February 2004 Archives

There are a variety of ways to find and deliver news information to your organization, including tools offered by proprietary services as well as free options on the web. My presentation at the recent SCALL Institute discusses the methods of delivery, vendor tools, web services and a brief introduction to RSS feeds. (Be aware that the presentation is 3 meg in size, and could take some time to download.)

The traditional online venders, Lexis, Westlaw and Factiva all offer email alert services. These services notify users of new information added to the selected database that meets a specific search criteria. Figuring out which one best suits your needs can be difficult as there are sometimes subtle, sometimes significant, differences between them. I've summarized the basic features of these premium alerts in this handout compiled for my presentation at the SCALL Institute. Please do comment if you have any additional insights on any of these services.

[3/4/2004: Correction made on handout. Cost of full-text articles referenced in Westlaw's Intraclips is $2.75 per document.]

It has been a big week at Yahoo! They've abandoned Google as their search engine and introduced their own; AND you can now add RSS feeds to MyYahoo. There's even an interesting convergence between those two features.

I will be presenting at the SCALL (Southern California Association of Law Libraries) Institute, Feb. 28th, on the various ways to deliver news and current information. Below is the bibliography for the session which includes selected materials on blogging, RSS, intranets and content licensing. I've included links when the materials are available on the web. Thanks to Marlene Bubrick for making this bibliography presentable.

Are you looking for a free high-quality legal newsfeed for your Internet or intranet site? Jurist's Paper Chase, the continually-updated legal news weblog edited at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law by Professor Bernard Hibbitts and his volunteer staff of over 30 law students is now making legal news headlines available free to legal, educational, and governmental websites and intranets. The headlines can be added to your site by incorporating an rss feed (with clear attribution to Jurist), or just grab the ready-made html code.

My quest to find the perfect spam solution continues. As I reported last week, I decided to try Spamex to solve my spam woes. I've since moved on to Mailblocks, and think that this may be the one for me.

Valuable information in any organization can be spread across a variety of databases, intranet pages, and of course, document management systems.

I'm convinced that we need to stop requiring attorneys to figure out which data store contains the information that they need, but rather, provide a search engine that will pull all the firm's resources together, and present the appropriate content based on the search terms. Everyone wants something "Google-like", and I don't see why they can't have it! Apparently the law firm of Cleary, Gottlieb agrees. Brenton B. Miller describes their search for just such a product in a recent article in the Legal Times, The Engine that Could.

I've never had the urge to browse the web on my cell phone. Call me old-fashioned, but the idea of viewing web pages on a 1" square screen just doesn't strike me as a satisfying experience.

I readily admit not everyone is like me. Case in point, Irene McDermott, librarian at the San Marino Public Library recently wrote an article called "Cell Phone Reference" for Searcher Magazine (Oct. 2003 - yes, that's a few months back, but what can I say, I'm at the bottom of the routing list).

I recently saw a demo of the Lexis Publisher product. I listened carefully, then said "It's a blog." Okay, it's ALMOST a blog. Really. It just needs a few minor tweaks.

Marshall Breeding will present Where is the Industry Headed? Top Trends to Watch in 2004 on Feb. 11, 2004, 8 AM to 9 AM Pacific as a Dynix Institute Seminar. It's a free web seminar so you don't have to travel any farther than your desk!  If you miss the live presentation, not to worry, I see an archive for past presentations.  You've gotta just love web conferencing!

George T. Tziahanas approaches knowledge management in a very practical and straighforward way in a recent white paper, Legal Knowledge Management: a Holistic Model.

He states that in "LRC's experience with workproduct databases demonstrates a minimum hit-rate of 25% in searches for highly relevant, existing content," resulting in equivalent savings in legal research and writing costs.

Email’s reputation as an efficient tool for home and business communication is being questioned these days, mainly because the spam that is flowing into our inboxes is devouring our day. You can judge the state of email by scanning such article titles as “Can E-mail Survive?” (PC Magazine, Feb. 17, 2004, p. 65)

I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more! I've had it with spam. I shouldn't feel like I need a shower after going through my inbox.

So I'm preparing to take a momentous step, at least momentous for me. It's time to retire my Earthlink email address of many years and move on. But such a move needs careful consideration and strategizing, or, as we all know, I'll end up right back where I started from. So here's my plan, disposable email addresses, or DEAs as they're called.