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1st Seminar on Juridical Information Management in Digital Environments

Claire Germain 

Claire M. Germain, the Edward Cornell Law Librarian and professor of law at the Law School, traveled to Brasilia at the invitation of Chief Justice Ellen Gracie Northfleet to give the keynote address at the 1st Seminar on Juridical Information Management in Digital Environments, Brasilia, Brazil, on Monday, February 12, 2007. Some 560 participants attended, mostly law librarians, but also technologists and government officials and staff. All the presentations were simultaneously translated into Portuguese and English and streamed on the Internet.

 

 

In her keynote address Claire presented an overview of the public policy issues surrounding digital libraries and described some current trends, such as Web 2.0, the social network. She discussed mass digitization projects and then turned to some concerns, focusing on preservation and long-term access, e.g., how to prevent the loss of born-digital legal information that has no print equivalent. She discussed the special authentication needs of official legal information, "the word of the law," as well as authority, accuracy, version control, copyright, scholarship, and open access. Claire then addressed new roles for librarians: to evaluate the quality of information, teach legal research methodology, keep up with the breakneck pace of technology, and adjust to new information-seeking and usage behaviors of students and faculty, judges, and lawyers. She urged the participants to think of the long-term consequences of the digital world. So much information is available, but without any context, which raises educational issues. In the field of law it is not only a matter of digital competence, but also of legal consequence. Whose responsibility is it to train the public? Will there be a growing demand? Recent developments in the U.S. to add a legal research test on the bar exam are of interest to the whole world because they signify the importance of sound legal-research training to the competent practice of law. 

Other speakers included the head of the legal department of the French National Library, Sophie Septjian, who described the Gallica project, a French encyclopedic digital project, and Europeana, the online European library with contributions from twenty-three European national libraries. Marybeth Peters, the U.S. Register of Copyright, explained the U.S. law, while Brazilian speakers retraced the history of copyright law in Brazil and discussed different aspects of digital libraries and digitization projects. Dr. Rubens Medina, the Law Librarian of Congress, gave great concluding remarks, focusing on the need to archive and authenticate official legal information in digital form.

More information is available on the seminar Web site, as well as summaries in Portuguese of each presentation under "Noticias."

Now, a few personal notes on Brazil: it is a vast country with 170 million inhabitants, the Amazon is larger than Europe, and I heard that there are still some tribes in the Amazon that are not known yet. The food in the restaurants is very sophisticated, prepared with much care, and lots of wonderful fruit and vegetables. People are uniformly friendly and smiling. Brasilia was started from scratch in 1960, as a planned city, the capital of Brazil—lots of modern buildings and interesting architecture. On the day of our arrival we were invited to the private apartment of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Brazil, Ministra Ellen Gracie Northfleet, and treated to a wonderful meal and conversation. She is an extraordinary woman, very stylish, warm, and polished. During the conference she gave us a private tour of the Supreme Court and sat down at her desk to show us herself the various electronic databases of the court. She also walked us through their preservation department for rare books.

Left to right: Dr. Altair Maria Damiani Costa, Chief of Library and Archives, Supreme Court of Brazil; Janice Hyde, Law Library of Congress; Claire Germain; Chief Justice Ministra Ellen Gracie Northfleet; Dr. Rubens Medina, Law Librarian of Congress