YEARS OF EUROPEAN ONLINE ANNÉES DE EN LIGNE ...

CONCLUSIONS
first, I would like to thank all the speakers who have made this morning
possible. they all showed that we always come back to one central point:
the user. Among the words very often heard this morning, I would mention:
the user, the reuser, and dissemination or redissemination of information and
documents on EU law.
the target user is the citizen, a personality very dificult to deine. And this
is particularly true if we admit that professional users — lawyers and documentalists
in national administrations, in courts, in law irms, in business, in
the academic world, in NGOs and in the EU institutions — are also citizens.
the morning showed that there are some users of expert search in the
room. Expert search has always been felt to be very dificult, and reserved for
some professionals. But thanks to opportunities for getting to know users, the
Publications Ofice has discovered that expert search is not only essential to
particular services within the EU institutions but also to a lot of users outside.
most of the people using EUR-Lex already feel that the simple search tool is
very complete and corresponds to the advanced search in most other systems.
It has also become obvious that the EUR-Lex user needs adequate background
knowledge to search and interpret the list of results, to stream down
the documents and to follow the evolution of EU law.
Discussions have shown that what is needed is a highly professional tool,
even at a time when we strive for transparency and to provide information to
citizens. Giving ordinary people access to a more sophisticated research tool
shows that its use is not restricted to professionals. But there is still a long way
to go to meet the special needs of non-lawyers. It is worth noting that more
and more citizens are becoming more and more interested in law. the number
of users without any legal training using legal information services seems to be
growing. the media increasingly provide legal information: a Luxembourgish
daily newspaper recently had an article about the digitalisation and codiication
of Luxembourgish labour law on its front page.
to make things easier for ordinary people, the EUR-Lex team selects interesting
documents the moment they are put online and constructs iles on
PASCALE BERTELOOT
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