« Ind. Law - Attorney with Barnes & Thornburg's Chicago office featured | Main | Ind. Decisions - Court of Appeals issues one today »
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Ind. Law - More on the Indiana Register "changeover"
I attended a meeting at the Indiana Legislative Services Agency (LSA) yesterday where the new online Indiana Register was unveiled. (They are having a duplicate meeting Wednesday at noon.)
The LSA showed an online "dummy" of how the new Register might look. Unfortunately, only a few sample documents were posted, rather than a full-fledged trial site, which I have been promoting.
I remain concerned.
The best of the news is that the LSA has ditched the plan to use URLs as Indiana Register citations. They have replaced these with a non-intuitive document identification number (DIN), but at least this has a basis in dates and document numbers, rather than being tied to the location of a file on the current website, as the LSA initially was proposing.
Of course, none of this would be necessary if the LSA had not decided (for unexplained reasons which they attribute to the General Assembly), to dump the "paged" format of the current Indiana Register. Rather than simply publishing the new electronic, but page-formatted, Register online weekly, or even daily, the LSA continues in their plan to post only individual documents and require users to rely on a google-based system as a finding aid, rather than the structure-based approach we have relied on for 30 years.
I was particularly struck at the meeting by the lack of understanding of, and the resistence to learning more about, the needs of the world outside the Statehouse. My impressions were later confirmed by several other attendees.
I plan to write at length on the matter of the General Assembly's failing stewartship of Indiana's statutes and rules, but not today.
For background, here are links to the ILB's two earlier entries on the Register changes, from March 31, 2006 and April 10, 2006.
In addition, I submitted written comments to the Indiana Register late last month. I have made them available at this link.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on May 16, 2006 08:30 AM
Posted to Indiana Law