By - Saturday, February 6, 2010 - 4:05pm
Last July, while traveling home from the AALL Annual Meeting, I had a layover in St. Louis. During this travel break I checked Twitter from my phone to see if anything conference-related had happened while I was in the air. Well, the best I could find was a vendor who had used a hashtag that some of my friends and I had used to identify our clique that week. In response, someone used the anonymous @aallsecrets account to criticize the vendor for co-opting "our" identifier, and I quickly fired off a couple tweets of my own belittling the vendor, even calling him a not-so-nice name. By then it was time to board my flight to Los Angeles, so I turned off my phone and forgot all about it.
While waiting for my luggage at LAX a few hours later, I checked Twitter again. My name-calling hadn't gone over so well. Someone called me out for rudeness from the @aallsecrets account, while the vendor in question explained that he used the hashtag as a way of inviting all of us to a party that evening, something I might have realized had I bothered to pay much attention to the content of his tweet. Nevertheless, I was angry at being called out. While crafting what I thought was a witty 140-character evisceration of anyone who disagreed with me, my phone battery died, leaving me unable to crush all opposition.
Before I could publish this brief manifesto, I discovered the airport police had towed my car from the long-term lot. By the time I made it home several hours later, my self-imagined feud with this vendor felt absurd, and I was ashamed of what I'd said. So when I did finally power up my laptop and return the internet, the first thing I did was email an apology to the vendor.
That episode of name-calling wasn't the first time I'd used the web to express self-righteous anger. By then it had become something of an art form for me. Any time I disagreed with someone, it was easier to tweet something inflammatory (and passive aggressive) than to communicate directly with the person I imagined I was feuding with. In the best of possible worlds, I'd raise an issue in the most condescending tone I could muster and start a revolution of re-tweets and replies that carried my message well beyond my own meager reach.
In the days following the namecalling incident, I decided I had some growing up to do and promised myself I'd stop making everything so personal in my communication with colleagues and vendors. Anger would not be my defining emotion and hyperbole would not be my preferred writing style.
My record since then has been spotty, but improved. I've only made a handful of passive aggressive tweets about AALL (one of my biggest targets in those heady pre-AALL 2009 days) in the months since, and I believe my blog writing since last summer has become more measured and logical than it was in the past.
But I'm troubled by the overall tone of our profession's communication of late. Now, flame wars are nothing new. The law-lib listserv has seen more than a few blow ups between librarians with differing opinions over the years, and Twitter might be unrecognizable without its piles of overreaction. (Just ask Scott Baio.) Nevertheless, I don't always understand the motivations of librarians who attack one another on a personal level and generalize vendors as evil empires with illegal intent. (Yes, any statement that a vendor is trying to bribe a state employee is an accusation of criminal behavior.)
The last week has seen some intense debate regarding vendor swag and librarian ethics. One need look no farther than the comments to any of Sarah Glassmeyer's posts on the subject (here, here, here and here) to see that there is a wide array of opinions on the matter and that we have no hesitation in challenging the moral integrity of one another in the process. Those that disagree with us are labeled "biased" and "trolls" rather than just a person with a different opinion. Exaggerated conflagrations become the norm on Twitter, with educated and influential legal information professionals questioning the character of our entire profession while providing no concrete evidence of our moral decay. And when an alleged employee of Thomson Reuters Legal (TRL), the grand villain in the eyes of so many librarians, posts a comment defending the company's marketing strategy without identifying herself as a TRL employee, there is an automatic assumption of so-called "sock-puppetry," with no consideration that the alleged employee might like her place of work and decide on her own to defend it. Instead, we feel compelled to unmask her treacherous ways in the most humiliating manner possible with no concern that we might put her job in jeopardy. (Never mind that IP addresses can be spoofed.)
There is, of course, the possibility that the commenter was a sock-puppet, and that's a troubling possibility that deserves investigation. As do many of the ethical questions raised in the last week.
But within the social media wing of our profession, vendor hatred has become a badge of honor. On the announcement of new products, sight unseen, we state publicly our suspicions that vendors designed such products to increase profits at the expense of effective research, never considering for a moment that maybe those two ends aren't always in conflict.
The inflammatory rhetoric lobbed at TRL, LexisNexis and others is sometimes well-grounded, but we've reached a tipping point where any opinion short of "West sucks!" is dismissed by many. We become outraged when a vendor attempts to bypass us in their marketing, as West did with a promotional email last year. Yet if vendors talked about librarians the way librarians talk about vendors, we would be up in arms.
I understand a great deal of the anger. I find myself regularly frustrated by the decisions made by many vendors, be they marketing, pricing or design decisions. But at the end of the day, we still have to work with these vendors. We have contracts to negotiate, products to vet and dollars to allocate. Sometimes the products are good, sometimes they aren't. (More accurately, sometimes parts of a single product are good while other parts of the very same product are bad.) Sometimes we are charged too much, sometimes we aren't. Sometimes we buy the product, sometimes we don't.
But we also have choices in how we respond to our anger, even the most justifiable anger. What law librarian interest is served in publicly shaming a vendor over a disagreement?
Society loves its villains. Tiger Woods can vouch for that. So can NBC. But what did Conan O'Brien accomplish by announcing via press release his rejection of NBC's time slot change other than winning public opinion? As much as I support Conan's decision to walk away from "The Tonight Show," I can't help but notice that even after the press release, he still lost his job and the jobs of his staffers and faced a contentious negotiation with the executives at NBC. Maybe if he had called Jeff Zucker and privately said, "No thanks, Jeff," instead of speaking to the "People of Earth" he might have obtained better severance packages for his staff, a larger payout for himself, a shorter non-compete period and the rights to some of his show's recurring characters. Perhaps not.
