Category: tech

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.

In 2009, Wolters Kluwer (WK) launched a web-based legal research system called IntelliConnect. The site incorporated a wide array of WK's print content from publishing brands such as CCH and Aspen. Within the law librarian community, the product launch generated a lot of negative opinions. Seeking to rehabilitate the product's image, WK invited several law librarian bloggers to the company's offices in New York a few weeks ago for a day of presentations and meetings. Full FTC disclosure: I accepted the invitation, with WK footing the bill for my flights, hotel room and a festive Cinco de Mayo lunch, as well as providing a per diem to cover other meals and transportation.

My exposure to IntelliConnect since its launch has been intermittent. This parallels my experience with the company's print products. Services like CCH's reporters are primarily practice materials, and as an academic librarian who does very little research in the tax and business arenas that WK specializes in, use of these materials is hardly a daily event. Nor weekly.

It's for that reason that I think my reaction to IntelliConnect upon launch was more positive than a lot of my colleagues. WK had placed its materials online prior to IntelliConnect in a manner that essentially matched its print products, thus you needed to know what content each title contained in order to use the materials. Much like the classic Westlaw and Lexis, you needed to know where something relevant would be found before looking for it. IntelliConnect, however, incorporated federated searching with faceted results, allowing users who didn't know with any specificity where the useful content for a query was to search the entire system at once and find matching content regardless of its location or print title.

While I found this to be a vast improvement over the old system, the federated search model, and its accompanying move away from print organization, upset a lot of longtime users. And therein lies the seemingly unsolvable problem for Wolters Kluwer: How do you make all types of users happy?

Power users of IntelliConnect's CCH/Aspen/etc content know what's there, where it is, and expect the ability to go straight to it with as few clicks as possible. New and less frequent users than that group, however, might prefer a system they can log into and navigate with ease, guiding them to the material they're looking for even when they don't know where it is.

The initial launch played more to the needs of the latter group, with content organized by type (case, explanation, etc.), rather than practice area. This provided a major source of complaints from power users who wanted materials organized by publication title. Since the launch, WK responded to these complaints by reorganizing its content by practice area, a change that should make a big difference in usability to those users. Of course, for the non-power users this means the "CCH for Dummies" interface is gone. Personally, I wish the company could find a way to integrate both organizational models without one getting in the way of the other. I'm not sure how this could best be accomplished, and without a concrete suggestion to offer, I have to agree with WK that pleasing the existing user base has to be a higher priority for the company right now.

WK added a number of other features since the launch, including navigational enhancements like "next document"/"previous document" buttons, book browsing and full document path information for every piece of content in the system. All of these features are being added in response to user suggestions and complaints, while indicative of real problems in the initial product launch, demonstrates that WK is unusually responsive for a high end legal information vendor.

Beyond what's already been added, the company has several enhancements slated for release this year. In July the front page of IntelliConnect, currently a mostly blank screen void of useful content other than a search box will be replaced with a number of links to the user's "favorite" materials and a number of support documents that are currently buried within the system. More importantly, the system's "browse tree" will be visible on the front page, allowing users to immediately browse the system's contents without having to click the small "Browse" command first.

Also on the way is a "Titles A-Z" list that provides users an easy way to view and find every title included in the current subscription. Coupled with a "Title Finder" search box, this will finally allow a user to know what they've subscribed to without needing to navigate a confusing backend interface.

From a content perspective, IntelliConnect is a valuable practitioner resource, providing searchable electronic access to CCH's goldmine of looseleaf publications, as well as a number of Aspen publications. Despite the confusing branding on IntelliConnect's homepage (the URL says "CCH," the browser title bar says "IntelliConnect," and the page banner says "Wolters Kluwer), the company says IntelliConnect is intended to be the online presence for all of WK's legal information content, including (eventually) LoisLaw, the primary law database recently purchased by the company.

