Topic 5 – Law - IT - Librarian Expertise: The Pioneering Role of the Administrative Library

Following a recommendation by the Council of Europe, the Administrative Library – together with the Constitutional Service Office of the Federal Chancellery – began developing a central database for legal information using electronic data processing in 1969.

New Approaches on Legal Information Access

Building on the journal Österreichische Rechtsdokumentation, launched in January 1969 by Otto Simmler, then head of the Administrative Library, a pioneering pilot project was initiated.

In a groundbreaking interdisciplinary collaboration between legal experts from the Constitutional Service, librarians from the Administrative Library, and IT specialists, federal constitutional laws, amendments, ancillary legislation, Constitutional Court rulings since 1960, and constitutional literature from 1969 and 1970 were digitized and integrated into the experimental system.

The often difficult-to-read rulings of the Constitutional Court were transcribed by magnetic tape recorders in the library, corrected, and then handed over to IBM. The evaluation process was carried out by 15 contracted legal experts, who thematically organized the decisions, removed irrelevant content, and assigned keywords and annotations. These keywords were then developed into a structured, categorized thesaurus to enable efficient search and retrieval.

"Court Judgment by Computer!"

In May 1971, an Austrian daily newspaper raised public expectations for the pilot project with the sensational headline: "Court judgment by computer!" The article proclaimed: "In just a few years, lawbreakers in Austria will be indirectly sentenced by a computer! In 5 to 6 years at the latest, Austrian judges will consult computers when faced with difficult decisions!" – Kurier, May 1, 1971.

However, these ambitious expectations could not be met. Despite the project's technical feasibility and impressive results, it proved to be far too labor- and cost-intensive. The effort required was disproportionate to the benefit, and the pilot project was discontinued on November 15, 1972.

The IT initiative, which cost IBM millions of Austrian schillings, was estimated by the company to have consumed the equivalent of 10 person-years – not including computing time. Nevertheless, the results achieved were well ahead of their time and received international recognition. The project successfully established a foundational system for structuring and accessing legal knowledge.

The Vienna System Opens the Door to the Future

The pilot project laid crucial groundwork for the development of Austria's Federal Legal Information System (Rechtsinformationssystem – RIS), introduced a decade later. One of its key lessons was the importance of integrating legal documentation earlier in the legislative process, rather than entering documents retrospectively.

Today, the RIS is a freely accessible online database of the Austrian legal system. It was established in 1986 and has been available to the public at no cost since June 1997.

A short illustrated history of RIS is avaible in German: Das RIS im Wandel der Zeit.

Link: 
RIS