Bulletin #5
Canadian Committee for a neutral citation standard
Minutes of the May 27 conference call.
Participants :
Daniel BOYER, Canadian Association of Law Libraries
Diane BOURQUE, Federation of Law Societies of Canada
Edna BREWSTER, Saskatchewan Queen's Bench
Maria CECE, Ontario Court of Appeal
Martin FELSKY, Judges Computer Advisory Committee,
Canadian Judicial Council
Guy HUARD, CRDP
Jennifer JORDAN, Appeal Court of British Columbia
Denis MARSHALL, Canadian Association of Law Libraries
Daniel POULIN, Judges Computer Advisory Committee,
Canadian Judicial Council
Ruth RINTOUL, QL Systems Limited
Sandra E. PERRY, Provincial Court Librairies, Alberta Justice
The meeting was opened with a review of the report on the last
meeting published in Bulletin #3 : broadening the Committee
has been accomplished, with two more members expected for
the next conference call, one a representative of the
Maritimes provinces and the other from the McGill Law Journal.
Publicizing to a larger audience is still to be done.
Daniel Boyer suggested circulating the working draft at next
week's CALL convention in Hamilton and also publicizing the
Web site.
Ruth Rintoul reported that Marie De Young from Nova Scotia
will include the Committee's work in her report on progress
since the November Summit at this convention. Marie will
also meet others from the Maritimes to designate a regional
representative on the Committee.
Martin Felsky reported a recent article in Lawyer's Weekly,
saying publishers have a problem with a neutral citation
standard. [The article, titled "Electronic legal citation
remains a thorny problem," quotes Butterworths Canada's
Gary Rodrigues, as saying that "The vendor-neutral citation
is the most consequential [to legalpublishers] because it
tries to level the playing field between vendors and
suppliers" and "reliance upon standardized document numbers
would lessen the value of the citation asset of the
information publisher."]
Daniel Poulin reacted by proposing that contacts with the
major legal publishers be established and the advantages
of neutral citations to them put forth.
Ruth Rintoul proposed that a list of benefits of neutral
citation to law publishers be compiled. Foremost is the
facilitation of parallel citations maintenance and
verification. This new document will be added to the Web
site.
The first two sections of the working draft were then
reviewed by means of the list of proposals and questions
at the end of the document, proposals dealing with the more
straightforward points and questions, with more intricate
issues that need not be solved right away.
Proposals 2.1, ordering of the elements from the general
to the specific, and 2.2, a single way of providing any
information, were readily accepted.
Questions 2.1, a unique identifier for each tribunal or one
for each official language, and 2.2, specification of
document language, and, if so, how, opened a central issue,
very specific to Canada, that of how to deal with the two
languages in the standard. Not easy.
It was soon proposed by Ruth Rintoul, and agreed, that a
sub-Committee should be formed to deal with this problem,
and that such a Committee should be staffed with
representative of bilingual provinces. Ruth herself, Daniel
Boyer and Guy Huard volunteered to be on it and Ruth proposed
that Maria Cece of Ontario, Diane Hanson of New Brunswick,
maybe Claude Marquis of the Supreme Court and also someone
from the Federal Court should also participate.
Daniel Boyer agreed to chair the sub-committee. The sub-
Committee should make sure that its proposals are acceptable
to courts in unilingual provinces, mainly that it doesn't
unduly burden their citations.
Proposal 2.3 was accepted provided it be reworded to be more
specific. The proposed character set is essentially that of
the English keyboard, also know as basic ASCII, or ISO/IEC
646. It is composed of the ten digits plus capitals and small
letters of the English alphabet, plus the English punctuation
and the few symbols seen on keyboards. [A chart will be added
to the web site.]
Proposal 2.4 will be reworded to read : It is proposed that
the standard be case insensitive. Thus case will not be used
to convey information, even if capital or small letters can
be used.
Question 2.3 about which separators should be used to separate
elements met with unanimous agreement that their number
should be kept to a minimum and they not be used to convey
information, as in regular legal or bibliographical citations.
Thus one separator should be used to separate elements (it
could be a mere space, or a period as the Court of Appeal
of Alberta is considering). Another separator should be used
to affix attributes (or suffixes) to elements if the need
arises.
Proposal 2.5 : Use of ISO codes for countries and dates, and
post codes for provinces and territories of Canada. In such
post codes, Quebec is designated by Qc rather than PQ.
Proposal 2.6 : The suggested length of court identifiers
should be of eight characters or less, including the
jurisdiction, which would be the province code. Thus the
province is not a distinct element. Eight characters is
not an absolute limit but tribunal identifiers should be
kept reasonably short.
In the course of discussion it was agreed to modify sections
2.1.3, On treatment of language, 2.2.3, On separators,
and 2.2.4.2, Designating a province or territory. These
modification will be the objet of an forthcoming message.
The call closed with members who will be at the CALL
Conference arranging to meet to co-ordinate actions.
As is now my habit, a very nice weekend to all,
with a special salute to our new members.
Guy
--
Guy Huard huard@crdp.umontreal.ca
Editeur LexUM
Centre de Recherche en Droit Public
Universite de Montreal
http://www.lexum.umontreal.ca/
Tel: +1 (514) 343-7853
Fax: +1 (514) 343-7508