Re: pacer program

[Stephen Schultze <xxxxxxxxxx@cyber.law.harvard.edu>]

John,

Aaron and I are eager to learn more about your PACER experiences.  We  
are indeed working on a system for downloading case documents via the  
library trial.  Are there open access folks at Rutgers that would be  
inclined to contribute to our efforts?  We are mindful of the fact  
that patrons' limitations in this regard may be different from  
librarians' limitations (and we are not seeking to know more about  
formal obligations that may be placed on librarians by virtue of  
being part of the program).  Perhaps you are aware of some Free  
Culture-ish patrons that sympathize with our cause?

Steve

--
Stephen Schultze
Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society
xxxxxxx@cyber.law.harvard.edu




On Sep 6, 2008, at 7:03 PM, Carl Malamud wrote:

> Tim Stanley (who drains pacer at Justia on a proxy basis) and John  
> Joergensen (librarian at Rutgers who is organizing the court  
> reporters on the east coast), please meet two very talented new  
> recruits, certified MIT rocket scientists.  ;)
>
> Aaron and Stephen have decided to adopt a local district court and  
> then take advantage of the local pacer "public" trial to  
> systematically grab all opinions for their jurisdiction and then  
> put them on bulk.resource.org.  I've given Aaron an account.  Once  
> we have an archive of their data, we'll scrub it for SSNs, then  
> figure out how to inform the chief judge that we have his data  
> available if he wants it.
>
> Tim, can you review sample docs that they harvest?  John, I wanted  
> to make you aware we have a couple ringers helping kick this off.   
> Both these guys are highly clueful.  I've asked them to a) turn on  
> the magic pacer header on the top of the pdf and b) embed the  
> information we need for a unique id in the metadata for the pdf file.
>
> Carl
>
> On Sep 6, 2008, at 3:57 PM, Aaron Swartz wrote:
>
> > Can you introduce us to Tim Stanley? Schultze is trying to figure out
> > which cases to focus on with his Thumb Drive Corps members and is
> > looking at the list of case names in Justia and wondering how it was
> > generated. Perhaps Tim can also review some sample output and make
> > sure we're getting the right stuff.