The Centre d’accès à l’information juridique (CAIJ) is the primary information source for Quebec’s legal professionals. CAIJ offers both traditional library services and a virtual library available online. Lexum’s expertise was called into action for the publications available on the eDoctrine product on the CAIJ website.
The Challenge
The Centre d’accès à l’information juridique (CAIJ) was looking to publish Barreau du Québec legal texts, which are highly valued by Québec legal practitioners, in electronic format. The documents include the Développements récents collection, the Collection de droit, the proceedings of Barreaucongresses, and a number of years of the Revue du Barreau journal, as well as the Wilson & Lafleur collection.
One of the project’s challenges stemmed from the fact that the layout code of most of the files that had to be processed was not standard. As a result, they could not be directly converted into HTML without any prior manipulation.
“Lexum was able to quickly publish online a large quantity of legal documents which allowed CAIJ to provide members of the Bar with more secondary sources over a simple and user-friendly interface”
– Richard Boivin, Director General of the CAIJ
The Solution
Lexum set up a publication system and automated editorial processes and processing to convert electronic versions of the documents into a format appropriate for electronic publication. Source files undergo automated pre-processing that transforms printing codes and parameters into structural components of the text via MS-Word styles. Next, Lexum editors check the files to make sure that styles are applied correctly to each element of the text: titles, sub-titles, paragraphs, quotations, footnotes, etc.
In 2020, the different collections included over 17,000 articles.