Category: Library

With WestlawNext (WLN) finally going live for law school faculty, librarians and staff yesterday afternoon, many law school librarians are finally getting permanent access to the much-hyped interface. This comes only a couple of weeks after Julie Jones's fascinating panel at the AALL Annual Meeting, "The Economics of Interface: Vendors Respond." Following presentation's by Thomson Reuters' Mike Dahn, LexisNexis' Molly Miller and Fastcase's Ed Walters, Larry Abraham of Fordham Law stepped up to the audience microphone and told the vendor representatives that their interfaces discourage users from using secondary sources, instead emphasizing primary law materials. Following Laurence's comments, a few other audience members (myself included) complained to the panel about how vendors treat secondary sources both within their systems and in training provided to subscribers.

With that fresh in mind, I wanted to hit on some specific problems I've encountered while searching secondary sources in WLN. My concerns aren't new. I mentioned them in my initial review of the product back in January. Specifically, when searching state-specific secondary sources, the results are often cluttered with irrelevant materials at the top of the results list. Here's part of what I had to say back in January:

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.

The problem I described then still occurs. Here's what the top search results for the Secondary Sources facet look like when I select California as my jurisdiction and search for the word "rape":

The first result from a secondary source covering California law doesn't appear until the 11th result. This means a researcher, despite having already selected a jurisdiction, has to wade through numerous off-topic, out-of-jurisdiction articles to find the ones that are on point for the search.

There is, however, a way around this problem. Having already narrowed the search results to the "Secondary Sources" facet, the left sidebar now displays additional filters. Find the one labeled "Jurisdiction" and select "California":

With this one tweak, the results reflect more of what a researcher expects to see when performing a jurisdiction-specific search:

The jurisdiction sub-facet illustrates part of the problem with the original set of results. Despite a researcher having selected California as the jurisdiction before running the search, WestlawNext still includes "National" sources in the results. In a state with fewer high-quality secondary sources than California — say Nevada — including these national sources is probably a necessary evil (though one would hope these national search results would be more on point). Just realize that if you want only state-specific resources you'll need to do that extra step of filtering.

Oddly, even if you narrow your search target to only "California Secondary Sources" by browsing the WLN sources before running your search, WLN still considers those national sources to be "California Secondary Sources," so you'll again need to apply a post-search jurisdiction filter to get true state-specific results.

But the problem with secondary sources in WLN doesn't go away by selecting a sub-facet. This refers back to another problem I discussed in January:

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.

Take another look at that last screenshot showing results from California-only secondary sources. This uses WLN's default "More Detail" display type. In these results, the first result looks to be the most relevant. After all, it is titled "Rape" in big bold print. The second and third results also look to be on point, but the information provided is rather cryptic about what specific crime they refer to. If the source in question isn't part of your subscription plan, the only way to find out if they're relevant is to click on each and incur an out-of-plan charge. Not exactly the best way to go about cost-effective research. Worse still, that first result — the one titled "Rape" — that looks so relevant? It turns out this is a section from an article about First Degree Murder that only discusses rape insofar as it pertains to the commission of a homicide. The second result ("Nature of Crime") is the only one in the top three actually from Witkin & Epstein's article about the crime of rape. The third document in the results ("In General") is, like the first, about homicide.

There is a more detailed view available than this one, but it doesn't solve the problem. To change the display type, go to the display options at the top of the search results (the icon showing one to three horizontal lines) and select "Most Detail":

Even with the most detail display available for search results, however, the full threaded information isn't included and it's still impossible to tell whether each result concerns the specific crime of rape without retrieving the document itself:

This isn't a problem so long as the source is part of your subscription plan and you can pull up as many documents as you want. But if "Witkin & Epstein's California Criminal Law" isn't in your plan, you might be faced with quite the dilemma when deciding how important it is to find the right document. Or perhaps you'll skip secondary sources altogether, jumping instead into the primary law results directly.

