very interesting he said you know that's a 1945 law we're talking about you know and it turns out in 1945 the only people that looked at the Oregon by statutes were lawyers and they looked at printed documents and it just wasn't an issue and the idea that ordinary citizens might want to consult those or even technical standards when I put US patents on the internet one of the main arguments from the commissioner of patents is nobody's going to want to read this why are you taking away our revenue stream because the only people that are going to access are a bunch of patent lawyers now that turned out to be raw right it was engineers and computer scientists and others were reading those patents but a lot of what we see in the current situation is simply the fact that that's the way it was in the 70s and the 60s and it kind of made sense and I think part of our job here is to kind of make the case as to why it doesn't make sense anymore we have lunch coming at 12 but we can break a little early so if anybody wants to help with it or please grab me or email me lunch is just going to be on a table outside I'm not sure it's actually there yet if it's not you can just know about restrooms are to the right outside the room so we're going to have lunch you can have lunch in here you can have lunch outside and then we'll come back at 1 o'clock for a couple more sets of speakers thank you