With all of these positives to recommend IntelliConnect, there is one aspect of the system that gives me pause: user interface. The layout of the system is something akin to a 1990's CD-ROM product running Folio Views. IntelliConnect's browse tree is constructed with threaded menus in which a user has to click on a small plus sign to expand the next level of the menu. The more levels down a user drills, the farther to the right the links are indented. And because this navigation pane is constructed with HTML panels, that means the titles become hidden behind the main content pane, requiring users to either scroll with a horizontal scroll bar or grab the panel's border and change the width of the nav pane. Is this functional? Yes. But it's not optimal nor is it in line with current web design norms.

The use of frames raises a larger issue than just the ease of navigation, which is overall browser functionality. One of the reason HTML frames fell out of favor in the last decade is that they render the URL visible in the browser's address bar unusable. That URL reflects the address of the page containing the frames, not the addresses of the frames currently loaded within that page. As a result, a user cannot copy and paste the visible URL into an email or another browser window or post a link to it on an intranet page so other users can access the precise material being viewed at any given time. Instead, if I email a colleague a link to the case I'm reading, when he or she tries to open it, it will load the IntelliConnect home page. In most situations, IntelliConnect's built-in email mechanism provides a workaround, but the functionality remains inconsistent that provided by most internet sites. The one place where there is no workaround is the browser's refresh button. If, as sometimes happens in IntelliConnect, a page doesn't load properly or freezes, users expect the refresh button to reload that page. Because frames are used, however, clicking the refresh button reloads the IntelliConnect home page, taking the user back to the beginning of the research trail. Frames can also break the browser's "Back" button (a common glitch in classic Westlaw), though this is less of a problem now than it used to be.

Another problematic issue with the interface is that it isn't compatible with all browsers. In fact, if a user loads IntelliConnect in anything other than Internet Explorer, a warning appears informing the user that he should use IE. While the system seems to work okay in Firefox despite the warning, it is effectively broken in both Safari and Chrome, with important buttons rendered unclickable or even invisible in those browsers. While many legal information providers rely on the accepted wisdom that all law firms are Windows shops that force employees to use only Internet Explorer, this ignores the realities of attorneys who prefer a different operating system or browser and ignore firm IT mandates when possible. And given what I see in the law school environment, where about 50% of students are now Mac users, as the current generation of students and young lawyers gain seniority in firms, the Windows-only mandates will evaporate. When questioned on the issue of browser compatibility, the folks at WK assured us they are aware of the problem and want IntelliConnect to be cross-browser compatible, no details as to what they're doing to fix the problem were offered nor a target date for when a fix would be in place.

Apart from technical concerns, the UI simply isn't consistent with design norms currently used across the web. This is a vague complaint to elaborate on, so I'll use an example within WK itself: AspenLaw.com. The colors, fonts, nav structure and browsing experience on this site are consistent with both contemporary concepts of what's "pretty" and what internet users have been conditioned to expect from popular sites like Facebook, Google or CNN. Upon selecting a publication series from the Student Central menu, the product listings are displayed in a two column layout, with facet navigation on the left and results on the right. Neither of these columns are frames. Each of the search facets list a few of the most popular categories by default, which tells the user what the facet title actually means, with a link to expand the list further if necessary. Selecting a specific item from the results loads that document in its own page with a permanent URL. To get back to the search results, a user need only click the browser's back button. No special training is required to navigate the site because it operates exactly the way most of popular sites do. AspenLaw.com illustrates that WK has excellent web designers (a distinct role that is separate from the web developers who actually build sites) at its disposal to design user interfaces for its products. I hope at some point the company asks them to tackle the IntelliConnect UI.

These UI complaints do nothing to detract from the high quality of IntelliConnect's content or the ways in which it organizes the content in response to user needs and suggestions. But with an updated look and feel that incorporates the ways users already navigate the web, the rich WK content provided in IntelliConnect could become not just functional but intuitive.

