March 25, 2007

45 Sites in 45 Minutes

Humor, travel, music, and even a few research sites were featured in 45 Sites in 45 Minutes, presented by Michael Saint-Onge (LexisNexis) and yours truly last weekend at the SCALL Institute - Global Legal Landscapes. This was my second presentation of this nature to SCALL and I had a great time.

You may recall that last year I spent much of my preparation time looking for the right tool to use to download the featured web pages in case of a technical catastrophe. After all, it would be a little hard to fake it without the web. I went back to last year's entry, saw that I used NetSnippets, and figured I'd do the same this year. With new computers at home and at work, I just needed to download and install it again. Except.....it seems that Netsnippets has been discontinued. It was back to the drawing board.

There was precious little time left; after all, I didn't think this was a problem I needed to solve AGAIN, so I waited until just a few days before the presentation to work on the download. This time around I decided to take the easy way out. I captured screenshots to Powerpoint, and decided that would have to do in a pinch.

Whether this kind of backup is still necessary is hard to say. It inevitably takes a couple of hours to compile, and considering the fact that Internet connections in conference hotels and elsewhere are becoming quite reliable, perhaps I'm going overboard. But just when I think I'm ready to fly without a net, I imagine myself in front of an audience with....nothing, and I start grabbing screenshots again.

This was my first time using a wiki for a presentation. It turned out to be a very easy and efficient way for MIchael and I to collaborate. I'm really liking PB Wiki's new WYSIWYG editor. It's unquestionably easier than remembering the special wiki syntax that PB Wiki used before.

I've been spotting presentation wikis fairly frequently over the past year. Here's just a couple of examples:

Technology Training in Libraries

60 Sites in 60 Minutes at the Texas Library Association

Sometimes wikis are the actual presentation medium, other times they've created to distribute supplementary information and handouts. Just think, you could continue to collaborate and communicate with your audience after the program is over. Try THAT with PowerPoint!

Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 05:05 PM | Comments (0)

May 03, 2006

ALM Content Available Exclusively on Westlaw

You may not realize it, but your Lexis news search isn't picking up some of the most popular legal newspapers, such as the National Law Journal, Legal Times and American Lawyer, because all ALM publications are available exclusively on Westlaw as of May 1st.

It appears that the ALM content was removed from Lexis sometime last week, approximately April 27th, potentially leaving researchers with holes in their search results that they didn't anticipate and may not even be aware of. While Westlaw has been touting their new advantage on the Westlaw login screen, Lexis has been very quiet on the topic. News content isn't the only thing effected. Jury verdict information for selected states such as California has disappeared; searchers of the group jury verdicts file may not realize that California is no longer represented in the results.

According to the Westlaw press release:

Specific material from ALM to be offered exclusively on Westlaw includes the full content of ALM magazines, state and national newspapers, including The American Lawyer®, The National Law Journal®, Corporate Counsel®, New York Law Journal® and Legal Times®, as well as all newsletters, jury verdict and expert witness databases, books and case collections, ALM directories, and settlement data and publications.

As always, the content provided by companies that aggregate third party news sources is a moving target. Unfortunately sometimes things can move so fast, you may get left in the lurch!

Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 04:22 PM | Comments (1)

April 09, 2006

45 Sites in 45 Minutes (More or Less) - Capturing Web Pages

Jenny Kanji, a veteran of the " ___Sites in ___ Minutes" presentation genre, and I, a newcomer to the format, had the pleasure of presenting 45 Sites in 45 Minutes at the recent California Joint Institute. The emphasis is on California regulation and politics, but you'll find a bit of an eclectic mix ranging from a podcast search engine to a dancing Bush.

I would never depend upon a live Internet connection for this kind of presentation. You could easily end up spending half of a precious minute loading the page! That's assuming that nothing goes wrong with the connection or the web site, in which case you're left with.....nothing. So some experimentation was in order. In the end, I spent a good part of my precious preparation time trying to figure out the best way to save and retrieve web pages.

Jenny uses CatchtheWeb, so I figured whatever is good enough for Jenny is good enough for me, and it worked great for Jenny. However, it's no longer available for download or support.

Of course, I considered saving screenshots in PowerPoint, but I wanted to be able to display and scroll down the entire page, not just the part that would fit on a PowerPoint slide. I played around with Adobe Acrobat, and thought that it might work in full-screen mode, but it didn't seem an elegant solution. I thought working within the browser, as CatchTheWeb does, would better simulate a real browsing experience.

So I did some more research, checking on various tools that I've seen recommended for this purpose and decided to try Net Snippets, a popular favorite. It was easy to use, and seemed to work in a very similar manner to CatchtheWeb. An additional advantage is the ability to upload your snippets to the Esnips web site.

This method wasn't without it's drawbacks. There were a couple of pages that simply couldn't be captured exactly as they appear on the web, either in Net Snippets or Adobe Acrobat, including the NPR Podcast Page, and the EPA's Window to My Environment, so the live connection did come in handy. But otherwise, it proved to be an ideal solution.