Truth be told, the more specific your search terms ("unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor" vs. "rape"), the stronger likelihood of having relevant search results float to the top. This is true of any search engine, and I'm not suggesting the search algorithm is the problem. It's the display. Given that general searches like "rape" are common in legal research, particularly when searching secondary sources, the lack of useful identifying information about a document is a problem that needs to be addressed by Thomson Reuters Legal.

I don't want this post to be interpreted as a negative review of WLN. Most of my review in January was positive and I stand by that overall opinion. WestlawNext is a vast improvement across the board over Classic Westlaw, and I don't share the opinion of many that it "dumbs down" legal research. To the contrary, I've found that it adds considerable power to most of the research I've done using the new system. Figuring out what database I need to search in Classic Westlaw doesn't mean I understand the sources of law any better. It just means I know what database I need to search in Westlaw.

But as superior as it is to its predecessor, it still has legitimate problems. The issues associated with secondary sources in WLN need to be highlighted. Even if Thomson Reuters opts to not fix these problems, we as researchers need to be aware of them. And as instructors — both in the classroom and at the reference desk — we need to be prepared to educate others about them, too.

The last week or so has seen a flurry of discussion about the AALL Annual Meeting's educational program and suggestions to improve it. I won't rehash the discussion here. Instead, have a look at:

• Caren Biberman: Some thoughts on Programming at the AALL Annual Conference
• Mark Gediman: A Modest Proposal on Programming at AALL
• Caren Biberman: Dream Big or Comments on “A “Modest Proposal on Programming at AALL” and the Report of the AALL Annual Meeting Review Special Committee
• Mark Gediman: Programming at AALL – A Modest Follow-Up…
• Nina Platt: My Experience in Participating in the AALL Programming Process or AALL Educational Programming Needs to go Back to School.
• Jason Eiseman: A defense of AALL (sort of)
• Tracy Thompson-Przylucki: AALL Conference - How About a "Less is More" Approach?

(If I missed anyone in my list, please post links in the comments.)

To some extent I heartily agree and vehemently disagree with each in one way or another. Rather than pick apart what others have written, I'll simply offer my three suggestions on how AALL can improve the program selection process.

1) Create tracks by library type
The idea of conference "tracks" has already been floated by many people over the years, and the Annual Meeting Program Committee (AMPC) already announced that the 2011 Annual Meeting will have six tracks for programming based on AALL's "Competencies for Law Librarians":

• Library Management
• Reference, Research and Client Services
• Information Technology
• Collection Development and Cataloging
• Teaching
• General or Core Programs

Problem is, every one of these tracks remains a one-size-fits-all approach, meaning programs related to providing reference service to public patrons at a court library will be on the same track as ones about service to attorneys in a law firm. As is often the case with the non-track approach to the Annual Meeting, many coordinators will still include both types of presentations in the same session as a way to spread their programs' appeal to a wider audience and increasing the likelihood of its acceptance by AMPC. Unfortunately, programs that try to meld disparate audiences become half as useful to their audiences.

Last year I moderated a program on adding Web 2.0 tools to the library catalog. The panel included both academic and firm librarians, each speaking on the tools used in their respective libraries. The academic librarians' portion of the session kept academics in the audience interested, but had little to no applicability to the firm audience. When the firm librarian spoke, the opposite was true, with firm librarians suddenly engaged and academic librarians uninterested.

While we are all law librarians and work with legal information resources, the truth is that crossover appeal between what we work on and are professionally interested in is rare. A commenter to Jason Eiseman's blog post about the programming debate wrote, "Personally, I find the sessions presented by law firm librarians to be above and beyond the best of the conference." With all due respect, she only feels that way because she is a firm librarian. I, personally, find those sessions to be sleep-inducing and think programs presented by academic librarians to be the best, but this has nothing to do with who the best presenters are. It's simply a reflection of our professional interests.

