Recently in Virtual Libraries Category

I must confess, I always cringe a little when I hear librarians say that though libraries are shrinking, law firms will always have a core collection of hard copy books.  I understand the sentiment and believe it accurately reflects today's environment.  Certainly, many paper treatises, statutes, etc. can be easier to use than their electronic counterparts, web interfaces aren't always intuitive and many attorneys are slow adopters. 

But I've always figured that the right e-book could change all that.  The fact that they haven't become mainstream among lawyers and law firms only means their development hasn't advanced to the point where they are desirable as hard copy substitutes.  As soon as the right e-book solution is reached, something with the combined convenience of hard copy and the power of electronic access, things could change rapidly.

The Amazon Kindle and Sony E-Book are starting to make inroads.  I've been intrigued by the Kindle for a while because of its ability to automatically download newspapers, magazines and books.  Now West has released 30 books for the Kindle.  That's a start.

What's the first thing that comes to my mind in terms of uses in a law firm environment?   How about loading cases to the Kindle or E-Book.  An attorney could take 100's of cases on a plane or to a court room without lugging paper copies.  Let's take that a step further.  Your attorney is on the road, maybe sitting at the airport.  He/she needs to read a case that hasn't been pre-loaded on the Kindle.  You could download the case and send it to his/her Kindle email address.  The attorney would have it in minutes, and wouldn't have to pull out his laptop or try to read a PDF on the small screen of his Blackberry.

Thousands of books could be loaded onto a Kindle, a veritable law library. The technology is no longer an obstacle to this scenario, but publisher's licenses?  That may be another matter. 

The vast majority of premium research services are available via the web, and generally speaking, that's the way we want it. But there's just one little drawback. Web-based for-fee services often offer only one billing choice, a flat-rate subscription fee. Paying by the concurrent user, or simply paying for the time you use, seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur. There are notable exceptions, of course, such as Lexis, Westlaw and Dialog. But for the most part, transaction based pricing is hard to find.

So now that we're paying a flat-rate for all this content, these same vendors don't seem inclined to provide detailed usage information. Perhaps they're just not properly motivated. I'm guessing they don't want us to know that the service that we paid $10,000 was used only 5 times. This lack of accountability has resulted in a whole new category of usage tracking products such as Missiontrek's Research Agent, OneLog, and offerings from both Lexis and Westlaw. But you have to ask, why should we have to buy and install software in order to get usage statistics that should be provided to us by the vendor?

At least one publisher has heard our pleas. CCH has just introduced account administrative tools for their online offerings, which include a usage reporting utility for generating usage reports based on user ID, practice area or client matter number. For a quick online demo, visit the CCH web site at: http://business.cch.com/irn/usageReports.htm

That's one down, and a whole bunch more to go.

I entered myself in a dog show yesterday. I actually meant to enter my DOG in the dog show, but when I looked at the entry confirmation after registering on the web, I realized that under "name of dog" it said "Cindy L. Chick." Now, that's a problem. My dog is considerably better bred than I am, and I simply don't have the qualifications specified in the Belgian Tervuren standard. So how did someone who is fairly web literate do something so stupid?

Here's the story. When I clicked on Roboform to have it enter my credit card number, it also blanked out my dog's name and popped my name into the "name" field. Why didn't I notice? Since I was only able to see a few of entry boxes on the screen at any one time, it was easy to lose context. So I didn't notice the error because I was at the bottom of the screen, while "name of dog" box was on the top, invisible to me because it had scrolled out of sight. While on a hard copy form you could easily see all of it at a glance, a long web page just isn't quite as scan-able.

Why am I sharing this lapse with you? Because I think it's illustrates the inherent difficulty in scanning information on a computer screen. There's a limited amount of text you can get on one screen. And I think this is also the difficulty in using treatises online. I wonder if anyone has studied the speed with which one can scan a treatise, jumping quickly from the table of contents to the index to the text, versus scanning it on a computer screen. I was particularly thinking about this issue after reading "Out of the Jungle: How to get beyond the digital v. print debate - and deal with the fact that digital won" by James G. Miles. (AALL Spectrum, Feb. 2005.)

Are virtual resources starting to successfully replace print? Are attorneys making strides in switching to virtual research? You may know the answer to that question for your own institution/firm, but perhaps you've wondered what the overall trend is in this area. If so, you may want to read an article recently published in the Law Library Journal, Feasibility and Viability of the Digital Library in a Private Law Firm

While some of the results were fairly predictable, there are some surprises.