From Kumar Percy Jayasuriya of Georgetown Law Library via GOVDOC-L:
You may have heard that some law librarians have drafted a petition to ask the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts to enhance the search features of PACER (the database of federal judicial information) and to make it free for GPO depository libraries.On September 11 Erika Wayne of Stanford Law Library, Terry Martin of the University of Texas Law Library, and I will deliver the petition to the AO's office as well as staff members from the Judiciary Committee, Appropriations Committee, and Senator Lieberman's office. Please take this opportunity to join hundreds of librarians and such legal notables as Jonathan Zittrain, Eugene Volokh, Tim O'Reilly, Mitch Kapor, Ellen Miller, and many others in this effort to update PACER.
As government documents librarians, please consider lending your voice to this effort to create more open government.
Please feel free to write any personal comments if you sign the petition. From the petition web site you can read some of the insightful comments and additional requests individuals have submitted when they signed. We invite your input.
You can sign here: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/improve-pacer
You can also see the number of people who have signed (830 as of this writing) and see the list of names along with any comments submitted.
Also, we recently posted a summary to our PACER spending survey on our Legal Research Plus blog. The finding are available at:
http://legalresearchplus.com/2009/08/28/pacer-spending-survey/