YEARS OF EUROPEAN ONLINE ANNÉES DE EN LIGNE ...

MEETING OF THE COUNCIL WORKING PARTY
ON LEGAL DATA PROCESSING
egy. formerly these documents were never sent to the Publications Ofice and
even now the full collection will not be made available on EUR-Lex. the aim
remains to give more visibility to the impact assessments among acts of the
legislative procedure in EUR-Lex.
Since the Court of Justice irst started to put its documents into CELEX in
the 1970s, provision was also made for a sector giving access to information
on national case-law which the Court had been asked to collect by a Council
resolution of 1978. the irst phase of development will include the loading of
the data available within the Court itself, and provision for a continuous uploading
procedure. Phase 2 will include the development of appropriate search
functionalities. the data collected by the Court and the documentary work
on these data does not include the full text of judgments but information —
including under more descriptors — and an analysis. for the past — and the
oldest record dates back to 1959 — making the full text available is a copyright
issue. for newer cases, linking to stable national databases is of course
an option.
Until now, one of the options for browsing — parliamentary questions —
has remained undeveloped. EUR-Lex offers a link to the European Parliament
site, but this does not insert the parliamentary questions in the context of
other legal documents to which they are related. If looking for a certain theme,
a user might miss important information or views provided by a parliamentary
question and the answer to it. formerly, parliamentary questions were published
in the Oficial Journal, but very often quite a long time had elapsed since
they had been answered. the Publications Ofice is in contact with the Parliament
on the best way to give early access to questions and answers and constitute
the right metadata set.
Usability
the main rules followed when designing the EUR-Lex interfaces were
clarity and consistency. the Publications Ofice nevertheless ordered a usability
study on EUR-Lex. the study included tests with users regarded as nonprofessional,
i.e. neither lawyers nor documentalists.
Usability is generally deined by three criteria: the time a user needs to use
a system, the time he or she needs to execute tasks and the number of errors
he or she makes before getting adequate results. the inal report of the study
is expected to be available in february 2007. the outcome will then be
analysed and ways of implementation examined. for the time being, the
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