Intelligent people can disagree on just about anything, yet they can do so in a civilized manner. That's the kind of career I signed on for seven years ago when I decided to become a librarian. Since then I've been something less than perfect in that regard, but I'm trying. And when I arrive in Denver this July for the AALL Annual Meeting, one of the first things I'll do is buy a beer for the vendor I insulted last year.
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By - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - 4:45pm
Sitting at dinner with executives from Thomson Retures Legal (TRL) in St. Paul, MN, one of my colleagues asked, “what do you expect from us?” The answer was that they simply wanted to tell their story. At the time I wondered if this was a direct hint toward a recent blog post I wrote, encouraging vendors to tell their story. I put the suspicion from my mind. My suspicions were re-ignited the next day at their headquarters in Eagan, MN when one of the reference attorneys presenting to us specifically referenced that blog post.
But the most amazing part of the trip was what TRL successfully did during that meeting, and have failed to do since. They told their story.
That’s why I had been planning on writing a post about the trip to Minnesota, and meeting with the WestlawNext folks. It was a unique experience and an interesting process that itself could be important, beyond the topic of discussion (WestlawNext).
And after February 1 when they unveiled WestlawNext at LegalTech in New York, I was prepared to blog about the value provided by the bloggers I sat in those meetings with, compared to the superficial tweets and posts coming from LegalTech.
But my friend and colleague Sarah Glassmeyer may have forced my hand a little by raising the issue of vendor swag and question of ethics, including the decision I and others made to accept an all expenses paid trip to Eagan Minnesota to meet with the WestlawNext team and preview the product.
Comments about this have ranged from the on point, to the factually inaccurate (all librarians on the trip had passwords which enabled them access to the product). And a larger discussion of librarian vendor relations has followed.
Now, I currently do not accept vendor swag. I used to. I do not remember the exact point at which I stopped accepting it (early 2009), nor do I remember the exact reasons (general feeling of ickiness). But I do not accept swag anymore. However, I did accept this trip to see WestlawNext.
I did not accept the trip immediately and not without some reservation. Yes, I questioned whether or not it was appropriate to accept a trip from TRL to preview this product. Beyond the ethical questions raised by accepting such a trip, flying to Minnesota, on about two weeks notice, in January at the start of the semester, is at best an inconvenience and at worst a pain in the ass. As my colleague mentioned this was not a trip to Hawaii.
Now here’s where it gets a little tricky.
I am a blogger – whatever that means to you – to me that includes some amateurish semblance of news gathering, editorializing, and simply passing on information. I decided long ago to not to place too much emphasis on counting how many visitors I have, subscribers to my feed, etc. I have had offers to monetize this blog and turned them down for one reason or another. But there are some people who do indeed read this blog, and find it valuable.
Now, since I am not employed as a professional news gatherer my organization cannot afford to send me to every event that may be valuable. I either use part of my professional development/travel budget, or pay my own way. Which is fine. In this particular instance, TRL decided to pay to fly me and other bloggers into Minnesota on their own dime. They gave me a place to stay for the night, and fed me. It was not a vacation. I spent most of one day traveling, and the second day in meetings.
I decided, right or wrong, that it was within my professional responsibility, and the scope of this blog to accept this trip. I mean that it may be advantageous to the organization that employs me (Yale Law Library) to have a staff member get an early insider’s view of an important new product, it may be advantageous to my career (I am up for promotion in a few years) to note that I was recognized as a blogger recognizable enough to be worth the cost to fly out to Minnesota, and valuable to the readers of my blog that I was at the meeting.
I stand by the decision.
Now some people,like this commenter, might think this makes me a less reliable authority on such matters. That doesn’t worry me. Long time readers of myself and Tom Boone know who we are and whether or not we are valuable, reliable sources of information. Frankly, I think devaluing our two voices (along with the other dozen or so bloggers there) is a disservice to any law librarian and their own professional reading.
There is of course a larger issue of vendor-librarian relations that I think should be addressed. And this is a wholely different issue than accepting an ipod (a gift I wasn’t offered and would not have accepted). FYI, I was offered but did not accept any swag while on this trip.
But I will save this larger post for later. Let’s consider this part 1.
By - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - 11:05am
My Westlaw/iPod experience has reminded me of yet another Something I Didn’t Learn In Library School – Librarian Ethics.
Sure, we covered the basics, like “don’t give out patron information” and…um…actually, that’s the only one I really remember talking about. There must have been others (something about whether or not you can let a teenager have a book on how to commit suicide, maybe?), but I’m positive I was never confronted with a hypothetical of the sort I just experienced in real life.
As the comments on my iPod post (and ones I’ve received privately) have shown me, this is clearly an issue that librarians feel strongly about. It is also an issue open to wide interpretation – ranging from “So, hot damn, enjoy who you are, and all the benefits that come from it.” to “Accepting such gifts certainly clouds our ability to evaluate a product fairly and anyone who says otherwise is most likely kidding themselves.”
I can’t say what the right action is for others. I do want to make it clear that I don’t judge the librarians that went to Eagan or the ones that are keeping the iPods. (Or take pens or gift cards or stuffed animals, etc.) Counted among that group are some people that I consider good friends and I trust that their judgment is not clouded by vendor swag. I can only do what my gut tells me feels right, and for me that means not accepting any gifts from vendors.
The guy you see pictured here is one of my favorite fictional characters ever. His name is Omar Little and he is a thief, murderer and perjurer, amongst other things. He also has a personal code of honor that he upholds no matter what. (Apparently if you are involved in a drug war in Baltimore, you never, ever, EVER fight on Sundays. Nice.) While my stance on vendor swag may appear to be smug and self-righteous, I am the first to admit that I am not a perfect person. I haven’t publicly been called on it yet, but I do want to admit that when I was in Boston for ALA Midwinter, yes I took several free books from publishers in the exhibit hall…because I never do business with those vendors. I also take candy that they leave in Tech Services during the holidays and will eat the meals our reps bring when they demonstrate a new product.
