No abstract

Cynthia Fellows, Philip Leith and Joe Ury report on the survey responses to a usage and attitudinal project carried out in early 2012 by the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII). There were 3,274 survey participants and their responses demonstrate substantial support for BAILII as an open access mechanism, a technically competent dissemination tool and a useful resource for lawyers and non-lawyers alike. Such positive response, we suggest, indicates that BAILII's resources are now threaded through the fabric of UK digital legal information, strengthening the ability of all citizens to access and become better informed about the laws of the land. Keywords: free legal information; open access; BAILII RESEARCHING INFORMATION USAGE IN LAWThose with an interest in exploring how technology has impacted the way legal information is being used have had very little information upon which to base their research. 1 Since most law was locked up through contractual agreements between courts, reporters, and legal publishers it was difficult to ascertain who was using the electronic databases, how often, and for what purpose. Such information was rarely made available given its commercial sensitivity to the legal publishers. The inception of Legal Information Institutes (LII) has hopefully changed this by manifesting a more open attitude to potential users of legal information. For the LIIs, usually funded as charities, it is a commercial imperative to prove to those who provide funding that the community actively uses the service. Without that information, then funding willand probably should -cease.BAILII has consistently promised its users that it will not use any privacy undermining techniques and thus cannot carry out the sort of background analysis that is routinely done by commercial information providers using tools which leave cookies on sites, analyse search patterns, and perform analytical consumer research. This means that a user survey is perhaps the best means (in terms of cost and effectiveness) to gauge information about BAILII's users, even though it is accepted that responses to online surveys are usually relatively low. In early 2012 BAILII posted an invitation on its website encouraging users to complete a survey and 3,274 users responded, a relatively high figure for this kind of research.BAILII is hosted in the UK and Ireland by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS), London and the Law Faculty, University College Cork. BAILII is legally constituted in the UK as a company limited by guarantee and as a charitable trust, supported by a number of major sponsors 2 and assisted by many other organisations and individuals. 3 BAILII celebrated its tenth anniversary in November 2010 and now comprises 90 databases containing over 297,513 searchable documents making up 36 gigabytes of data. Two servers offer parallel data access to provide 99.5% up-time for the system, these being based at the IALS and at Queen's University of Belfast, both accessed via the UK academic network. Usage of BAI...