Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 December 2016
Free access to public legal information for the general public and professionals promotes justice and the rule of law. Presenters at the 2015 Law via the Internet conference discussed projects using the power of technology combined with expert human input to make information accessible, and to extract new information from large document collections. Although the scale is different, there are similarities in the ways in which indexers and informaticians explore meaning, develop standards and consider user needs to make information widely accessible. Glenda Browne reports on the conference.*
1 See an earlier article on indexing in AustLII: Building a global legal index: a work in progress, by Davis, Madeleine, The Indexer, 2001, vol. 22 no.3, pp. 123–127 Google Scholar, http://www.theindexer.org/files/22-3/22-3_123.pdf
2 Wiktionary defines informatics as ‘A branch of information science and of computer science that focuses on the study of information processing, particularly with respect to systems integration and human interactions with machine and data’ and informatician as ‘someone who practices informatics’. I have previously written about health informatics and its intersection with librarianship (Browne, Glenda. ‘Forward-looking seminars: AGLIN and HLA in Canberra’, Online Currents, v.25, pp. 305–312, http://www.webindexing.com.au/forward-looking-seminars-aglin-and-hla-in-canberra/).
3 Shu, Xu. ‘The Shen Bao Index: its academic significance and effect on the development of Chinese indexing’, The Indexer, Vol. 33, No. 4 December 2015 Google Scholar.
4 Lihosit, Judith Research in the Wild: CALR and the Role of Informal Apprenticeship in Attorney Training, Law Library Journal, Vol. 101:2 [2009–10] 157–176 Google Scholar, http://www.aallnet.org/mm/Publications/llj/LLJ-Archives/Vol-101/pub_llj_v101n02/2009-10.pdf