Law Library News
by Shirley H. David, Director, Sacramento County Public Law Library

Sacramento is the host city for several law library associations meetings this spring. The groups are The Northern California Association of Law Libraries (NOCALL) a chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries, The Council of California County Law Librarians, and the Membership and Subscription Law Libraries Roundtable (MSLLRT).

Membership and Subscription Law Libraries Roundtable is a self-selecting group of fifteen law library directors from libraries that serve legal information needs of a varied constituency in a public or non-profit setting. They charge for some of their services and are funded primarily through bar association dues, court filing fees and/ or governmental funding. The MSLLRT has met annually for over sixteen years, to share member accomplishments and to serve as both an informal sounding board and benchmarking group for library services and programs for both internal and external customers.

The rest of this article highlights the NOCALL program that rivaled the Academy Awards for its space odyssey theme. NOCALL held its annual Spring Institute entitled 2001: A Capitol Odyssey on March 15-17. Sue Welsh, readers services librarian at the Gordon D. Schaber Law Library, McGeorge School of Law chaired the Institute Committee in her role of vice-president/president elect of NOCALL. Other local institute committee members were Pete Egler, Sacramento County Public Law Library, Maggie Kauffman, California Department of Housing, Evy Posamentier, McGeorge School of Law, and Carolina Rose, Legislative Research, Inc.

A pre-institute workshop on legislative advocacy, conducted by NOCALL's legislation committee was a first for the group. On March 15, twenty-five law librarians from throughout California learned more about the information policy and library funding issues that are part of AALL and CCCLL legislative platforms. Robert Oakley, professor of law & law librarian at Georgetown University, AALL Washington Affairs Representative (on leave), and president of AALL discussed issues such as the requirement of federally-funded grants to libraries to use filtering software on their Internet-accessible computers purchased with the grant money. Various library groups and libraries are preparing to sue the federal government for violation of first amendment free speech rights.

Adam Cohn, counsel, Sun Microsystems and former staff attorney at the Federal Trade Commission explained what the Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act is really about. Sun Microsystems as well as library organizations, business and industry organizations such as the Association of Computer Machinery, the Consumers Union, the IEEE, and FTC and twenty four state attorney generals are on record opposing UCITA. UCITA was written and approved as a uniform law by the National Commission of Uniform State Laws. The commissioners write proposed uniform laws with the American Law Institute. In a very unusual circumstance the ALI decided not to continue working on UCITA and they did not give their support to the proposed law. According to Cohn, among other things, UCITA would make mass market software "licenses" enforceable under state law. Licenses, which are disclosed after purchase and which contain numerous, unclear terms would be binding on the purchasers. UCITA would circumvent contract law and upset the balance between the promotion of innovation and the free dissemination of ideas.

At this point UCITA has not been introduced in California. However, a group of those opposed to the uniform law including Robert Oakley and your county law librarian met with representatives from the governor's office and state agencies to alert them to the problems inherent in the law. Computer professionals are concerned about the right this law would give software companies to come into the backdoor of a system and to turn off software. Allowing for such access also would open the door to hackers. An example used at the meeting was that a company such as Adobe® could stop allowing state agency customers access to Adobe Acrobat®, which has become the default software to view, complete, submit or download government forms on the Internet with no notice. I decided this was not so farfetched when I returned to the library to find the building elevators had been programmed to stop working that day because the building owner was disputing the price of the elevators. The owner had no notice that the elevators were going to stop like that.

Charles Dyer, Director of the San Diego Public Law Library discussed the county law libraries' efforts to receive supplemental state funding. The idea is to give county law libraries an additional revenue stream so that they are not so dependent on a share of the shrinking civil filing fee income. The outlook for success is bleak this year as the energy crisis continues to eat into the state surplus. The law libraries are also supporting AB 1103 (Papan), drafted by the California Law Revision Commission to clarify the make-up of county law library boards of trustees. The CCCLL lobbyist Michael Corbett presented techniques for getting your point across. Participants spent the afternoon putting their new skills to work at Capitol offices.

The NOCALL institute on March 16-17 was an mixture of what's new on the technology front and what are some of the ethical and philosophical issues related to our expanding use of technology, especially in the areas of biotechnology and intellectual property.

With Bion Gregory at the helm of the Office of Legislative Counsel, it was no surprise to me that California has the most all-encompassing legislative counsel's office in the country. Their on-line bill service is especially easy to use and the subscription feature sends bill status updates unmatched by any state.

The California State Library is responsible for the most recent improvements to the State of California Web page. John Jewell and his staff discussed the philosophy behind the remapping of the virtual Capitol. Librarians are experts at assuring multiple access points to information. This is what they do when they catalog books and when they listen to those seeking information to look beneath the question. Using librarian skills and the Singapore Website model of organizing access points by life events; the new ca.gov site is now organized by subject area instead of by name of the governmental agency. Improvements will continue as the search for a better search engine is completed.

Do you know that you are virtually required to file certain cases electronically at the Northern District Federal Court? Doug Purcell, systems manager for the court announced the new e-filing program at the institute. A limited number of judges are participating to test the program that began April 2, 2001. There are some exceptions to the civil cases that are assigned for electronic case filing but attorneys who manually file a component of the case will have to justify why they cannot electronically file their documents. The original complaint must be sent in hard copy however, because the court only accepts the filing fee payment manually at this point. There are also some restrictions. For example, Netscape Navigator® browser is the only browser that works reliably with the court electronic filing system and Adobe Acrobat® is also a key to the system. Attorneys practicing in the northern district is both large and small firms will now need to purchase software and hardware to comply with the courts e-filing requirements. By the end of the year it is anticipated that more judges will be requiring e filing of their cases.

The Surfing from River City web page highlights the website addresses for the organizations listed in this article as well as the sites for some of the information vendors who exhibited at the NOCALL institute.

The Sacramento County Law Library Ad