I am also at any one time committing at least 4 of the 7 deadly sins.
So, no, I’m not perfect. I do, however, feel strongly that the librarian profession is more than just a job. Librarians are the gatekeepers to the world’s knowledge. This profession is an important one that has a greater duty to society, on par with doctors and teachers and, yes get your giggles out now, lawyers. So, yes, I do take these things seriously, perhaps a little more seriously than others. (In addition to this iPod dustup, this week I found myself harping on a nascent librarian friend on FriendFeed for talking about a celebrity patron publicly.) Maybe I do need to just chill out, just a little.
While I’ve been waiting to see what the legal department at MPOW has to say about how I can dispose of the iPod, I thought I’d check to see what my professional organizations have suggested with regards to ethics and to specifically see if they have any guidance to offer librarians when presented with gifts. Guess what? THEY DON’T.
Ethical Roundup:
- AALL has a code of ethics that hasn’t been updated in over 10 years. It states: ” We have a duty to avoid situations in which personal interests might be served or significant benefits gained at the expense of library users, colleagues, or our employing institutions.” which I guess is the most applicable. The Committee on Vendor Relations, near as I can tell, is silent on the swag issue.
- SLA doesn’t have a code of ethics (???!!!???) , but instead refers people to ASIS&T and AIIP, among others.
- ALA code of ethics
I can’t believe I’m actually suggesting this, but perhaps we need a committee for hashing out this issue and coming up with a more explicit policy? Or maybe also an ethical hotline where librarians can ask for opinions when confronted by the many sticky wickets of modern librarianship? Just a thought…
By - Monday, February 1, 2010 - 7:12pm
Ten days ago or so I received an email from someone at Westlaw. It said, “Just wanted to send you a quick note… We’ll be revealing the new Westlaw on Feb. 1 at LegalTech New York… I’d like to get you some information about it… What’s the best address to FedEx you something?“ I sent my work address and didn’t think too much about it.
Flash forward to today.
My package from West arrived. There was some paper and a nice letter from someone, the details of which I don’t remember, because also included was what you see to the left. An iPod Nano, 8GB with video capabilities, retail value $149. I guess there’s a video or something on the iPod detailing the WestlawNext features, but I wouldn’t know as I couldn’t bring myself to open it.
Here’s the thing, y’all: I was absolutely livid when I opened this.
I’ve briefly mentioned before my feelings about accepting vendor swag. It’s advertising, I understand that. It’s built into their budgets and it’s not like they would charge less if they weren’t giving out the pens. However, I also don’t feel comfortable being a billboard for the legal information duopoly in front of my students who expect me to speak freely about the pluses and negatives of each service, so I don’t accept the little gifts of pens, coffee mugs, note pads, etc.
But an iPod? I don’t really like to take pens and here they’ve gone and sent me an iPod? As I said to one of my correspondents today, “this is just re-goddamn-diculous.” (Pardon my language, but I was really mad.) It does have “Compliments of WestlawNext” written on, but in super-tiny font. It feels like a bribe, frankly. Gross.
I guess I was expected to tweet/blog my “Thank you, Westlaw!” for it? Well, thanks but no thanks, Westlaw. I hate to seem rude or ungrateful, but I simply cannot accept this gift. (1) I’m an employee of the Commonwealth of Kentucky and we have rules about the monetary value of gifts. (2) Even if I disclose the iPod receipt before blogging about the info sent to me, I still wouldn’t ever feel right about saying positive things about WestlawNext. As I said to another one of my correspondents, “Congratulations, Westlaw, you just bought my silence.” (3) My usual rules of swag acceptance are in effect, no matter how much I love the way it looks or the fact that it shoots video or that my Zune seems to be dying and ZOMG IT’S SO PRETTY AND SHINY AND I LOVE NEW TOYS.
*sigh*
So, here’s the thing: I’m not keeping it. I’m auctioning my WestlawNext iPod and donating the proceeds to an appropriate organization or two. The details are still being worked out (my legal obligations as an public employee, whether or not my target charities will accept the donation, how to set up an auction, if other law librarians want to donate their iPods as well…details, people, details.) So, basically: WATCH THIS SPACE. I’ll have something hammered out by the end of the week. If you received a WestlawNext iPod and would like to get in on this action, contact me at Sarah dot Glassmeyer at gmail and we’ll work it out. And if you are Westlaw reading this (and I know at least someone at West does) and you’d rather that I not do this, I will gladly ship your iPod back to you. Seriously, I’m not trying to be rude about this.
I know my standards are higher than others when it comes to accepting swag from vendors. I have to admit to being a little weirded out by the trip to Minnesota some of my colleagues were offered. (Of course, I also wasn’t sure if there was some jealously on my part that I wasn’t asked to go, so I held my tongue. Some of us are just kinda bigger deals than others, I guess…. I KID BECAUSE I LOVE, JASON AND TOM.) I’m not entirely sure where to draw the line…coffee mugs? iPods? Drinks at the Bender Baby Dinner/Westlaw party? Trips to Minnesota? It not an easy line to figure out. Where does the appearance of impropriety show up? When does one start to feel a little like a corporate whore?
Despite all of my cheerleading for Free Law and complaints about pricing, duopolies, etc., I really don’t believe that vendors are the enemies. But I also realize that they are in business to make a profit and that will always take precedence for them. The vendor-librarian relationship is complicated enough…..please stop clouding the issue with over the top gifts of swag.
