Mowbray, Andrew; Chung, Philip; Greenleaf, Graham --- "Improving A Global Research Network Of Free Access Providers Of Legal Information" [2005] CompLRes 14 (18 November 2005)

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Improving a global research network of

free access providers of legal information

Presenter: Andrew Mowbray

[e-mail]

http://www.austlii.edu.au

Co-authors: Andrew Mowbray, Philip Chung and Graham Greenleaf**

Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII)

Abstract:

High quality legal research must increasingly be global and comparative. This is hindered by the limited range of countries’ laws covered by the centralized systems of the multinational commercial legal publishers, and by the costs of accessing their materials. Over the last decade, particularly the last five years, a global decentralized University-based network of Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) has emerged, providing both free access to legal information, and information of quality and international scope which is comparable with and sometimes better than the commercial providers.

The ad-hoc nature of the technical networking between the dozen existing LIIs means that the effective utilization of this shared infrastructure is sub-optimal and increasingly fragile. This is exacerbated by the network’s constant expansion. This paper proposes the development of a flexible generic set of tools to support and enhance access to WorldLII and more generally to any network of geographically distributed set of web based systems. Existing commercial tools are inappropriate, particularly for networks like WorldLII where different LIIs have vastly different technical and personnel capacities. The tools proposed will support redundancy and synchronization between local data sets, flexible load balancing and allocation of requests to a geographically dispersed set of machines and replication of data sets across such a global network.

This will give the LIIs a far stronger platform on which to develop more sophisticated ways of sharing access to their decentralized data, which will facilitate more innovative cross-jurisdictional legal research.

** Andrew Mowbray is co-Director, AustLII and Professor of Law, University of Technology, Sydney;

Philip Chung is Executive Director, AustLII and Lecturer in Law, University of Technology, Sydney;

Graham Greenleaf is co-Director, AustLII and Professor of Law, University of New South Wales.