October 2005 Archives

According to the article "Time to Put Away the Umbrellas", the layoff of their entire library staff in the Chicago office of Baker & McKenzie was a turning point for law librarians who responded by being "more vocal about how much they do for lawyers and for the firm as a whole." Apparently it worked, or perhaps the fact that librarians can still track down information more efficiently than lawyers would have eventually become obvious regardless.

The turnaround in our prospects is clarified by statistics compiled by American Lawyer, and are included in summary form in the article. But let me summarize. Staff is up. Compensation is up. Billable hours are up.

If you're working on your budget or annual report, and want to show management the current trends in law libraries, get a hold of this article, and/or the American Lawyer statistics! Does anyone know if this article has been reprinted elsewhere so that non-Californians can enjoy it, too?

"Time to Put Away the Umbrellas: Budgets and salaries head northward as firms concede librarians importance", California LegalPro, Fall 2005

Okay, it turned out there really IS something wrong with my computer. You may recall when we last talked, I was having problems importing my Bloglines subscriptions into the new Google Reader. But I tried it at work, and lo and behold, the export/import worked quite smoothly. I think that's proof that I really DO need a new computer for Christmas!

So I now have all my required reading in the Google Reader. My initial reaction to the product is that it will be well-liked by those that monitor a relatively small number of feeds. Bloglines need not be overly concerned at this juncture.

On the bright side, it's quick and easy to figure out. Once you've subscribed to your favorite RSS feeds, the default view shows you the headlines in order by relevance. (By date is the other sort option.) I can't help but wonder....how do they determine relevance? Think about it, I didn't run a search at this point....so how does it know? It's a mystery to me, but I have to admit, the items listed at the top were quite interesting, so they must be doing something right.

This is not, however, the way I'm used to reading my feeds. In Bloglines, I can see which feeds have unread items, and how many. I can then choose which feed I'd like to read. I've become rather fond of this method. If I'm in a hurry, there are some feeds I'll skip. Others, that are must-reads for me, I go to right away. With the Google Reader, I don't have that kind of view as an option. The list of subscriptions doesn't indicate how many unread items are waiting for me.

But the Reader does follow Google's tendency to keep things simple and clean. And the relevancy ranking intrigues me. I may log on every once in a while to see the Google Reader displays items of interest that I've missed. If you just want an easy way to read a short list of feeds, Google Reader might suit you just fine.

No one can complain about a scarcity of news content. There's a LOT of news on the web, some of which probably isn't really fit to print, from both free sites, and not so free ones. But one can legitimately whine about the difficulty of finding RELEVANT news, no more and no less. To my mind, a controlled vocabulary, preferably one reviewed by real people, is crucial to finding what you want. Full-text searching on its own isn't enough.

The news offered by Lexis and Westlaw include indexing terms, but they don't put these important terms front & center, rather they hide them in segments, requiring users to ferret them out and then try to determine how to make use of them.

They could learn something from Inform.com, a new beta site that aggregates and indexes hundreds of newspapers and magazines. Inform apparently knows a not-so-well-kept secret of researchers who use index terms to increase the relevancy of news search results, that is, the best way to find the appropriate index terms for your particular search is to find an relevant article in any way you can, usually by running a full-text search, then seeking out the index terms applied to that article and using them to refine and expand your search. This process is usually not the domain of the beginning searchers.

But Inform indexes the news, then offers a slew of features based on that indexing, making it easy for the user to find additional articles on any facet or topic related to the currently viewed article. For example, select an article from the front page. The full-text is displayed with a menu across the top, called the Discovery Area, which includes links for People, Places, Organizations, Topics, Industries and Products. I'm looking at an article on American Airlines. If I want to read more about the general state of the airline industry, I can select Industry from the top for a new list of articles. Or I can select People, and click on Ron Hunter for additional articles relating to him. I'm hoping that RSS feeds for custom channels are in the works.

There's much more here, but you can explore yourself. I've only touched the surface of Inform's capabilities. All I can say is, it's a different way of looking at the news.

I'm a big fan of web-based RSS readers; I've been using Bloglines for some time now. So I sat up and took notice when I saw the announcement that Google was now offering an web-based RSS reader. It's from Google, I'm a Google-holic, it seemed like a match made in heaven.

Just an FYI, you need a Gmail account in order to use the Google Reader. That shouldn't be a barrier, since Gmail accounts are now available to everyone. Just select "Get and Account Now" from the Reader page. Since I already have a Gmail account, I went straight to the Google Reader and tried to import my recently exported Bloglines OPML file.

Except it didn't work. Who knows, maybe it's a Bloglines problem, maybe not. But I have to ask, am I the only one having problems with getting Google products to work lately? (Aside from the basic Google search, of course. Luckily THAT'S not causing me any trouble.) Gmail started the trend by rejecting my emails, making it less than useful as an email program. Then I upgraded my Google Desktop Search, which promptly quit working. I uninstalled and re-installed. No dice, so I downloaded Yahoo Desktop Search instead. After all, a girl's gotta be able to search her hard drive. Now Google Reader doesn't want to import my feeds.

I'm trying not to take it personally...heck, Google and I go way back. Maybe I need a new computer...yes, that's the ticket! It can't be Google's fault...it must be me. What a great excuse...I mean reason...to get a whole new system. Would that appease the Google Gods?

Amazon does it. Now so does OCLC. According to Roy Tennant, as reported on the Free Range Librarian, OCLC has "released the ability for readers to write their own reviews." You can see this in action by searching Worldcat via Yahoo or Google.

That's very nice, but what I REALLY want is the ability to include comments in our online catalogs. How hard could that be? Wouldn't it be helpful to know what your resident expert on Mergers & Acquisitions thinks about the M&A books in your collection? Which ones are his favorites, which ones are useless? Oh, and one more thing. How about the ability to create a bibliography of the highest ranking books on a topic, complete with comments? These features would combine knowledge management and library research, and though relatively simple to implement, could have powerful results.

If only Amazon OR OCLC would start selling library software, maybe then we'd have a chance...

I haven't had a chance to look at Lawyerlinks, but Dennis Kennedy says it's a very interesting site, so it's no doubt worth the time. But even better is a quote from his review of LawyerLinks: "my advice: give the librarian a raise and better tools and cut costs on books."

I couldn't agree more.

According to a N.Y. Times article on attorney bloggers, a recent survey conducted by Blogads.com found that 5.1 percent of the people reading the blogs were lawyers or judges, putting that group fourth behind computer professionals, students and retirees. Not only that, 6.1 percent said they were in the legal profession, putting lawyers fourth again, behind educators, computer types and people involved in "media".

Who says lawyers aren't early adopters! But, of course, blogging isn't about technology. As the article points out, it's about words, and attorneys always have something to say.