By - Friday, January 29, 2010 - 4:46pm
As I mentioned in my previous post, I traveled to Eagan, Minnesota (on Thomson Reuters' dime) earlier this week along with several other writers to get a sneak peek at Thomson Reuters' new legal research product, WestlawNext. I've already participated in a video roundtable discussion on the system, but I wanted to go into a little more detail in writing. Several others have provided comprehensive reviews of the product already, so I don't want to duplicate too much of their information. I do, however, want to look at things from the perspective of legal research instruction, since that's a big part of what I do in my job each fall, and because I've written in the past about Lexis and Westlaw's usability from that perspective over at VoxPopuLII.
The simplest assessment is this: Once law students gain access to WestlawNext (and "New Lexis," launching later this year), legal research instructors will have some 'splaining (or at least some adapting) to do.
Research instruction is marginalized and splintered at most law schools as it is. If law librarians -- the most qualified research instructors within any law school -- are part of a required 1L research curriculum, the length of that instruction is often brief. At Loyola Law School, for example, we have five weeks in the fall semester to cover the basics. At other schools, librarians might play no role. Instead, a legal writing program might rely on second-year students to teach the material. At the far end of the spectrum, some schools have no required research curriculum, offering only advanced research electives. Regardless of these requirements, electronic research instruction is often farmed out to vendor representatives, with Westlaw reps teaching Westlaw and Lexis reps teaching Lexis. The reliability of rep training varies, and a common complaint among librarians is that these reps emphasize full-text searching of primary law at the expense of secondary sources and other analytical materials. This leads to a somewhat disjointed program of instruction, even without the ground shifting beneath us.
When using the current versions of Westlaw and Lexis, a researcher needs to know exactly where relevant information is located before running a search. Therefore, when searching for primary law, she has to already know if she's looking for cases or statutes or regulations or some other type of document. In a familiar area of law, that's not a big hurdle, but when researching a new topic, the first task in research is often figuring out what type of law governs. Only then can the researcher move on to primary materials.
Using WestlawNext, however, a researcher no longer needs to select a source database before running a search. Instead, searches are most often limited only by jurisdiction, using a pop-up page overlay (NOT a pop-up browser window/tab) that allows precise selection of both state and federal jurisdictions. Then, upon running a search, the system provides results from all types of sources -- primary and secondary -- in that jurisdiction: cases, statutes, regulations, secondary sources, briefs, etc. The overview page shows just the first one or two results in each category, but the left sidebar of the page lists all the types of documents available with a count of the number of results in each of these facets. To see complete results for a particular type of resource, a researcher need only click the link for that category. When viewing these faceted results, more limiting options appear in the sidebar, such as jurisdiction, date, topic, and publication name depending on the type of materials being viewed.
Generally speaking, WestlawNext eliminates the need for researchers to know where to look for legal documents before running their searches. Don't know whether your clients' issue involves statutory or regulatory law? Just run the search and find out from the results.
To be fair, the current version of Westlaw already allows researchers to search multiple databases simultaneously, but the implementation is poor. Selecting the databases you want is a tedious process, the results display in one lump-sum list of results with no limiting facets, and basic functionality like tables of contents are nowhere to be found when viewing documents from your results. These problems are all dealbreakers, and they are corrected in WestlawNext.
While the relevant sources of law can be gleaned more easily from search results, it presents a challenge to legal research instructors. As legal professionals who have used the old systems (and print resources) for years, we already understand what the various sources of law are and how they work together. To even use Westlaw and Lexis, law students needed to learn this foundation. With WestlawNext (and most likely "New Lexis") providing Google-esque search with faceted results, students can and will run searches without an understanding of legal sources and yet not feel confused by the results. Well, not at first.
Given this likelihood, research instructors will have to provide a solid overview of the sources of law to their students. Hopefully, we already do this. But until now we could rely on Westlaw's database selection requirement to force students into learning at least a little bit about these sources before running a search that provided meaningful results. Not anymore. A student need not understand anything about sources in order to retrieve a wide swath of relevant material, and many will have the illusory feeling that the research process has been simplified enough to eliminate any need for foundational training. After all, if the fact pattern mentions "unlawful sexual intercourse" and "California" (yes, I used a Roman Polanski hypothetical in my class), a student can search those terms and retrieve a California case that seems to be on point and perhaps believe they've performed due diligence. Of course, the governing law might actually be statutory. Or there might be an split among appellate courts in California on the specific issue. Or a higher court may have decided an issue a little closer to the one in the fact pattern, making the case in hand irrelevant.
This isn't a criticism of WestlawNext. Assuming one understands sources of law, the search experience in WLN is more efficient and more likely to provide relevant materials in results. From a single search a researcher can pull in a wide array of materials and browse them easily using the provided facets. A lawyer unfamiliar with California real estate law need not know of the existence of "Miller & Starr California Real Estate" ahead of time in order to easily find that source's information in WestlawNext.
Foundational source issues are already covered in legal research instruction. The problem isn't that we don't teach them. The problem is that students might be less likely to listen once research begins to seem deceptively easy. This makes it all the more important for us to spend substantial time on instruction and assignments that cover the sources of law, independent of the specific research tools and mechanics. The good news is that if the WestlawNext interface is the future of legal research, we'll be able to spend less time in the classroom teaching Westlaw and Lexis navigation, providing extra time for foundational information.
