Law, Information, and Technology Blog >> David Whelan

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Susannah Tredwell's post at Slaw.ca about the future of loose-leafs has gotten me thinking more about that expensive mainstay of the law library collection. For those of you who do not know what a loose-leaf is, think of a binder (usually multiple volumes) that gets updated periodically. They initially met a need for keeping information current between full releases of an edition of a given law book. The benefit to the legal researcher is currency. The benefit to the publisher can be revenue, since many publishers charge for each release. In some cases, the releases are weekly.

You can read Susannah's post here.

Secondary Materials Are Underutilized

The problem with loose-leaf publications is that there are electronic databases.  Some legal publishers have migrated their loose-leaf texts into their database offerings but they don't seem to be very effective.  Usage of online databases in Ontario law libraries seems to be heavily focused on primary law (no surprise) but secondary content makes up a small minority (10-15%) of all usage.

There remains an ongoing discussion about why lawyers do not seem to use secondary materials.  We're taught to use them as a starting point in law school but somewhere between learning and practicing, lawyers appear to shift their focus.  Librarians continue to harp on the need to train, as if we had some holy insight into the problem.  I could be wrong (surprise surprise) but my guess would be that lawyers know the secondary materials are available and they generally don't find them to be useful.  As the practice of law becomes specialized, lawyers are probably less likely to find themselves in unknown territory.

Paper Looseleafs Are Poor Resources

Other legal publishers have not even made the transition, so they continue to churn out new pages for library staff to file.  Some problems with this ongoing collection method:

• The cost per page of staff time is probably not recoverable in the value that the supplemental pages actual provide;
• Loose-leafs enable publishers to hide behind the unknown of changes in the law.  If there are significant changes in the middle of the year, you may find a sudden flurry of updates.  These have obvious budgetary implications where the legal publisher has chosen to charge per release, rather than all you can eat like CCH Canadian does.  If libraries have reputational problems with their organizations, it's in part because we cannot say, we will spend $X this year.  At the start of the year, you have no idea what your print loose-leaf activity is going to be.
• Theoretically, new content for loose-leafs is generated in an electronic format (word processor, whatever).  It should then be uploaded to its online home.  It is also printed, packaged, sorted, and shipped to a library.  It seems crazy to pay for a product that has this sort of delay if an electronic equivalent is available online.
• A constant concern, sometimes confirmed, is that these updates do not actually reflect any new commentary.  Instead, they cause repagination of the valuable commentary with additional citations to cases, legislation, or other information.  Much of this is accessible electronically and would appear to anyone researching primary law.  Other than creating make work for library staff and extra revenue for the publisher, it probably does not have any substantive value to a researcher.

Drop the Format, Grab the Content

Few people would argue that the content created by authors of these volumes is not valuable.  But it's time to drop the loose-leaf, print and binder format.  If I was to think of a current online analog to the loose-leaf, it would be the wiki.  It enables content consumption a section at a time, it can be organized in a hierarchical way so that it can be browsed, and it can be searched.

It can even replicate some of the serendipity that books provide, where related links or taxonomic metadata can enable aggregation of information from beyond adjacent pages.

If a loose-leaf was truly read like a book, rather than harvested for a section or a chapter by itself, this might not make sense.  But that doesn't seem to be the future of the secondary text, if it was ever the past.  Which is not to say that authors don't need to write in a linear way or with some coherent form, as the comments to this post by Gary Rodrigues, also on Slaw, suggest.  But just because it is created that way doesn't mean that it will be consumed that.

Using wikis does not even mean that the publisher needs to create a resource segmented apart from its other legal research databases or services.  If a publisher can aggregate content from multiple sources in response to a search query, or to enable browsing of aggregate resources, the wiki should be able to fit within this environment.  

A wiki can also provide the necessary break from trying to replicate, often poorly, the linear path of a secondary text in an online format.  Again, it's not that the content cannot be read linearly, but that doesn't appear to be how lawyers actually use it.  So why emulate an environment that doesn't enhance use of the content?

My ideal future for loose-leafs would be to see them go away.  LexisNexis (US) has already started selling some of its multi-volume loose-leafs in cheaper, perfect bound editions.  As Susannah's posting suggests, many libraries have started going to annual contents, which is essentially to buy a single copy of the loose-leaf, skip updates, and then buy a new edition in the future.  If that's the pattern, then publishers may want to convert these loose-leafs into permanent volumes.  Leave the updating to electronic resources that enable the content to stay in its original format, can reduce overall operating costs (and hopefully operating expenses for libraries).  Even better, ditch the print entirely for these texts and find a better way to provide them online.  Look at how they are being consumed, not just how they have to be created.

Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Finding and Managing Legal Information Book from Canada Law Book

 

Finding and Managing Legal Information Book from Canada Law Book

A project that had its start the summer after I moved to Canada has finally seen sunlight! I have for some time wanted to write something longer, more in-depth, and covering a lot of the research tools and concepts that I use myself for legal research. It turned out to be timely, given that a lot of lawyers are using Google as a research starting point!

There are plenty of books on legal research proper, that will walk you through types of law, and the relatively academic process of learning how to perform research.  Similarly, there are a wealth of Web sites that seem to all contain the same hackneyed lists of legal information resources online, let alone the tomes that print those lists to create reference volumes that are unnecessarily duplicative of free online tools.

Since I'm far more focused on what lawyers in practice do, neither of these directions fit my own practical viewpoint.  My book is geared towards someone who wants practical tips and recommendations for Internet-oriented research.  Lawyers, paralegals, and librarians in any kind of library will find it accessible.  While I discuss some of the fee-based research resources and have some suggestions for purchasing or licensing access to them, for the most part this is resource agnostic.  If you are interested in finding information online and then keeping track of it and using it later, you will hopefully find much to help you in this book.  

The book was originally conceived as an electronic book (in PDF) with a companion Finding Legal Information (FLI) blog.  But Canada Law Book, my publisher, excels at print-on-demand so a perfect bound version was also made available in print.  The print version was on display at this year's Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference and over the last 8 weeks promotion for the book has started.

It's been an interesting experience, one which I'd always wondered about.  First, I wanted to see if I could write something longer than the articles I often write for magazine publication.  I'd been piqued a few years ago when someone told me, in essence, "You've done a lot of writing, but it's all short."  It was meant disparagingly and taken so, and I've had it as a challenge ever since then to surmount that perception.

But I'd also been curious about what was necessary, both as an author creating and as an author participating in the publishing process.  This was a great opportunity and I was lucky to work with some wonderful people at Canada Law Book who didn't appear to mind answering what were probably obvious questions.

Check out the blog and feel free to buy a copy of the book!  I'd be interested in your feedback on what's helpful and what can be improved if I ever get the opportunity to update the text in the future.

Here is the entire list, thanks to the Twapper Keeper archive.

Here's one of mine