shlep: the Self-Help Law ExPress

More and more legal and government information is available online. But how well is it organized? Can you find it easily, or do you have to wade through menu after menu? Is it presented in a way that newcomers can figure out or does the organization only make sense to insiders? Two organizations offer criteria for best practices and give examples of courts and agencies that have really good websites.

Justice Served is a group of court management consultants. Since 1999 it has been giving Top-10 Court Website Awards — mostly to U.S. courts, but this year’s awards include courts in Australia and Singapore. Are you trying to provide information to the public? Looking at the honored websites and reading Justice Served’s descriptions can be a good way to get ideas for information to post, services to offer, and how to do it. Are you a citizen/consumer who would like your own courts to have better websites? Here are some ideas for your wish list.

Note that no one is perfect, not even award winners. For instance, I looked at a site that was supposed to have helpful information about translation services and didn’t see it right away. I figured that if someone with my level of literacy in English couldn’t spot it, then the people who really need it would have one heck of a time. In contrast, the California Courts put “Self-Help” in the upper left corner and, right beneath it, “Centro de Ayuda.”  If you were a native speaker of Spanish, I think “Ayuda” would stand out. (If you go to either the English or the Spanish self-help page, you find in the lower right corner a link to “More Languages – Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese — or, en Español, Más idiomas – Chino, Coreano, Vietnamés.) Looking at several sites can help you improve even a site that’s already good.

Justice Served’s Criteria for Evaluating the Top-10 Court Related Websites are worth exploring.

Several years ago the American Association of Law Libraries set up a standing committee:

The Access to Electronic Legal Information Committee shall articulate and advance the law library profession’s principles and values concerning public information provided on government websites. Such principles and values include permanent public access, authenticity, citizen usability, comprehensiveness and other suitability for legal research and reflect the special concerns and unique competencies of law librarians.

AELIC’s website offers General Website Evaluation Criteria and examples of good sites in different categories (e.g., a general court site, a general local government site, and sites with appellate opinions, court rules, statutory codes, executive orders).  Again, thinking about the criteria and looking at sites that do their jobs well can give you good ideas, either as a provider or as a consumer.