LawLibTech

February 27, 2005

Information in Context

I entered myself in a dog show yesterday. I actually meant to enter my DOG in the dog show, but when I looked at the entry confirmation after registering on the web, I realized that under "name of dog" it said "Cindy L. Chick." Now, that's a problem. My dog is considerably better bred than I am, and I simply don't have the qualifications specified in the Belgian Tervuren standard. So how did someone who is fairly web literate do something so stupid?

Here's the story. When I clicked on Roboform to have it enter my credit card number, it also blanked out my dog's name and popped my name into the "name" field. Why didn't I notice? Since I was only able to see a few of entry boxes on the screen at any one time, it was easy to lose context. So I didn't notice the error because I was at the bottom of the screen, while "name of dog" box was on the top, invisible to me because it had scrolled out of sight. While on a hard copy form you could easily see all of it at a glance, a long web page just isn't quite as scan-able.

Why am I sharing this lapse with you? Because I think it's illustrates the inherent difficulty in scanning information on a computer screen. There's a limited amount of text you can get on one screen. And I think this is also the difficulty in using treatises online. I wonder if anyone has studied the speed with which one can scan a treatise, jumping quickly from the table of contents to the index to the text, versus scanning it on a computer screen. I was particularly thinking about this issue after reading "Out of the Jungle: How to get beyond the digital v. print debate - and deal with the fact that digital won" by James G. Miles. (AALL Spectrum, Feb. 2005.)

Milles asserts that librarians are holding on to print resources, convinced that they offer a benefit to researchers, while younger users are drawn to the online resources like bees to honey. (That’s my choice of words, not his.) I'm not so sure.

Are librarians trying to hold onto the past? Perhaps. Let me give you an example. I've heard many librarians say over and over again that online resources are not always the best place to start a research project and that print treatises and other secondary materials such as ALR are usually a better starting point because they allow the researcher develop a familiarity with the subject matter and a context for the problem being researched.

But wait a minute, aren't many treatises and ALRs available electronically? Do they really mean to suggest that a hard copy treatise is a better starting point than an electronic version of the treatise? I don't think so. I suspect what most librarians mean to suggest is that secondary sources such as treatises should often be the line of first defense rather than starting by researching case law online. (If I'm wrong about that, please feel free to write and tell me so!) Considering the wide variety of research material now available electronically, we need to stop looking at this as a “hard copy versus digital” issue, and start considering it a “case law versus secondary source” issue.

Milles makes some excellent points about what he believes are erroneous assumptions that he says librarians are perpetuating, for example, that understanding print sources is essential to understanding electronic ones, and the often stated principle that that students should be taught print sources first, moving on to electronic later. I think students need to understand the difference between cases, laws, regulations, law journals articles, etc. Whether they're using them online or electronic isn't the real issue. So starting by teaching students online sources, as Milles suggest, sounds like a fine idea to me!

But I disagree with Milles about one thing. I'm absolutely NOT finding that the younger attorneys want to use treatises online. I cajole, and sometimes whine at patrons, "But we have that online, can I show you how it works?" But inevitably my hopes are dashed when they insist they want to see the books. This is true of both the older attorneys, and the younger ones.

To be fair, I am often frustrated when I try to use treatises online as well, so I feel their pain. That gets me back to my original point. If the younger attorneys, who grew up with the Internet, don't want to use treatises online, perhaps there really is a good reason. Even though the vendors have greatly improved online statutes and treatises, there's still something missing.....and I assert that the difficulty is context, and our inability to see all that much text on one relatively small computer screen.

Considering that librarians have been quick to embrace such things as using reporters exclusively online, and as Milles mentions, Shepardizing electronically, I think there's more going on here than meets the eye. I don't think librarians are intrinsically anti-digital. After all, on p. 5 of the AALL Spectrum CRIV Sheet is a suggestion to "make a lamp out of those clean hardbound used books....we especially liked the ones at www.diynet.com." That doesn’t sound like someone who’s trying to hold on to books at all costs!

But I hope I'm wrong and Milles is right. Most firms spend quite a bit of money on electronic resources, and often they languish, if not unused, at least under- used. Librarians are pulled in two directions when trying to cancel hard copy materials that they have available online. The administrators typically love the idea, but the attorneys often balk. This has put librarians in the very difficult position of having to decide whether to keep the attorneys or management happy, a definite no-win situation. If that's about to change, so much the better.

In the meantime, I have some phone calls to make. Let's hope that I can get myself un-entered in the upcoming dog show. I guess I should have just done the simple thing and filled out a piece of paper and dropped it in the mail. Perhaps not everything is better on the web.

October 25, 2003

Digital Disconnect?

Are virtual resources starting to successfully replace print? Are attorneys making strides in switching to virtual research? You may know the answer to that question for your own institution/firm, but perhaps you've wondered what the overall trend is in this area. If so, you may want to read an article recently published in the Law Library Journal, Feasibility and Viability of the Digital Library in a Private Law Firm

While some of the results were fairly predictable, there are some surprises.

What struck me is that there seems to be a disconnect in terms of attitudes about pricing between vendors and purchasers. (Go figure.) When asked about pricing, most legal publishers responded that print was the most expensive to the customer. Yet the librarians express concern about the high cost of digital materials in comparison to print.

What the vendor seems to forget when discussing pricing of print v. electronic is that typically our print collection is used by a number of different people, at different times, mind you. But we don't restrict a book to one user.

Since most vendors seem to want to avoid concurrent pricing like the plague, and seem very attached to per seat pricing, that's exactly what they do with their electronic offerings. Then, I'm guessing, they compare their one user price with the one copy of the book/journal/newsletter print cost. From their point of view, this results in an inexpensive option, but to the librarians, faced with buying a license for every user, electronic resources are really quite pricey.

But that's just a guess!