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Montreal Association of Law Libraries (MALL):
Position Paper on Access and Dissemination of Quebec Legal Information
Montreal Association of Law Libraries (MALL): Position Paper on Access and Dissemination of Quebec Legal Information MONTREAL, 10 January 1997. - On 15 November 1996, the Montreal Association of Law Libraries (MALL) submitted to the Minister of Justice, the Hon. Paul Bégin, a brief responding to the concerns of the legal community regarding problems associated with the dissemination of Quebec legal information. The Association is of the view that the Quebec government must act rapidly in order to improve access to its legal documentation both by the legal community and by those subject to the law. The Minister will shortly be presenting in the National Assembly of Quebec a bill aiming to expand the mandate of the Société québécoise d'information juridique (SOQUIJ), a Crown corporation under the aegis of the Minister of Justice. This bill follows the report of the Committee on SOQUIJ, entrusted by the Minister of Justice with the task of reviewing the role of SOQUIJ. The Committee's final report, made public in March 1996, includes several recommendations aimed at increasing centralization of the processing of legal information in Quebec, as well as enhancing its commercialization. For its part, the Barreau du Québec also submitted a brief to the Minister of Justice, in January 1996, recommending that he take a broader approach by reviewing in depth the entire process of dissemination of legal information produced by his Ministry, rather than simply limiting the review to a re-evaluation of SOQUIJ's mission. MALL's brief goes even further, proposing that it is the responsibility of the Executive Council to adopt a global policy on legal information which will allow Quebec citizens easy and rapid access to the diverse sources of government information. Besides the sources of case law and legislation, there are a variety of services within the government producing "legal" information, which do not fall under the jurisdiction of the Minister of Justice. You will find attached a copy of the Association's brief, which was drafted by Judith Bird, Ronald Charest, Rachel Didier and Stephen Park. For further information, please contact MALL President, Stephen Park, at (514) 398-4715, ext 5745, email: park_s@falaw.lan.mcgill.ca
Quebec Legal Information: Access and Dissemination Brief presented to the Minister of Justice of Quebec in response to the report - SOQUIJ: mission, orientations et choix pour l'avenir - ******** The Montreal Association of Law Libraries (MALL) is a professional association which exists formally since 1987. The majority of its members are legal information specialists working in a law firm or similar environment, where they provide informational support for the practice of law. By means of the present submission, we request you, with your colleagues in the Executive Council, to develop a provincial policy of production and dissemination of legal information which will allow the general population of Quebec to have rapid and reliable access to the various legal information sources existing within the Quebec government. Legal Information and the State Legal Information We define legal information as all information having a normative character, emanating from all powers and branches of government: legislative (laws), executive (decrees), judicial (case law) and quasi-judicial (decisions of administrative tribunals), administrative (agreements and directives), as well as regulatory bodies (decisions and orders) and government registers (of land, of companies and of personal rights). Generally, the government authority which generates this information in the form of raw data provides a certain minimal classification framework, for purposes of retrieval. Given the diversity and lack of uniformity among these various legal sources, however, it is still not possible for a jurist in 1996 to consult the Quebec legal corpus in its entirety, even in the most comprehensive of libraries. The State as both Producer and Disseminator The State which, as noted above, is characterized by a multitude of services producing legal information, sees itself also as disseminator of that information. For more than twenty years, Quebec has been increasing its efforts to regulate the production of legal documentation. The mandate to disseminate case law has been entrusted to SOQUIJ, while Les Publications du Québec has distributed normative and administrative texts emanating from the government. In the more recent climate of budgetary deficits, these organizations are now required to be self-financing, a goal they have achieved very well, but not without danger. For obvious commercial reasons, they have both decided to diversify their product line, with the result that we are now faced with duplication between the two. The most glaring example is the publication of the laws and regulations of Quebec. Les Publications du Québec sells them by the piece in printed version and, electronically, via the Internet, while SOQUIJ offers these very same normative texts on both CD-ROM and as part of their online database service. To add to the confusion, each of these versions generally has a different currency date. The report - SOQUIJ: mission, orientations et choix pour l'avenir - defines the commercialization of products and services (legal documentation) as the major element of financing of SOQUIJ. In principle, MALL is in favour of the recommendation of this report that responsibility for government legal publishing be centralized in the hands of a single organization, but cannot agree with this tendency of attempting to extract a profit, at all costs, from legal information. Such an objective would encourage the sale of legal "best-sellers", while dissemination of other legal information to limited sectors of society would be neglected as non-profitable. Following analysis of the above-mentioned report, we submit the following recommendations with the aim of clarifying the issues when the time comes to take a decision on the future of SOQUIJ. Recommendation 1: Standardization of Computer Systems The government must bear in mind that it has an obligation to facilitate access to and dissemination of legal information to the general public. It is our view that, in order to meet this obligation, the government must require all its services producing legal information to place in a common site, at the disposal of the public, all raw data, organized according to a minimal classification framework. The action plan must favour dissemination via a single gateway, accessible by means of an information highway such as the Internet, and must also provide for a system of archiving historical information. The current situation must be rectified: proliferation of databases operating on incompatible platforms, with a variety of non-user-friendly search engines, and too many disparate user interfaces. Recommendation 2: Quality Control At a reasonable cost, legal information produced by the government and its services must be disseminated electronically to all those subject to the law, in the form of raw but organized data. The legal community has the right to expect the State to exercise rigour in the collection, entry, processing and dissemination of legal information, having recourse to qualified personnel, ensuring strict quality control and providing excellent client service. Currently, the updating of legal texts on paper is subject to significant delays. We believe that it is now possible to provide virtually daily updating of all legal information produced by the government. For concrete evidence of this, one has only to consider the Journal des débats of the National Assembly. As a means of accelerating the dissemination of legal information and controlling its quality, it would be reasonable to accord SOQUIJ the mandate of developing standards for the entry and validation of information, as well as the coding of raw data using a recognized standard such as SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), and ensuring that these standards are adhered to by the various services producing legal information within the Quebec government. Recommendation 3: Value-added Products The private sector must have the same access as any other member of the public to raw data, in order that the legal publishers may develop and distribute value-added products, such as annotated legislation, case law commentaries, specialized, topical collections, etc. The private sector, by managing legal information like a natural resource, will reap benefits from it, thereby contributing to the health of the Quebec economy. Productivity growth and competitiveness of private enterprise must remain a permanent objective of the State. We see no objection to SOQUIJ also offering value-added products, providing this is done on a level playing field, without benefitting from any government privilege, as is currently the case. Recommendation 4: Admissibility by the Courts All official documents emanating from the government in electronic form must have the same official value as their equivalent on paper. Economic considerations will make it impossible to maintain two parallel versions, print and electronic, in either private or public document collections. Recommendation 5: Crown Copyright Legal information must form part of the public domain in the sense of the Copyright Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-42. Under no circumstance can the State require written permission or royalties for the reproduction of an official document. November 1996