July 20, 2004
AALL Exhibit Tidbits: Tracking Online Research
It can be difficult to know how frequently the costly web research services your firm subscribes to are actually used. Many web vendors don't provide any kind of usage data for unlimited, subscription-based services. Elite Research Manager and Research Agent want to help you with that problem.
Thomson Elite unveiled their new Elite Research Manager at AALL last week. ERM is actually a licensed version of Lookup Precision, previously called Online Lookup.
ERM is designed to help recover costs by providing client validation and/or monitor usage for electronic subscriptions, such as Pacer, BNA, CCH, Westlaw, LexisNexis and LiveEdgar, just to name a few.
In addition to Lookup Precision's standard features, ERM also integrates with the Elite billing system so that cost recovery is speedy and accurate, and client-matter information is accurate and up-to-date.
In addition, using Microsoft Windows authentication, ERM can be configured to look up IDs and passwords for different sites, allowing your users to log in automatically.
Research Agent unveiled a new version of their product, Research Agent Enterprise, which offers similar functionality for monitoring and recovering web research. This new version of the Research Agent software is specifically designed to capture the usage of mobile users, even when they're not connected to the firm's network with advanced synchronization and tracking features.
For information on how Tom Fleming uses Research Agent at Jeffer, Mangels, Butler and Marmaro, see his presentation from the 2003 Internet Library conference.
Monitoring usage, and validating client-matter numbers is now do-able for just about any web resource, even the dreaded Pacer.
Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 06:48 PM | Comments (0)December 16, 2003
The Boolean Debate
Is Boolean searching suited only for the professional researcher and/or librarian? That's the "The Boolean Debate", much of which has taken place on TVC Alert at The Virtual Chase.
Stephen Abram threw down the gauntlet at a recent panel presentation at Internet Librarian. I always find Abram to be an interesting speaker because he challenges librarians to re-think our commonly-held beliefs. He's done it again by asking whether we need to teach Boolean to the average researcher.
There's much more to the discussion, but I'll leave you to read it for yourselves. I just have a couple of thoughts to add to the mix.
First, I'll admit that I generally agree with Abram. But legal research may be a bit different than other subject areas. Because of the nature of legal research, and the emphasis on exact language, many legal researchers like to be precise about what they're looking for, retain control over their search terms, and understand exactly why they're seeing the search results that are delivered to them. So attorneys who do a lot of research probably fall more into the category of professional searcher. And Abram agrees that librarians and professional searchers still need Boolean.
On the other hand, I think most librarians and as many attorneys vastly underestimate the value of natural language searching. It can be an extremely powerful tool and can often provide better results than Boolean seaching. (Note that I said often, not always!) When sifting through large results sets, viewing the search results in relevancy ranked order alone is definitely worth the price of admission!
I don't know what percentage of Lexis and Westlaw searches are natural language, but I suspect it's a small percentage of the whole. When was the last time you used it, and when was the last time you SHOWED someone how to use it?
Perhaps it's not time yet to discard Boolean. But I suggest it IS a good time to pay more attention to natural language searching.
Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 08:32 PM | Comments (0)The Boolean Debate - Teaching Print & Electronic Sources
I have been following the Boolean debate, as it has appeared in TVC, with great interest. One of the reasons to complement a database search with other case-finding tools is to help overcome potential weaknesses in Boolean searching.
For example, have I waived an argument or am I estopped from pleading it? An editor or subject expert may categorize cases using different terminology next to each other and this may aid a novice researcher in finding like cases. If I knew that sexual harassment and sexual abuse were interchangeable I could use Boolean logic to search for both. I don't think I trust Google yet to search for both where I asked only for one or the other.
The point that strikes me is that I think the transition from print to electronic has created a gulf in the way we're teaching. We used to teach print products as part of a larger research system (West System or Lawyer Coop's Total Client Services Library). One learned not only what the individual titles were, but how they fit into the larger self-contained system. These systems no longer exist in print as a practical matter. Teaching the individual products in print serves very little purpose, in my opinion because a) the odds of students using these products again is minimal and b) we're missing the part about teaching a "system". The systems now, to me, are Search Advisor and KeySearch, not West or TCSL.
Part of the underlying point of my first Navigating the Law article is that forcing students to spend a semester or longer using print products is a grand waste of time because they've come from computers and as soon as they get they're Lexis and Westlaw IDs, bonus points, free trips, t-shirts, mugs, candy etc., they're going back to computers. I think we'd be better off spending our time teaching library science skills like source selection, taxonomies, search strategies and those sorts of things. One reason for that is I don't see where they are getting them elsewhere in their education and, in a complicated field like law, they are absolutely essential. Do children still learn about basic research concepts like the Dewey decimal system or a card catalog as an organizational tool? When and how do college students use encyclopedias? I can't prove this yet but I surmise that our incoming attorneys no longer have a foundation in the science or research that we presuppose in teaching them to use traditional tools specific to law. In other words, start with the premise that attorneys will use computers to do research and begin by showing them how to be better database searchers. Once we have their trust, we can augment their education with the other items and at the end or as part of an advanced class, teach the print systems.
Just an opinion.
November 17, 2003
Hard Copy v. Electronic Research
Thomas O'Keefe, in his article "Navigating the Law: Case-finding Tools Beyond Lexis and Westlaw" (Legal Information Alert, June 2003), makes an excellent case for the usefulness of hard copy case finding tools. He also notes in his concluding paragraph that the strategy of using case finding tools along with online full-text searching can be a difficult one to promote because such tools are disappearing from library shelves. Why are such useful tools going by the wayside? I blame it on the online research vendors and their love affair with full-text searching.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of full-text searching. Been doing it all my adult life. Some of my best friends full-text search. But O'Keefe's points are well taken. Well-organized finding tools and secondary sources are worth their weight in gold. But this doesn't have to be a hard copy v. electronic version debate. Why not use the secondary sources electronically?
Perhaps because the ones that ARE available online are still not that easy to use online. The contents get thrown into databases, and users are expected to search them using full-text strategies more suitable for case law. That's quicker, easier and cheaper than evaluating how a tools is used, and defining an interface customized to the material. For example, one of the most common research tasks, finding a particular section of a book, is not always intuitive. The answer usually ends up being "do a search" to find the section.
O'Keefe talks about the benefits of controlled vocabulary. But many of the vendors aren't convinced of the value of controlled vocabulary, with several notable exceptions. Librarians have been begging for treatise indexes to be included online for years, and in some cases the vendors grudgedly comply, but often they don't see the need of an index when, after all, you can full-text search the book.
Some publishers heading down the right road. For example, my favorite implementation of a finding tools is CCH's Internet products. All the finding tools are linked on the main menu. Click on "Citation Search" and templates are provided to help you find the specific documents you're searching for. Could you conduct a standard full-text search to find something like an SEC release? Sure, but how much easier is it to use a ready-made template? One that lists all the different sources included in the publication! What a concept.
There are other issues. Secondary materials tend to be easily overlooked on the major online services, buried deep within the database directories. So how about suggesting these additional sources based on a user's search terms. Direct them to the resources that could be useful for them, even if they didn't specifically ask. After all, Amazon can do it!
Maybe that's the ultimate answer. Push the data to the user, and stop expecting them to know where to find it.
Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 02:21 PM | Comments (0)