I love my iPhone, but its core functionality doesn't always provide the tools necessary for me to function as a mobile librarian. Faculty requests for articles are an almost daily occurrence for me, and I'm not always in my office when I get them. Yesterday, for example, I was in a lunch presentation when I got an email from a colleague with an urgent request. I didn't have my laptop with me, so I used my iPhone to track down the article. JSTOR had the document I needed, but when I displayed the PDF file in Mobile Safari, there wasn't much I could do with it except read it. I certainly couldn't save a copy or attach it to an email:

So even though I'd found the requested article, I couldn't send it to the person who needed it it until I got back to my office an hour later.

I knew there had to be a way to get a PDF out of my browser and into an email. Josh Brauer tipped me off to an app called GoodReader. It's not free, but at 99 cents it's hardly expensive. GoodReader is a PDF/TXT reader and file storage application, and because it has its own web browser one can access PDFs on the web and save them.

Once the file downloads, it resides in the app's  file library. From there, select it and choose the email option, which drops the file into a new email as a file attachment.

There's also a method for saving documents to GoodReader directly from within Mobile Safari, but I find it easier to use the app's browser since I'll have to switch to GoodReader to email the file anyway.

I've only described a small fraction of GoodReader's functionality here, but this document delivery feature alone makes it worth 99 cents. There's also a free version of the application that limits storage to only five documents.

I make no secret of my love of web technology and services. I'm a full convert to electronic books for leisure reading, having read 17 consecutive books this year on my iPhone's Kindle app. Legal issues aside, I think the Google Books project is a big step forward. I haven't rented (or borrowed) a DVD in well over a year, preferring instead to rent from Amazon's Video on Demand service or stream movies from Netflix. I don't read print newspapers or watch television news, opting instead to get my news online via a selection of RSS feeds from various sources. I am not on a routing list for even one journal, yet I read several regularly online. I use Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, IM and SMS rather than email and phone calls to stay in contact with my friends and colleagues. I love "new media."

Professionally speaking, that means slightly more than diddly squat.

There is no shortage of librarians stating their preferences about online services. God knows I do it plenty. Some proselytize tools like Twitter as gospel. Others are evangelical about the enduring utility of print. But even if, for example, "I believe that print books are an outdated technology" (which I don't), that doesn't mean my library should cease collecting print materials. I am but one person. Furthermore, I'm not even really a patron of my library. I am an employee. As a professional, my job is to give the patrons of my library what they want and need for their purposes. I work at an academic law library, so by and large those patron wants and needs are scholarly or instructional in nature. Yes, many of those patrons would prefer that everything we have be available in electronic format. These patrons are merely one constituency. If we are able to meet that constituency's expectations, there are still other constituencies to consider. Service to one group of patrons should not be provided to the exclusion of all others.

Now, given my preference for digital library service, I may believe that the reasons behind my preference are universal strengths that all patrons would embrace if only they knew about them. Well, then it's my job to inform patrons about those strengths. And to do so in a neutral manner that doesn't attempt to bully anyone into "seeing the light." Some will see things my way. Some will not. But my job as a librarian isn't simply to please those patrons who agree with me and my preferences. If a significant portion (and that doesn't mean it has to be even close to a majority) of my library's patrons prefer something other than what I like, it's my job to give it to them as well as my budget allows.

This is not an anti-progress post. I believe that librarians should explore social media tools and ebooks aggressively to meet the needs of those patrons who prefer them. If a new web technology really is progress for patrons, and we do a good job illustrating that to them, it will stick. But these new services should be added in addition to the ones already in place. The existence of IM or SMS reference service does not necessarily mean there shouldn't be a librarian at a reference desk, too. These are individual considerations for individual libraries based upon the needs of each institution's patrons. The adoption of new technology should make things easier for patrons, not more difficult. If we, as librarians, simply rely on our own personal preferences in making decisions about services and materials that impact our patrons, we cease to be useful to the very people we're here to serve.

Even in the examples I provided at the beginning of this post, my preferences only go so far. My parents do not use Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, IM or SMS. So while I prefer all those things, when it comes to staying in touch with them, I use email and phone calls. And that's just fine. There is no reason the new and the old can't co-exist.