YEARS OF EUROPEAN ONLINE ANNÉES DE EN LIGNE ...

has worked with legal databases knows that it is not easy to establish links
based on citations in the text, because for many types of documents there are
no standard rules for the citation format, or there are some rules, but these
have changed over the years. for us it was a revelation to discover that CELEX
used a general format for all document types, and that the format was used
systematically both as document identiier and in citations. In addition, a
CELEX document would refer to other documents which cited the document
in a signiicant context. the CELEX number also said something about the
document itself — besides identifying the year and number, it said something
about what type the document was. we did ind it a little curious that the year
of the document was only represented by two digits, implying perhaps that at
some time somebody had not been totally convinced that the European Communities
was a project for the long-term future.
thE REASONS fOR BEING A hOSt
Several people have asked me why we still bother to be a host when all the
CELEX sectors are available free of charge in EUR-Lex. this may seem all the
more strange since EUR-Lex is a truly excellent system which is easy to navigate
and search.
my response is that by integrating CELEX and our national system we
achieved easier access to CELEX documents overall by Lovdata users. more
speciically we have established:
• chronological tables of content for all CELEX sectors,
• links from all national documents which cite CELEX documents, that is
from the national documents where the regulations are incorporated in
Norwegian law,
• links from all CELEX documents to national documents which cite CELEX
documents, so that if a national document cites a CELEX document, there
is established a link from the CELEX document to the citing document,
• easy and fast searching of CELEX documents on a par with our other databases.
Links are very important in our system. By establishing these links, which
are used very actively, I think we have obtained our aim of integrating Community
and national law at least to a certain extent.
historically there has been one other important reason for wishing to integrate
CELEX with our national system. As you know, Norway is not part of
the European Union, but together with the other EftA states we are part of the
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