The SCALES-OKN team is very excited today to announce the launch of our first public software repository, PACER-tools
, which can be accessed on Github.
This repository is a place for us to share our tools with other researchers that work with data from PACER. As we build our knowledge network, our set of tools is expanding to deal with the acquisition, extraction, and synthesis of data in an effort to ask new questions of court records. At SCALES, our goal is always to support the broader community so we are focused on shipping as much of our software and toolset once it’s fit for consumption to help speed up the pace of research and innovation across the field.
The main component of the PACER-tools
repository at present is our software for automatically acquiring data from PACER. The software has three parts and allows the user to download query results, docket reports and case documents. It can also complete these queries as as separate tasks or in sequence, so given a PACER query it will download all cases and associated documents for the query parameters.