Just because one can search an entire jurisdiction's worth of material doesn't mean that Thomson-Reuters Legal has eliminated the ability to browse and search more specific information. The currently buried Westlaw Directory once again moves front and center in WestlawNext (albeit in a redesigned form). Rather than running a search from the front page, a researcher can browse via simplified tabs on the front page (which thankfully contain no search boxes or checkboxes). From the "State Materials" tab, if a researcher selects California, a clean list of California materials displays, and the search box at the top of the page now limits itself to just a search of California materials. Clicking "All California Secondary Sources" displays a list of state-specific secondary sources and a search box that now searches only these resources. Selecting a specific source, say "California Jurisprudence," displays the table of contents for that source and allows searching of only that title.
It's been said elsewhere, but it bears repeating: Boolean search still functions. Given that many doubters have yet to acknowledge any of my colleagues' statements on this topic, let me repeat that: Boolean search still functions. There may still be some glitches here and there in that functionality, but Thomson-Reuters Legal has made it clear they intend for those operators to work as expected in WestlawNext.
WestlawNext is not without its problems, however, and the biggest concern I have is a big one for legal research instruction: secondary sources. No matter how many times instructors tell students to begin research with a secondary source, many students will still insist on running full-text searches of cases and statutory codes. (I was one of them.) Part of the blame lies at the feet of database reps who consistently overemphasize full-text searching of primary law in their training sessions, but anytime you ask students to find a case, the logical inclination is to, well, search cases.
I won't quibble with the order of the search facets in WestlawNext. Cases, statutes and other primary materials do belong at the top of the food chain because that's what lawyers and law students should be citing as precedent. The problem is how the results within the secondary sources facet display. In these results, very little specific information about each source displays. Most of the time what a researcher sees is the title of the specific section, the title of the source, and a couple of text snippets in which the search terms are highlighted. Little to no information about where within that source the section appears shows in these results. For example, when a section of Witkin and Epstein's California Criminal Law title simply "Generally" appears, that's the extent of the citation information displayed. The precise article within Witkin & Epstein in which this section appears is nowhere to be found, so researchers won't know until viewing the document itself whether it's from an article about sex crimes, robbery or murder. The threaded information available in search results for statutory sections (Title, Chapter, Subpart, etc.) needs to be included in secondary sources as well, or else the results are confusing at best and unusable at worst.
The search algorithms for secondary sources are also problematic. When I select California as my jurisdiction, if there are California-specific resources available on my topic, those need to show up first in my results. Period. When I ran a search for the term "rape," the first 12 results were from "National" sources such as Am.Jur. Trials, Am.Jur. Proof of Facts, and several law reviews. More alarming, none of these were general overviews of rape law, but instead provided information on specific aspects of rape law in various jurisdictions. I discussed this problem with Mike Dahn, vice president of new product development at Thomson Reuters Legal, he assured me that this was not by design and that they were working to make sure jurisdiction-specific resources for a user's selected jurisdiction float to the top of search results, but as of now this isn't working correctly.
Apart from these concerns, I'm still excited by the overall direction of WestlawNext. This really is a significant step forward in electronic research. I hesitate to call WestlawNext a "game-changer" because I think the game changed for all online search providers awhile back. Westlaw and Lexis are simply catching up, finally pushing legal search into the 21st century.
One final thing to note about the progress made here by Thomson Reuters (and presumably by LexisNexis later this year) is that it furthers the gap between the haves and have-nots in legal information. Once these new products are pushed out to law students, the more comfortable they become searching jurisdictions instead of sources, the harder it will be for them to use source-oriented tools (especially print materials). Again, this presents a challenge for those of us who teach legal research to make sure we provide them the foundation necessary to perform research on any platform.
I'm hardly the only person writing about WestlawNext this week. Here's a list of the reviews already in circulation:
Robert Ambrogi, A First Look at WestlawNext
David Bilinski, Dave’s Top 10 List about WestlawNext
Laura Bergus, WestlawNext: It’s About Time
Simon Chester, The Future of WestLaw – A First Glimpse
Jason Eiseman, 5 random thoughts about WestlawNext
Carolyn Elefant, My Trip Out [to] West: A Preview of WestlawNext
Greg Lambert, WestlawNext - A Study in Applying Knowledge Management & Crowdsourcing
Betsy McKenzie, Westlaw Next
Lisa Solomon, WestlawNext Preview: Product and Pricing
Jason Wilson, WestlawNext Review: Ending the tyranny of the keyword?
And of course, be sure to check out Jason Eiseman's video roundtable with Greg Lambert, Jason Wilson and me:
Video: discussion of WestlawNext
By - Friday, January 29, 2010 - 10:45am
So lots has been written about WestlawNext. Much more detailed analysis has been floating around. So rather than rehash what’s already been said all over the web, I’m going to provide some random thoughts I had about the project as I was sitting in the meeting at Eagan, MN. These are just from some notes I jotted down, that I think are interesting. Disclosure (again): Thomson Reuters paid my way to Eagan and put me up for the trip.
1. Attorneys do not look at documents on Westlaw beyond the first 5 to 10 results. I suspect it’s the same for Lexis, and pretty much any search site nowadays
This is what they found when researching how attorneys used Westlaw. I know that this is a problem on Google, one that has led to the emergence of the Search Engine Optimization industry, that search results beyond the first few almost do not exist. But to hear that attorneys by and large will rerun a search if desired search results don’t show up within the first few hits is very… I’ll say illuminating. Is this a failure on the part of firms, librarians, legal education, or attorneys themselves? Is it a failure at all, or just how research is done in the Google age, something that databases, search engines, librarians must simply accept as a modern research practice? WestlawNext is now accommodating this practice, as will other vendors I’m sure. Should librarians?
