Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Administrative Law Blogs -> Within the Scope

Administrative Law

: Within the Scope

The Sesquicentennial Gift for Lawyers and Law Clerks

By Eric L. Lipman

In time for the 150th anniversary of Minnesota's admission to the Union, the Revisor of Statutes' office has made all of Minnesota's "Session Laws," from the Territorial days to the present, accessible through the internet. For anyone who is interested in the series of additions to, and substractions from, Minnesota law over time, this is important news.

And the Revisor's Office deserves our grateful thanks for making these items more widely accessible. As anyone who has done legal research in the online collections of other states will agree, the Revisor's Office continues to place Minnesota (and its legal collection) in a real leadership position.

This is no simple feat. As the Revisor's Office explained in a recent press release, the process for re-formatting these historical materials for online access was intricate and demanding:

The laws from 1983 to 1993 were in a customized format on a mainframe computer manufactured in 1971. As part of a larger project to develop a more modern bill-drafting and publishing system, these older laws were converted to HTML format for Web access. The laws before 1983 were converted from print. First, the original book bindings were carefully removed by staff at the University of Minnesota. The often-crumbling book pages were scanned and the results were subjected to optical character recognition (OCR) technology by Lason, Inc. Then programmers from the Revisor's Office and System Specialties Incorporated were able to transfer the data to the Web in over 40,000 searchable PDF documents. Meanwhile, U of M staff carefully rebound the original books for archiving.

Concluded the Revisor of Statutes, Michele Timmons: "I am delighted that technological advances and broad legislative support made it possible for the Revisor's office to improve public access to the historical session laws in this sesquicentennial year."

The whole, wonderful kit and kaboodle is accessible here.

Full post as published by Within the Scope on May 17, 2008 (boomark / email).