See You in Court

The National Center for State Courts in Williamsburg, VA is a non-profit organization providing leadership and services to the state courts. Their website provides a tremendous amount of information, compiling and archiving all types of information gathered from a variety of sources. Just some of the resources this site includes are court statistics, links to court websites, a section on science, technology, and the law, a survey of judicial salaries, emerging court technology standards, technology vendor listings, trial court performance standards, and even a jobline for available court positions. They host a variety of online discussion lists and provide email newsletters. Just recently two new resources have been unveiled - the Court Information Database and the Court Information Portal.

The Court Information Database, prominently linked from the home page's left navigation bar, is a collection of information in 18 subject areas. The project is in its second year of development. Each of the main subjects are further subdivided, with the final documents available in PDF (Portable Document Format). Visitors to the site can either mouse over each of the main subjects to see a drop down list or choose to link to either a non-graphical display or an alphabetical listing. The main categories include topics such as case processing, scientific facts and the law, juries, and court technology. Subtopics for any of the categories marked with a number sign (#) denote that there is no information currently available. For each populated subtopic users will see a brief description, and links to publications, FAQs, events, education, and topic contacts. Since the project is still under development some of these areas are not yet populated. Linking to publications will reveal a neat listing that includes date, author, document type, title, and a summary for each available document. There is also search function available at the top of each page. While still in the early stages, the breadth and depth of this project is tremendous.

In addition to the Court Information Database, the NCSC has also created a Court Information Portal. This portal allows visitors to search the NCSC, court, and court related websites in any combination. A web crawler is used to search selected sites and help eliminate non-court related search hits. The portal page is divided by frames. In the left frame users can type in search terms, choosing a variety of powerful search parameters with a click, including fuzzy search, stemming, phonic, and natural language. Results can be sorted by rank, date, site, or author. All of the search parameters are carefully explained in the right hand frame. These instructions include how to structure search queries, including Boolean logic, phrases, and proximity. There is even a structure for synonym searching, with synonyms and antonyms provided from the built-in thesaurus. The search capabilities for this portal range from simple to complex and users will greatly benefit from reading about all of the options available. Once a search is initiated, the results are returned in the left frame, with the search instructions still available in the right frame. Search results include rank, title, location (URL), date, and file size. Choosing a result will open the document in the right frame. Frames can be adjusted for easier viewing. The top frame has buttons for "new search", "previous document", "next document", "help", and "home". This allows the user to fully extend the right frame to easily view the documents and still navigate the search results. By choosing "help" users can open the search instructions in a new browser window. Since frames have certain limitations, viewers wanting to investigate the full website of any of the search results will need to open a new browser window and copy the URL for the site into the address bar.

The National Center for the State Courts website has a world of valuable court information. These two new projects make finding information about the courts of the Unites States easy and accessible. Court professionals, bar associations, attorneys, judges, and the public can all find something of interest on this well designed site.