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Privacy California: “Library Privacy Protected with New Legislation”
Via: InfoDocket Congrats to Mary Minow! From a San Mateo Daily Journal Article: A new state law that takes effect Jan. 1 will add an extra layer of privacy for library users in the digital age. California’s library privacy laws were created before the advent of the Internet and, as a result, an individual’s interaction with the library outside of circulation was not protected under state law until Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 445 earlier this month. The bill was authored by state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, but inspired by Librarylaw.com founder Mary Minow, who also manages the Stanford Copyright and Fair Use website.Minow proposed the legislation as part of Simitian’s “There Oughta Be A Law” contest. Read the Complete Article: Continue reading
HTML for California statutes: Collaborate?
Ari Hershowitz, who runs Tabulaw (software tools for legal work), has converted California's statutes into structured html, with most internal references now hyperlinked (calaw.tabulaw.com), and has written about the process of doing this on his blog:
- How to Convert All Files in a Directory: CA Legislation.
- How to Convert Citations to Hyperlinks: CA Laws.
- How to: Convert Sections Into Hyperlink Targets.
- How to convert Text to HTML: Using txt2html Perl Module.
- California Laws: Converting Plain Text to HTML.
- California Law: Recovering Meaning and Metadata with RegEx.
...tracking of bills or proposed legislation becomes more meaningful if it can be compared to existing legislation. Please get in touch if you are interested in brainstorming or working with me to connect proposed legislation to the existing statutes to create a "legislative diff", or related improvements. Even better would be thoughts on how we can get California's legislature to include this metadata in the original drafts of bills.See www.tabulaw.com if you'd like to get in touch with Ari. Continue reading
A website that tracks promises in race for California Governor
While government information specialists mostly focus on information by the government, our users also want and need information about the government and the political process. Here is an interesting case of a website that tracks the political promises of those running for governor in California.
- Politics Verbatim collects and categorizes the promises, proposals, arguments and attacks made by the two major-party candidates for governor in California, Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown. The site allows voters to drill down on issues and hold the candidates accountable.
- California Watch launches Politics Verbatim, by Mark Katches, California Watch blog (June 21, 2010) "Check out the search tool that Davis created. It allows readers to sort candidate statements by nine different categories – including promises, attacks, and vague policy points. If they dodge an issue or a subject, there’s a search category for that, too. Readers can also sort by geography, to see where the candidates have been appearing – and what parts of the state they’ve been ignoring.... "The candidates’ statements are sorted by 26 topics -- from abortion to welfare."
Problems with Accessibility of California Law
Law student, Robb Shecter, who has created the OregonLaws.Org web site, wrote us recently about the fact that California Codes have accessibility issues:
The California Codes are published online (http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/calaw.html) with crucial information absent (removed?) that renders them nearly impossible to use: No Section names ("leadlines") are present in this version-for-the-public. For example, the Sections relevant to the California Highway Patrol are presented like this: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=veh&group=02001-03000&file=2250-2269 The sections are thus relatively unusable, greatly increasing the cost of legal research and defeating access and transparency for nearly all people. The missing information is also crucial for third parties (like me) who'd like to create easy-to-use directories of the codes. The needed information does seem to exist, however. The names for this particular section, for example, can be found on the DMV website, for example: http://www.dmv.ca.gov/pubs/vctop/vc/tocd2c2a2.htm Those DMV pages are unfortunately the exception that proves the rule. After seeing these Section names, it should be immediately obvious that these represent a crucial element of the codes that should be published along with the codes.Continue reading
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