Many of the tools in this category are not strictly intended as presentation tools, but rather as ways to compile, save and present your research. After using Net Snippets, I'm still not convinced that it's a better way to go than Adobe Acrobat for collecting research results, but I'm going to continue to experiment with it. I'm a bit handicapped because I'm using the free version, and from what I hear, the professional version's ability to create a report with all your snippets, complete with a table of contents, is worth the price of admission. For more information see:

I'd be very interested in hearing what tools you use for web presentations and/or the compilation and reporting of research!


Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 12:02 PM | Comments (2)

November 27, 2005

LawyerLinks.com

I would guess that companies providing full-text search services grow weary of librarians constantly asking for topical indexes. Not the kind that are computer generated, simply listing keywords found in the text, but rather indexes with REAL index terms, that are assigned by REAL people. And not just any people, but experts that know a subject inside and out, and use that knowledge to organize information in a way that adds context and connections.

The need for the human touch hasn't gone away with the advent of Google. And you don't have to tell that to the people behind LawyerLinks, a new, subscription web site for corporate lawyers and researchers. LawyerLinks reminds me of a looseleaf service, and easy to use looseleaf service, that is. They've created browseable topical pages that gather together a variety of primary source materials from the web, including laws and regulations, cases, new developments and other related materials. They're so confident that organization by topic is what's needed in the real world, there's actually no search engine. Yep, you heard me right, there's no search engine.

Now I'm all for indexes and topical treatments, but full text search has it's place, too. In a web site such as this, a full text search engine for a specific case or term might get the user to the topic they need. After all, there are over 1,000 topic pages, and that's likely to expand. I guess I'm not the only one of that opinion, as after quite a bit of feedback, the LawyerLinks people are considering adding one.

Sites such as LawyerLinks and Smartrules are particularly interesting because they're indicative of a trend towards niche sites that are useful because of the way they aggregate and organize the information. The data is already out there. These services make it accessible.

For more information see:

DennisKennedy.com - LawyerLinks - A Legal Research Tool That's Simple in the Best Sense of the Word

Robert Ambrogi's Lawsites - Radical or retro? New corporate law research tool is a bit of both

Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 05:34 PM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2004

Internet Archive Admissable as Evidence

According to The Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, "In a pretrial evidentiary ruling, a magistrate judge in the Northern District of Illinois held that “snapshots” taken by the Internet Archive that depict web pages as they appeared in the past are admissible under the Federal Rules of Evidence. The court rejected the arguments of plaintiff Telewizja Polska USA that the archived pages constituted hearsay and that the Internet Archive was an “unreliable source.” " So I guess you could say the court has accepted the Internet Archive as a reliable source, and IA's valid use as a research tool is firmly established.

[Spotted on Librarian in Black]

Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 10:41 AM | Comments (0)

September 06, 2004

Forget About Knowledge Sharing

I really enjoyed this short article, 'Knowledge sharing' should be avoided, by James Robertson. KM theory can provide interesting fodder for discussion and strategy. And that's fine, but if you carry that talk to the masses....that is, the people who you're trying to get on board with KM, they're not going to get it. Define tangible, clear projects that meet business needs and improve efficiency, and you may very well accomplish knowledge sharing. Just don't talk about it. :-)

[Spotted on Column Two]

Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 01:03 PM | Comments (0)

January 19, 2004

OpenURLs for Legal Research - A Uniform Method of Retrieval

There's lots of talk about OpenURL link resolvers in academic and public libraries. In a nutshell, these OpenURL services direct the user from an online citation containing just the basic data, such as journal volume, page number and abstract, to what most of us are really after, the full-text of the cited material. Some can even direct the user to the full-text version that is licensed and provided by their library rather than one that isn't available to their users. Couldn't a legal version of this concept be a great boon for legal researchers? Let me explain.

Lexis, Westlaw and other online publishers already link to the full-text of cases, statutes, articles, etc. that are available on their own system, though never to materials elsewhere. Since they have a very large body of data available, often the full-text is available and linked.

But what about a smaller publisher, let's say CCH or BNA. Wouldn't it be great if you could click on a link in one of the CCH reporters to the UCLA Law Journal, and have it link to the full-text on another service, asking for your password along the way? How about a link to a regulation, statute or case? Perhaps even free web resources could include links to premium materials.

Linking to full-text could be easy enough, but linking to, let's say, the UCLA Law Journal on LEXIS, because they're the service of choice for a firm, gets a little trickier, but is similar to what some of the Open URL link resolvers do.

There are certainly competitive issues in play that could prevent this from happening, but I can dream, can't I?

For more information on OpenURL based link resolvers, see The Many Facets of Managing Electronic Resources, by Marshall Breeding, Computers in Libraries, Jan. 2003.

Posted by Cindy L. Chick at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)