Monitoring of the application of Community law . 16th annual report 1998

In a supplementary working document, the European Commission's services present the annual report on the management of the automated inter-institutional documentation system for Community law, called CELEX ('Communitatis europae lex'), for the year 1998. To recapitulate, CELEX was created in the 1970s as a service for internal use by the European Commission which then, over the years, became inter-institutional, to be finally transformed at the beginning of the 1980s into a multilingual system, accessible to the general public. In 1998, the Official Publications Office continued its efforts to improve the content and the quality of this data base, as well as its accessibility. The text content of the finnish and Swedish versions was considerably improved. At the end of the year, almost all of the texts available in the two languages had been loaded. The only remaining shortcoming between the Finnish and Swedish data bases and the other language versions is that the acts in force at the moment of their joining the EC are not yet translated. An overall inventory of the content of certain sectors of the base was also undertaken. The new Internet service inaugurated in 1997 was improved by the launch of a new version of the www interface. The result was a significant increase in the number of consultations of the data base. The number of documents visualised rose to 14 million in 1998 as against 8 million in 1997 and 5 million in 1996. CELEX has become the European Commission's most used Intranet service. Lastly, the report mentions two important meetings of the CELEX Interinstitutional Group (CIG), which resulted in the adoption of a strategic document. This document proposes the improvement of access to the Union's legal information in four fields: the extension of CELEX's coverage to documents other than those published in the Official Journal, an improved follow up of legislative procedures, the modification of the dissemination policy (in order, in particular, to reassess the need to provide this service for free; it is currently a pay-service), and the improvement of the synergy between the information services of the various institutions.