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34 SCCLL News 1 (2008)

handle is hein.lbr/alsclnws0034 and id is 1 raw text is: I A Newsletter of the State, Court and County Special Interest Section of the American Association of Law Libraries I View from the Chair Sara Galligan, SCCLL Chair Authentication of online legal resources - we've been hearing about it all year. So how would you answer the question How trustworthy are your state's primary legal resources on the Web? If you can't quickly come up with a reply, you might want to again review the materials at the AALL website (www.aallnet.orQ/summit). The final report (State-by-State Report on Authentication of Online Legal Resources) includes a statement that State online primary legal resources are therefore not sufficiently trust- worthy. Because these free resources are usually the only resources available to self- represented litigants, I find this particularly alarming for those of us in state, court, and county law libraries. Here in the real world of Dakota County, I recently encountered an elderly patron with a question about car insurance. Apparently he'd been in an accident and believed his insurance policy covered the needed repair. Due to a contrary opinion of his insurance representative, he felt compelled to visit the law library to check on a state statute that the insurance company supposedly sent him. While he didn't have the text, he did have the citation, so we searched the online Minnesota Statutes to investigate. From what I could gather, the patron's summary of the text sent him by the company was not consistent with the online statute text. Obviously, there could be several things wrong with this picture. But left to his limited resources, how would this gentleman know if the insurance company sent him inaccurate information, either willfully or unintentionally? On the other end of the spectrum, here in Dakota County our law library implemented a project last summer to upload the county ordinances onto the web using a photocopier with scanning capability and Adobe Acrobat software with OCR and book marking functions. While the ordinances clearly display on our official county website, I failed to even think about providing any of the authentication methods described in the Authentication Report to convey the validity of our content. Am I off the hook because the AELIC report seems to apply more to state-level primary legal resources? It's quite commendable that AALL started this discussion, led the summit last April, and issued a noteworthy report on the authentication of online legal information. The report discusses the status of authentication in the fifty states and also includes an appendix with information on encryption and digital signature techniques. The report also suggests how we can take action as individual law librarians. As for follow-up by our SIS, Katie Jones, Chair of SCCLL's Technology Committee attended the Court Technology Conference and a program featuring AALL's authentication report. The program presenters included AALL members Tim Coggins and Mary Alice Baish as well as the Honorable Judge Herbert B. Dixon, Jr. (Superior Court of D.C.) who was a summit delegate. As AALL's representative to the National Center for State Courts, I had budgeted attendance at the Court Technology Conference in October 2007. With its emphasis on technology, I asked Katie to attend in my place. (View from the Chair continued on page 2)

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