2. Analyzing customer usage to make the relevancy rankings more relevant, in particular measuring “meaningful interaction with documents”
For me, this may have been the most welcoming revelation about the new WestSearch relevancy rankings. They wanted to take user behavior into account in relevance rankings. But users click on documents in search results which are irrelevant. So how do you measure document relevance to a search. WestSearch incorporates what they called “meaningful interaction with a document” as signifying relevance to the search. Meaningful interaction may include actions like keyciting a document, printing a document, citing with reference, saving it to a folder, downloading, etc. These are the types of actions that were found to signify a relevant document. WestSearch will incorporate these actions into relevance rankings.
In addition to search results, WestlawNext will analyze documents saved to their folder system. The theory is that documents that appear in the same folder may have links between them and can also improve relevancy rankings.
What does this mean? It means that Westlaw’s relevancy rankings should continually improve as more people start using the system. Awesome.
3. All browsers will be supported. But Chrome is the best
Gone are those annoying pop-up windows, and messages telling us that something is best viewed on Internet Explorer. WestlawNext will be available on all browsers (Chrome is coming in mid-February). That means Mac users, Firefox users, Chrome users, Safari users will all be able to use WestlawNext on their desired platform. This is a very welcome development. It also makes me think that Westlaw may have been listening to all the user complaints about browser compatibility. Oh, by the way. Their studies found that Chrome was the most steady, fastest, most reliable browser.
4. Synchronization across all platforms
Save a document to your folder on WestlawNext online. Access it from your mobile device later. WestlawNext has been built with portability in mind. As we enter an age where people expect content to be accessible across multiple platforms, WestlawNext appears to deliver.
5. Possibility of command searching
Librarians seem to be worried about the disappearance of boolean searching. I am excited about the possibility of command searching. Currently in WestlawNext if you type “keycite [citation]” you go directly to a keycite report for that citation. Not a big deal, as Greg Lambert mentioned on the video I posted earlier. But imagine the possibility of typing “define [term]” and going straight to the definition in Black’s Law Dictionary. How about typing “ALR Index [term]” going straight to the ALR index. Do you see where I’m going with this? This system seems ripe for these types of shortcuts, and I am excited about some of the possibilities opened up by it. Whether or not others will be as impressed, or if and when these capabilities will be fully explored in WestlawNext has yet to be seen. But I would like to see it.
6. Super Bonus Final Random Thought
There is a lot more to think about with regards to WestlawNext. The system is by no means perfect. There are other issues to consider, like pricing.
But this new system is obviously a major shift in legal research. Couple this new product with Bloomberg, and the new Lexis product coming later this year, and alternatives like FastCase and the entire ecosystem of legal research may be completely different by this time next year.
I know some librarians and others are worried about what this means. But I think the application of modern search techniques, coupled with new web technologies may open up a whole new world of legal research for us. I look forward to some much needed changes.
By - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 - 12:42pm
ABA Journal and New York Times have already written about it. Lisa Solomon and Robert Ambrogi have seen it also. On Feb. 1st Westlaw unveils it’s new product WestlawNext to the world at LegalTech.
Yesterday they met with a group of legal information professionals to talk about the product and it’s creation. I was lucky enough to snag an invite to the meeting. Disclosure: they paid our way out there and put us up for the trip.
Soon I will post some (hopefully) cohesive thoughts about it, including some discussion of the meeting itself, but in the meantime…
After the meeting Tom Boone, Greg Lambert of 3 Geeks and a Law Blog, Jason Wilson and I sat down at the Minneapolis airport and talked about our thoughts about the product and the meeting. I videotaped it.
The video includes discussions of features, potential price considerations, and other issues raised by the new product. So please enjoy, the video runs about 40 minutes long.
Discussion of WestlawNext from Jason Eiseman on Vimeo.
By - Sunday, January 24, 2010 - 6:41pm
In Library 2.0 and Web 2.0 philosophies, there is a concept called “Radical Trust.” The idea behind Radical Trust is pretty simple: trust your patrons. Trust them to leave comments on your blogs. Trust them to edit wikis. Trust them to add tags to your Flickr photos or OPACs. Yes, there will always be jerks and 12 year old hackers with nothing better to do than vandalize the materials that you have so lovingly placed out in the Internet for people to interact with. But guess what? You also have to trust that the community will step up and re-edit out the wiki mis-edits and/or trust that are users are savvy enough to ignore a trollish comment on a blog.
Radical trust really isn’t that radical..it’s just trust. It only feels radical to us because librarians and other gatekeepers of information have spent centuries trying our damndest to preserve, protect and defend information resources from theft, loss and corruptions. As I’ve said before, this is a noble and just raison d’etre. However, the digital age has changed the game in many ways. We don’t need to keep materials chained up and out of patrons hands because they may destroy them…now we can digitize and allow many more users access to them. And if they do somehow corrupt the digital versions? Well, it’s easy enough to have master copies locked away that can replace the corrupted versions.
In Law LibraryLand, there is currently a major issue of conflict between librarians and information providers in the area of authentication of digital legal materials. I don’t claim to be an expert on the issue and I haven’t entirely decided what is the best solution to the conflict between the two camps. However, John Joergenson, the digital services librarian at Rutgers University School of Law – Camden, wrote an excellent blog post last year which breaks down much of the conflict.
The American Association of Law Libraries has recently issued a report on Authentication of State Documents which outlines the concerns of the librarian community. If I’m reading it correctly, here’s the problem. (1) Digital materials are vulnerable to lapses in management and control, corruption and tampering. (2) To make up for these vulnerabilities, the digital materials need to equivalent to the official print versions. (3) To become equivalent, they must become “authentic.” (4) To be “authentic”, they must be capable of being “authenticated.” (Um…yeah.) There is no standard or endorsed method of authentication, but it can involve things like digital water marks, chain of custody, certification, etc.
