First things first…I’m going to try and get my arms around what the current crop of law published online by the creating government looks like.    Seems simple enough, right?    Actually, I don’t think it will be too bad.  Just tedious and, if the few websites I looked at today are any indication,  heartbreaking.

I’m going to stick initially with just basic primary state level material – codes, case law and regulations.  (Although with case law, I think I may go county by county – all 3143 of them – so that for later data manipulation I can get everything with the correct state and federal jurisdictions.  Because I just know even without looking into it that federal and state judicial districts will not overlap nicely.  BUT ANYWAY.. enough about cases for now. )  At this state level investigation,  I’m also going to include DC and the inhabited territories, so that brings us to 56 geographic entities for codes and regulations.

So what are the data points I’m going to collect?  I think I came up with a good balance of COLLECT ALL THE DATA and things that are actually important to know.  Since I don’t have a final product firmly designed for this outside of using it for research and comparison, I may have erred on the side of “collecting too much” but if I’m going to spend time on this, I want to make sure that I’m Doing It Right.  As you can probably tell, my list has also been greatly informed by the recent problems with the Georgia State code.    Here are the data points I’m going to collect for codes.

• Name of official version of code
• Is official version annotated or unnannotated?
• Publisher of Official Code
• Online version URL
• Is online version official?
• Statement of officialness?
• Format of Online Version
• Publisher of Online Version
• Use restrictions on Online version
• Statement of Copyright
• Current year only or archival versions available online?
• Code archive or session law archive?
• URL of Archival versions
• If archival versions available, how far back?
• Bulk download available?
• Search capabilities – none, basic, advanced/filtered

Am I missing anything?