PROXYsearch creation - PROXYsearch/PROXYsearch.github.io GitHub Wiki

We are three law librarians and one programmer at the AALL 2014 hackathon.

As law librarians, we recognize that sometimes government documents are difficult to find on government websites. For example, the South Carolina Judicial Department provides a way to search for South Carolina court opinions on its website, but the search function is fragmented.

The SC site lets you search for all judicial opinions within a range of dates. Alternatively, it allows you to search for all opinions by a certain judge as author. However, if you want to search for all opinions written by a certain judge within a certain date range, you are out of luck. That search combination is not possible on the current site.

Our group's goal today is to take the separate search functions available at the South Carolina Judicial Department's website and combine them into a single search template, allowing more flexible combination of search queries.

Our programmer helped us define the problem in technical terms, and singlehandedly built a solution. The SC site has five separate forms. Mike created a single form ("one form to rule them all") to mash the five segmented forms into one proxy search.