I learned something new and pretty cool today. Librarians at the 9th Circuit Court have been archiving citations in Court opinions since 2008 — and the Internet Archive has been archiving the archived citations in the wayback machine! However, I’m not sure if the change in their process is a good thing or a bad thing. Will those archived documents now only be available through the court’s filing system and PACER? Any law librarians out there who can clarify?
Since 2008, court librarians in the Ninth Circuit have been tracking citations to online resources and preserving original documents and/or web pages as Adobe PDF files. Although stored on the court website, http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/library/webcites/, the availability of these files is not readily apparent to legal researchers.
The process will change January 4, 2016, when PDF files of online resources cited in opinions are automatically added to the official case docket. The files will be immediately available to anyone accessing the docket through the court’s case management/electronic case filing system, or CM/ECF, and the federal judiciary’s PACER system.
Since January 2008, circuit librarians have identified 643 Ninth Circuit opinions having citations to online resources. The yearly totals range from a high of 102 opinions in 2011 to 69 opinions in 2014 with an average of 80 opinions per year. The number of web links cited in an opinion ranges from one to as many as 30.
via Online Citation Sources Added to Docket.
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