Legal Research

Organizing archived Ontario legislation (and other content) on the Internet Archive

By Ted Tjaden

We have posted many times on the great efforts of colleagues within the library community who are working to digitize older Ontario legislation on the Internet archive and elsewhere.

The volume of content there is increasing.

Has someone, or will someone, create clickable Table of Contents to organize this content? I couldn’t find any such efforts or am I missing something obvious?

For example, it literally took me 3 minutes to generate the following partial (and simple) clickable Table of Contents for part of the 1980 annual Ontario statutes (warning: the PDFs are slow to load):

Statutes of Ontario (1981) [PDF]

Statutes of Ontario (1982) [PDF]

Statutes of Ontario (1983) [PDF]

Statutes of Ontario (1984) [PDF]

Statutes of Ontario (1985) [PDF]

Statutes of Ontario (1986) [PDF]

Statutes of Ontario (1987) [PDF]

In the absence of such organization, I would suspect usage of these materials would be minimal since I have found results from searches to be relatively happenstance.

I assume the work of coding a Table of Contents could easily be divided up. Would there be an academic law library willing to host the Table of Contents? Could we do it here on SLAW if it is not being done elsewhere? What other content should be organized?

I am open to suggestions (and enlightenment if I am missing something).

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on May 27, 2009 (boomark / email).