LawLibTech

Concerning meta data, Dennis makes an excellent point about capturing data once and using it many times. As he says, "the key is eliminating duplicate data entry." In a large firm, a great deal of information may be collected for contact management, accounting and conflicts systems, just to name a few, but that information isn't necessarily made available to other applications. Some of this information would be useful as searching points in KM systems, for example, a client's SIC code to limit a search to a particular industry, but it's too burdensome to research and key information into several different systems. As Dennis states, "the goal of good computing is 'enter once, use many times.' Use every available way to reuse information you already have entered at least once (such as client/matter numbers and other information) to automatically put meta data on documents using simple business rules. I can't emphasize this enough: making lawyers enter information multiple times is a recipe for failure."

A good point is also made about the possibility of doing away with taxonomies altogether. But the ability to browse a group of documents, though often not the best way to locate a specific item, is useful for allowing a view into the collection. Or maybe the desire to browse on the part of most attorneys is simply a symptom of the dissatisfaction with existing search engines. I particularly enjoyed the quote "As William Blake might have said about this, "I must create my own categories or be enslav'd by those of another." No doubt many people are forced to browse taxonomies that make no sense except in the mind of the creator.

Or is full-text only, as Ron suggests, not necessarily the ideal method of access, but is popular because it looks good in comparison to nothing?

Very interesting discussion!

[via on excited utterances]