COM documents on CD-ROM, August 2005

As promised some time ago when the general circulation of paper copies of COM documents to information relays ceased, a CD-ROM of the annual output of legislative and other COM documents has now been produced. To date only the 2003 CD-ROM has been produced but it does appear to work successfully.

Access to the full text of the documents in PDF is via either the Browse, Search or Keyword functions. The Browse feature offers three routes: a chronological list in date order with shortcuts via the months' buttons at the top of the page; by number - again with navigation by blocks of numbers to obviate scrolling; and finally by the 20 directory chapters.

The Search feature has a simple and advanced search as well as the option to search by date of adoption or by COM document number. Simple and advanced search results are ranked by relevance, the full text is searched and the search terms are highlighted. Results can be refined by searching within the list of hits. The advanced search allows the combination of three parameters, specifying the Boolean operators AND, OR or NOT.

The Keyword search uses Eurovoc thesaurus terms and is rather confusing as not all terms have related documents within the time period, thus initially it appears unclear how to actually access the documents. However if there are any relevant documents a number will show up in brackets next to the term and will link directly to the hits.

The CD-ROM offers a link to the live EUR-Lex site but curiously, despite the fact that it was produced in 2005, it goes to the old EUR-Lex site. Though occasionally the search seemed to be slow, it did run successfully and closed down without trouble. At first glance it seemed to be comprehensive but no doubt users will test that fully in due course. It is at least comforting to feel that there is something to fall back on if material should disappear from EUR-Lex or the system fail temporarily.