Seven federal district courts are participating in a pilot program to make transcripts of courtroom proceedings available online.

     Those participating are the district courts for the Southern District of Alabama, District of Columbia, District of Kansas, District of Maine, Eastern District of Missouri, District of Nebraska, and the Eastern District of New York.

     In the District of Columbia, the district court currently has an exemption from the prohibition on remote public access to criminal case file information, and will be able to make transcripts of courtroom proceedings in criminal cases available electronically as part of the experiment.

     In other pilot courts, only transcripts of civil proceedings will be electronically available.

     The transcripts can be found on the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system. Information about obtaining a PACER account is available at http://pacer.uscourts.gov.

     In keeping with the policy of the Judicial Conference of the United States, the transcripts do not include specific personal identifiers, such as Social Security numbers, account numbers, names of minor children, and dates of birth.

     The project is expected to run from January through June, but may be extended through the summer of 2004.