Thousands of court judgments and law reports could soon become freely available on the Internet following the launch of 'Open Law', a project set up by the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (Bailii) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), an academic committee for further and higher education.

Over three years, the two organisations aim to digitise more than 40,000 pages of material, including about 200 of the judgments most frequently cited in the core areas of university law syllabuses. Some non-core areas will also be covered.


Joseph Ury, executive director at Bailii, said: 'The project will involve tracking down these judgments, then working out the best way of converting the typed copy into electronic format.


'We currently receive all our material as Word documents, which we convert into html documents using programmes we have written, so there will be an extra initial step with the older judgments.'


As part of the project, Bailii plans to improve its search engine and conduct a survey to investigate how it can improve its user interface.


Bailli is an independent British charity, set up in 2000, that works to get legal material freely available on the Internet and encourage consistent formatting of law reports and vendor neutral citations.


When the project is completed, all texts will be available on its Web site.


Link: www.bailii.org.