Currently no state-provided (i.e. FREE) digital legal materials are “authentic” and as such, “citizens and law researchers may reasonably doubt their authority and should approach such resources critically.” I guess these researchers are supposed to try and get a hold of a print resource (assuming a library is close by, the state still issues a print verison and/or the library hasn’t canceled its order) OR utilize Wexis (which also isn’t “authentic” and is quite costly)?
This makes no sense to me.
Can someone please explain to me what steps that free information providers like Justia, the Legal Information Institute and Public Resource – or even Google Scholar – need to be taking so that they are given the same respect as Lexis and Westlaw?
I propose it’s time we extend the concept of radical trust upwards…not only should we trust our users to take the information we safeguard and remix and run with it, but also maybe we should start trusting people who want to provide the information to our patrons.I could also put in a plea for open source ILSes, but that’s another blog post for another day.
If an entity like the Legal Information Institute wants to take raw data from the government and put it up on the web in a more easily navigable way than what the government provides on the GPO website, maybe we should trust that they are not altering the text of the materials or even being sloppy in the updating of them? If enough providers get in the game, there will be plenty of copies to compare against to make sure they are accurate. Why is accuracy not enough?
Perhaps if librarians can learn to radically trust information brokers, we will be able to work together and start to see new ways to use and manipulate legal information. Input from the librarian community will allow the information providers to make more useful tools and provide stability, which in turn, will lead to better donor funding for long term preservation and maintenance of the information. And finally, patrons will be able to access accurate legal information much more easily, which ultimately, is what everyone wants.
Like I said, I have no answers. Personally, in my ideal world, the various state and federal governments would step up and provide stable and easily navigable law for free. However, as my mother always says, “…and people in Hell want ice water.” Clearly, we as librarians are going to have to choose between forever being at the mercy of Wexis or working with the free legal information providers. I’m hoping that by writing this, a dialog can be opened between the library camp and the legal information world and some solutions can be negotiated.
By - Wednesday, January 20, 2010 - 12:51am
One of my favorite movies is Thirteen Days, which is the behind-the-scenes story of the Cuban Missile Crisis from the perspective of Kenny O’Donnell, a longtime Kennedy Family friend. As the movie depicts, the United States wasn’t quite sure how to react to threat of nuclear weapons in Cuba. A committee of the National Security Council and close presidential advisors – EXCOMM - was formed.
Robert Kennedy – Attorney General at the time – was given control of the group. He describes the committee’s mission thusly (in one of my all time favorite movie lines): We’ve got a bunch of smart guys. We lock ‘em in a room and kick ‘em in the ass until they come up with some solutions!
Oh, that RFK…always a charmer.
I don’t think I’ll be spoiling the movie to say that EXCOMM did come up with a viable solution and nuclear war and total destruction of civilization as we know it was averted. If that did spoil the movie for you, I suggest you stop reading my blog now and maybe check out some history books? Or at least a wikipedia article?
Anyhoo, what that scene shows – and what I’m a big believer in – is the power of brainstorming with other people. Don’t get me wrong, I am also a big believer in the power of social media and have found valuable interactions to be had with others through that medium. But there’s something that happens while chatting with someone – intentionally in a meeting or just while hanging out, eating a pizza – that can’t be replicated in a chat, emails or phone calls. I don’t know if humans subconsciously pick up on facial clues, hand signals or other visuals. Hell, maybe those late night History Channels specials are right and humans all share some sort of psychic bond. All I know is that I can generate ideas and plan things much faster during and after an in-person sit down than I can after instant messaging service.
This is also one of the things I love about unconferences. First, and most obviously, there is the knowledge gained by all attendees. Secondly, there’s the empowerment of people sharing their knowledge, especially if they think that they have nothing to share. But there’s also the Big Unknown – the fact that when you get a group of people in a room with no set agenda and let them talk about the things that interest them, they can bounce ideas off of each other, combine ideas and come up with things that they didn’t realize they knew.
I know this all makes me sound like some sort of dirty hippie and I assure you that I’m not. (Not that there’s anything wrong with dirty hippies….) I don’t even really like talking to people most of the time. But occasionally I pull myself out of my shell and chat with people and that’s when the magic happens.
As you may know, this weekend we held Lawberry Camp Midwinter 2010 in Boston, graciously co-hosted by the Harvard Law School Library and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. (I would be remiss in not also thanking Local Arrangements Cool Kid Meg Kribble, without whose help Lawberry Camp would not have been possible.) I say, with all modesty, that it was a a complete success.
We had about 20 librarians from all stripes of law libraries attend. After a fascinating unkeynote address by David Weinberger, we had some great discussions ranging from infoliteracy standards for law students to an iPhone apps petting zoo to the law school bubble. (I hope some of the attendees write up some of what they’ve learned – in retrospect I wish we would have had official reporters from each section.)
There’s already been a result from the converstation…we had a giant roundtable discussion about research guides. One of the ideas bandied about was that it would great if there could be a central repository for law librarians to share research guides. I was tweeting the discussion, and John Mayer of CALI responded that Legal Education Commons is available for this. So. Yay.
Sarah and Tom Bruce - photo credit Jason Eiseman
I was very lucky in that post-lawberry camp, my adventures continued. I made my way to New Haven to hang out with my friend and Lawberry Camp co-organizer Jason Eiseman. It was really amazing to me how much fun and productive the days were. We communicate almost daily, yet once we got in the same room together we were able to really makes some plans. On one of the days, we were joined by Tom Bruce of the Cornell Legal Information Institute. We had both talked with Tom via various forms of media, and had briefly met at CALI in Boulder last year, but this was the first time that we had gotten to have an extensive chat. It was almost a min-summit between librarians and a legal information provider and the start of a conversation that we hope to continue.
