Over the past 5 years or so, I have invested some of my personal time into the study of accessibility of local municipal code books through a variety of mediums, including but not limited to an online capacity.
In fact, my first attempt at broadcasting a comprehensive and all-inclusive municipal code book index I branded The Law Book List was initially a worrisome task - there's not much worse than a hyperlink-based index becoming outdated in a matter of moments, such as was the case one year when a major codification company changed their online address directory structure. Their upgrade was definitely a move towards more continuity in connectivity to the law books they hosted, but it made my index look far more inaccurately put together than what initially existed when I first posted my discoveries for all 50 states in the United States of America, which is part of why I discontinued maintenance on The Law Book List by simply taking down the site.
Not only were a chunk of my links being scored as broken, as I mentioned in the beginning - this was something I was doing with my personal time and I simply had no ideas on how to trim time off of the process that initially went into the first few rounds of The Law Book List. I had succeeded at producing one of the most comprehensive lists of municipal code books able to be found on the Internet - at least at the time of publishing - but it had taken well over a hundred hours to patiently visit hundreds of sites over a period of a couple of months.
With threads of notes and notations still circulating in the major search indexes from that particular projects, it remains difficult to view the Justice System as simply another industry perhaps Too Big To Fail. And with powerhouse conversations currently centering around generic content frequently studied and explored by the mental health community, if someone cannot access the rule book governing their health care, how can they be expected to know how to follow the rules built around the various contracts available to cover such costs...?
I do sometimes fret over the degree of current disconnect between access to local law books, but I still don't have any ideas to counter this otherwise disturbing trend to continue suggesting things like The Economy are preventing cooperation and compliance with a variety of transparency laws that have been around now for well over a decade. This isn't a paper cost issue and what is to prevent local law books representing potential income for the municipality...assuming someone was to chose to promote their law books in such a manner, of course. I also don't have hard-core numbers to back up this suggestions, I just have slightly different perspective and experience with rule books of a variety of kinds and types.
So although I may not be able to tell you where you can go to get yourself your very own copy of your local municipal code book, perhaps I will be able to once again build the most comprehensive index of municipal code books for the State of Illinois, The 2012 Illinois Law Book List.
In addition, I am also working on indexes relating to building codes and zoning ordinances, hence the very generic branding of this effort, The 2012 TCB Index. So once again, welcome to The 2012 Code Book Index, another perpetual work in progress that may or may not be the "most comprehensive" at the time of your stopping by...but I know it's certainly one of a few.
