Charbonneau on Collaboration & Open Access to Law

Olivier Charbonneau, Associate Librarian at Concordia University, and author of the Culturelibre blog, has posted Collaboration and Open Access to Law, on the VoxPopuLII blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this new post, Mr. Charbonneau presents a model — called the Collaborative Document Management Framework (CDMF) — of the digital legal information ecosystem. Further, he envisions a range of new platforms and tools enabling users of electronic legal information to collaborate:

• Open online legal communities that facilitate information sharing among users and mashups of primary and secondary legal resources;
• Non-proprietary, automated citators, featuring citations associated with stable hyperlinks for online legal resources; these citations and hyperlinks would be designed to be easily grabbed and shared by users, and to be dynamically updated as legal resources are revised or invalidated;
• Transparent usage statistics, so that users of those communities can see how popular particular resources are;
• Ranking of legal information resources, determined by users’ votes;
• Personalized, customizable user interfaces;
• Display of automatically generated suggestions of relevant secondary sources, when a user views a primary legal resource;
• Tools enabling users to annotate primary sources as they read; and
• Crowdsourced registries of metadata for legal resources.

Mr. Charbonneau developed many of these ideas in collaboration with Professor Daniel Poulin and his colleagues at CanLII.

Mr. Charbonneau expands on these ideas in his master’s thesis and his paper at the 2009 Law via the Internet Conference (click here for slides).

Mr. Charbonneau’s post will be of interest to all persons — including administrators and developers of legal information systems, and law librarians — exploring ways to augment the role that users play in online legal information systems.