By - Sunday, January 10, 2010 - 4:59pm
I like Seth Godin. His book Tribes (which I admittedly haven’t read yet) was quite the talk of SLA 2009. I also like his blog, which generally always gives me something to think about and wonder how I can apply to libraries. So when I saw that Mr. Godin – who is not a librarian – actually wrote about libraries, I was really excited to see what he had to say.
Aw, crud.
Aw. Crud.
It’s…not good. His idea of what libraries are, what they should be doing…I disagree with most of it. I want to unpack his post, but before I do, I want to make clear (and make sure it doesn’t get lost in the bottom of this post) that the main problem with this post lies with libraries and librarians. If someone like Seth Godin, who has met with librarians and has so many fans in the community, can get it so wrong, what does Joe Q. Public think of libraries? This should definitely be (yet another) wake up call that libraries need to think about how we market ourselves.
Okay, on to Mr. Godin’s post…
What should libraries do to become relevant in the digital age?
No problem here. I could be pedantic and harp on the “become relevant” verb usage which implies that libraries currently aren’t relevant, but pedantry helps no cause. I believe that it’s extremely useful and proper, especially when you are in a public service industry like libraries are, to periodically evaluate yourself and change course as necessary. And I don’t mind when non-librarians poke their head into our self-evaluations and offer suggestions – after all, they are our users.
So, one sentence in, we’re okay! Then the wheels fall off.
They can’t survive as community-funded repositories for books that individuals don’t want to own (or for reference books we can’t afford to own.)
What? Wow. So much wrong with this sentence. I mean, obviously for the purposes of his post, Mr. Grodin seems to be talking about public libraries, which is sort of the first problem. If you are reading this, then you are likely aware that there are dozens of types of libraries (many not even called libraries) with as many types of librarians. But, again, that’s really a minor quibble. All libraries are “community funded.” My academic law library is funded by tax dollars and student tuition – the community we serve. Corporate libraries/knowledge management centers are funded by the company whose employees they are expected to serve. There’s just no such thing as an independent library.
Mr. Godin says “repository” like it’s a bad thing. Someone needs to preserve knowledge. Just because something is not immediately needed, that does not mean future generations won’t need it. I take huge issue with the “books that individuals don’t want to own (or for reference books we can’t afford to own.)” part of that statement. Want? Really? I mean, I guess it’s technically true in that I borrow books from my public library because I want to pay my bills and eat more than I want to buy books, but otherwise I just don’t see libraries as currently taking up the slack for people who just don’t feel like purchasing information resources. Call me a commie, but I have no problem with a community (be it a town, a company or educational institution) pooling resources so that all of its members may share information resources.
More librarians are telling me (unhappily) that the number one thing they deliver to their patrons is free DVD rentals. That’s not a long-term strategy, nor is it particularly an uplifting use of our tax dollars.
I get really nervous when we start judging the relevant “uplifting” value of resources, especially in a public library setting. Every library has a mission and ultimately it’s up for the community to decide what they want from their library. In law libraries, it’s not too hard. We, for the most part, collect the laws and the secondary materials that interpret them. It’s also not super-easy, though, because there are myriad decisions about which jurisdictions to collect, format, duplications, etc. Additionally, some law libraries are branching out from their basic mission and are starting “Popular Media Collections” (Deborah Schander discusses her current efforts in creating one here.) Personally, I would love to work on creating a collection like that, but I can see where some members of our community would have an issue with it.
Similarly, some people may have an issue with public libraries collecting DVDs. Surely these people don’t think that everything in a public library is intellectually stimulating, do they? Should public libraries only collect Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen? Should they chuck out the romance novels, science fiction and graphic novels? If DVDs go, does that mean books on tape have to go too? I have this crazy notion that I like to enjoy what I read. My favorite writers are Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene, but I know they’re not everyone’s cup of tea. Why can’t everyone have free enjoyment from the library?
Here’s my proposal: train people to take intellectual initiative.
Here’s my answer: We do. Or try to, anyway. I mean, this is sort of a major component of librarians’ raison d’etre. I don’t just hand out answers like candy at my reference desk. I show people how I found the answer. I teach a handful of bibliographic instruction sessions every semester in addition to CLEs – and what I do is minor in comparison to many that I know. (A quick check shows that my public library has dozens of computer skills classes every month.) Librarians aren’t trying to be gatekeepers of secret knowledge – we love to explain things to people.
Once again, the net turns things upside down. The information is free now. No need to pool tax money to buy reference books.
Ha. Haha. HAHAHAHAHA. Oh, man, I can’t wait to tell our aquisitions department to tell West to take their bills and STUFF THEM because INFORMATION IS FREE NOW. Frankly, this statement is just ignorant. Yes, there is a ton of great information on the web. However, there’s a little thing called copyright law that keep most information sources from being torrented up on the Internet free of charge – you know, legally at least. There’s also the fact that about 80-95% of all information on the Internet is in the Deep Web and therefore unreachable from search engine searches, not the mention that I’m not going to throw over a solid reference resource for a webpage unless I can verify that the source is legit. (I like to show my students this seemigly okay page on Dr. Martin Luther King. Check out the owner of the site and try not to vomit.) And, as I recented noted for my disclipline of law, while the information is free, the indexing and finding aids for it are not. So, while I wish that this would change, for the time being legal information is not free.
What we need to spend the money on are leaders, sherpas and teachers who will push everyone from kids to seniors to get very aggressive in finding and using information and in connecting with and leading others.
Like I said, we’re trying. Some of us, at least. There is a definite component of librarians who don’t want to explore all the possibilities of user engagement that are currently available, but I think that there are few out there that don’t want to help users find and use information. Obviously we’re not doing a great job on marketing this fact.
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bibliona/202506372/
