The Gazette 1982

JULY/AUGUST 1982

GAZETTE

LEGAL DATA BASE NOW ON TEST'

as text books, commentaries and articles in legal journals and books of precedents, would be of far greater value to the ordinary practitioner than the wealth of information already in the Data Base. For Ireland, the problem is that of a small jurisdiction whose statutory and case law is inextricably mixed up with that of the United Kingdom, so that the establishment of an "Irish Legal Data Base" would necessarily involve the inclusion of substantial amounts of U.K. material. It is understood that the major cost of a Legal Data Base arises in the original inputting of the material into the system. If this is the case, it would seem difficult to justify on any economic basis the establishment of a separate and comprehensive Irish legal Data Base, since it would involve the inclusion of much material already included in one or other of the existing U.K. Data Bases. This, no doubt, will be one of the points to be raised at a seminar which is to be promoted by the National Board for Science and Technology to consider the results of the project. •

A research project of the Department of Library and Information Studies in U.C.D., aimed at establishing the feasibility of establishing an automated data base of Irish Legal Information, is now available for test. The project, funded by the National Board for Science and Technology, has produced a small data base in the subject area of Constitutional Law. One of the difficulties which faced those organising the project in considering the choice of a suitable subject area was the non-exclusivity of the Irish Legal Data Base. In many areas of law, U.K. statutes still apply and United Kingdom case law is of significant persuasive authority, even where the bulk of it is no longer of binding authority. While one of the reasons for choosing Constitutional Law as the test subject was because of its general interest to people outside the legal profession, it must also have been in the minds of those making the choice that Constitutional Law provided an area of reasonable exclusivity. The system, called "Aidlaw", is a full text information retrieval system, enabling every word of the original text to be searched; the data base available is (1) The Constitution of Ireland, (2) The Text Book — The Irish Constitution by J. M. Kelly (3) Decided cases relating to Articles 1 to 15 and 40 to 45 of the Constitution. The data base includes full reports of some of the more important cases but, in most cases, only head notes and abstracts have been included. There are ten different indices to the material in the data base, which enable searches to be made not only through the text but also for the decisions of a particular judge, or the name of a particular book or the name of a particular article. The organisers of the project are anxious to arrange for as wide as possible a test of the system to be rru J by potential users, primarily with a view to ascertaining whether there is a sufficient demand for a computerised legal information retrieval system in Ireland. The service may be accessed directly by potential users through their own computer terminals, or be searched by an intermediary. There is no charge for the use of the service during the test period. Demonstrations or sample searches can be made by contacting one of the following: Aideen Cantwell, U.C.D. Tel. 693244, ext 8354. Jenny Aston, Law Library, Tel. 720368. Margaret Byrne, Law Society. Tel. 710711. This project has been carried out at a time when a major battle between competing commercial interests is being fought in the U.K., where two legal information retrieval systems are available, one being Lexis, which is being marketed in the U.K. by Butterworths and the other, Eurolex, which is being marketed by the Thompson Organisation. The merits and de-merits of the rival systems have recently been the subject of debate in the columns of the New Law Journal. Reservations are being expressed whether the data bases, as presently established, are of particular interest to the ordinary practising solicitor comprising, as they do, largely statutory material and reports of cases. The view has been expressed that the inclusion of what are called "secondary materials", such

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