To summarize the problem with the Annual Meeting's programming as deficient in programs for firm librarians is myopic. The real problem is AALL's well-intentioned push to appeal to all of the people all of the time, which results in watered-down programming that has limited applicability to everyone but inspirational functionality for no one.

For these reasons, I don't see the six tracks announced for 2011 being a solution to the problem. They simply reshuffle the schedule without resulting in any difference in the programs themselves. Instead, the tracks need to be based, at least in part, on librarian types. This means a track for academic librarians, one for court librarians, another for firm librarians. But this doesn't solve every problem, as reference librarians in an academic environment have little in common with technical services librarians in the same institution, so these tracks need to be split into additional mini-tracks. In the end, we could continue splitting until there are 100 or more tracks, but even with only one or two splits, the tracks become far more applicable to individuals than the current ones. Does this mean more than six tracks? Yeah, probably, but maybe every track doesn't have to be represented in every time slot. Or maybe having more, smaller programs is a good thing. Convention center meeting rooms can usually be split into smaller rooms, right? Not every session has to have 100+ attendees to be valuable. I'd rather sit in a room with ten people discussing academic library reference and technology concerns than in a huge room with 150 people discussing non-specific reference and technology concerns.

I don't know exactly what the structure of this multi-layered track system would be or what the specific tracks are. All I know is, trying to appeal to everyone at once in the same program rarely results in information I can take back to my library and put into action. In order to be useful to anyone, the tracks need to focus first and foremost on the type of library attendees work for. Only then will all constituencies find applicable programming.

2) Replace the AMPC with a separate committee for each track
If focusing program content on specific types of audiences is a desirable thing, it then follows that the content should be designed by the very people it is designed for. If there is a track for academic reference librarians (which is the category I fit into), the content should be solicited by, vetted by and scheduled by academic reference librarians. A committee made up of academic, firm, court and public librarians lacks in specialized knowledge what it gains in professional diversity. Instead, each of those librarian types should be involved in creating the track that fits their own qualifications and interests, not someone else's.

Under the current structure, where wide appeal is the goal, a committee with a sampling of all constituencies makes sense. With a move to specialized tracks, even the one announced for 2011, the committee makeup should shift to specialization as well.

Perhaps this would make AMPC membership less prestigious since there would be multiple committees instead of one centralized cabal, but firm librarians shouldn't be subjected to a program selected by academics and vice-versa. Embrace our differences and allow us to get the most out of the conference. This only happens if the committee itself reflects and embraces the differences, not through homogenization, but through specialized programming created by specialized committees.

Of course, the influence of the committees themselves becomes less important if we...

3) Crowdsource the program proposals within each track
In the last year or so I've had a lot of private conversations about crowdsourcing AALL programming. One of the commenters to Jason Eiseman's post also mentioned this, citing the SXSW PanelPicker as a model. The extreme example of this would be to post every proposal online and allow the AALL membership to vote. The top vote-getters then become the educational program. This model is problematic because it allows the largest constituency to dictate the program, leaving little or no content for specialized groups. This would also probably lead to the same problem with the current program in which sessions with the widest possible appeal, and perhaps highest likelihood for being watered-down, receiving the most votes.

Another suggestion I've heard is having AALL crowdsource one session, perhaps posting all the remaining proposals after the rest of the program is selected, allowing the membership to vote for the last slot. I find this problematic on two accounts. First, it sends a message that AALL only views member preference as worthy of consideration for a single session, preferring the machinations of a committee working in secrecy over the voice of its members. Second, it makes all the rejected proposals public, subjecting AMPC to an onslaught of "How could you have picked this session over that one" complaints. Both of these would be valid complaints, but the ensuing chaos might lead to obnoxious flame wars that would annoy everyone but the rabble-rousers.

