SCC Website – What’s Next?

24.08.2009

A couple of days ago I was at the Supreme Court to discuss potential improvements to the Supreme Court decision website. Some of you probably noticed that over the last year LexUM greatly expanded the scope of decisions available on this site.

We now have everything back to 1949, as well as everything from Ontario and BC back to 1876. If everything continues to go according to plan, all of the decisions ever published in the Supreme Court Report will be freely available online before next spring. With content becoming exhaustive, we are now looking to improve the feature set.

To prepare the meeting I drafted a wish list of features we always wanted to implement but that never made it online for all kind of reasons. I am interested to get your thoughts on this list and particularly on any missing feature. I cannot promise that any of them will be implemented on the next version of the website, but at least I can assure you that all ideas will be considered.

  • Structure all case related information under one interface (docket information, data from the bulletins, filings / factums, webcasts, decisions);

  • Cross references between related information of one single case;

  • Links on citations in the body of documents;

  • Links to appeal and first instance decisions available on CanLII;

  • Snippets or keywords displayed in search results;

  • Improved highlights of search results with navigation;

  • Ability to search in Webcasts;

  • RSS feeds (for website updates and also potentially by case);

  • Keywords displayed on updates for the mailing list / RSS / website;

  • Interface for mobile device;

  • Adding all PDFs from the report and making PDFs searchable.

Let me know what you think is missing.

By the way I think this is the first post on Slaw initiated by someone at LexUM. From now on you should see some from time to time as we will try to be more visible on the blogosphere.

Original document on slaw.ca.