With program tracks defined by clear member constituencies, however, crowdsourcing becomes a workable option. If there is a track for firm librarians (or some sub-category therein) already defined with a set number of session slots, a proposal can be submitted to that specific track where it will be voted upon solely by firm librarians. Proposals for academic tracks would be voted upon solely by academic librarians. This ensures that each constituency gets a program that reflects its current interests and needs.

This doesn't mean AMPC (or the various tracks' AMPCs) doesn't have a role. Crowdsourced voting should be the top consideration in selecting a program, but scheduling, speaker availability and other issues will still have to be dealt with by the committee(s). Again, this might make AMPC a less prestigious committee appointment, but prestige shouldn't be why AMPC exists.

These three changes to program selection are not small. They would involve major alterations to how the Annual Meeting's content is selected, requiring personnel, administrative and technological overhauls to be implemented. So what? AALL is our organization, and if we don't shape it and the Annual Meeting into something that meets our needs, we have no one to blame but ourselves. This is really just an "off the top of my head" summary of various conversations I've had over the last year, so it's by no means intended as an end all, be all solution. Your mileage will vary. But hopefully as more people enter the conversation and the various suggestions are weighed, we can come up with something that results in a more valuable Annual Meeting for everyone.

Like many academic libraries, my institution uses a liaison model to provide faculty service. In short, each member of the law school's faculty is assigned to a reference librarian. That librarian becomes a faculty member's liaison to the library, and any request for library service usually goes through this liaison. Ideally, in addition to waiting for direct requests for service, a librarian/liaison will stay on top of what faculty members are working on and funnel relevant information to them as needed, say keeping track of new books and articles in an area in which the faculty member typically writes.

Maintaining these faculty-librarian relationships are an ongoing challenge of the job. Some faculty like to stay in constant contact, so knowing what they're working on is easy. But others keep a little more distance, either because they're hesitant to ask for help or because they're simply more comfortable working in isolation. Even in these more "spacious" relationships, however, author alerts can be a good way for a librarian to keep track of a faculty member's interests without nagging him or her with unwanted emails and phone calls.

Most law school librarians are probably already aware of such author alerts from Westlaw ("WestClip") and Lexis ("Alerts"). LegalTrac provides them, too ("Search Alerts"). But the limitation of these alerts is that they're limited to what's already been published. If Westlaw sends an email notifying me that Prof. Smith has a new article in the Iowa Law Review, that can be useful in a number of ways, but it doesn't necessarily tell me what Prof. Smith is working on right now. In fact, it may simply tell me what he was working on a year ago.

So, in addition to those alerts, I also subscribe to author alerts for all of my faculty from SSRN (Social Science Research Network). Because many professors post working papers and forthcoming publications to SSRN, sometimes long before a journal accepts it for publication, these alerts keep me more up to date than the aforementioned systems. I'm still limited to what's already been written, not what's being researched currently, but the delay is considerably shorter than what I get from Westlaw, Lexis and LegalTrac.

As far as I can tell, author alerts from SSRN are only available via RSS feeds, but they're easy to access. Simply search for a professor's name. When you find an article he or she authored in the search results, just click the author name. This takes you to SSRN's author profile for the professor. In addition to listing all the articles in the system written by this professor, it provides a link to the RSS feed for the author. Subscribe to the feed using your preferred RSS reader, and you'll be notified whenever the professor uploads a new or revised article to SSRN. (A quick hint: Google Reader seemed to have trouble reading some of SSRN's author feeds, so I run all of mine through Feedburner now and use Google Reader to subscribe to the Feedburner URL for the feeds. It's an annoying step, but it works.) And if you do prefer email alerts, there are plenty of options for receiving RSS feeds via email.

Technologically speaking, this isn't a mindblowing concept. I use RSS for many things, and this is hardly a novel application. However, I don't tend to visit SSRN that often, and as a result I'm not always aware of what functionality the site offers. What makes this tool so useful for me—and perhaps for you—is that I'm seeing works in progress, not long completed publications. I, for one, find this extremely beneficial in my day-to-day job duties.

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.