Lexis Advance debuts today!

The long-awaited Lexis Advance platform officially debuted today.  Bob Ambrogi gives a good review of the new interface at http://goo.gl/W6IbE while Greg Lambert provides a more technical review of the launch at http://goo.gl/p8ugR.

 

Office of the Law Revision Counsel wants YOU!

The Office of the Law Revision Counsel is seeking comments on the new beta version of its website for the U.S. Code. The Office is looking for feedback from law librarians and members of the public about the site’s features, content, and ease of use.

The beta site is located at http://uscodebeta.house.gov and the current site is located at http://uscode.house.gov/. Your comments will help the Office make changes to the website to better meet user needs. Please send your comments to uscode@mail.house.gov.

Some key features of the new website are:

• A new search engine for Code data
• An expanding "Table of Contents" style browse of the Code
• A simple search facility for quickly accessing specific Code sections or performing simple word or phrase searches
• An advanced search facility for sophisticated searching of Code content using delimiters such as field or Code hierarchy restrictions, Boolean logic, and case sensitive searches
• An improved display of search results and Code documents
• Cite Checker, a new tool that enables quick checking of specific Code sections for recent amendments
• Easy access to USCprelim, an advance posting of the next online version of the Code
• New explanatory material about the Code and the functions of the Office

Prospective features include:

• Ability to search previous versions of the Code
• Ability to search USCprelim
• Enhanced internal and external links

Hat tip to Emily Feldman, Advocacy Communications Assistant at the American Association of Law Libraries for sharing this exciting news with us!

Student Information Literacy: Reality and and Possibilities

Are
today’s college students prepared to be “digital citizens”? Do they
have the tools they need to find, evaluate, and use information in
today’s wired world? A Northwestern University suggests not, and a white
paper offers some minimum standards for information literacy.

A
recent study shows that while college students may be able to find
information online, they are not very good at figuring out what
information is reliable and authoritative. The study was released by the
Communications Studies department at Northwestern University (the press
release at http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2010/07/Google.html; the article that reports the study is at http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/636/423).
The students in the study relied on commercial search engines like
Google, and could not distinguish useful, unbiased websites from biased
ones. For example,  the students confuse search rankings with
authoritativeness (higher rankings meaning better websites), and they
assume that an “.org” web address gives a web site authority (when any
organization, even a well-known neo-Nazi group, can get an “.org”
 address).

A
recent white paper addressed this gap in information literacy. While it
does not present solutions to the problem of digital literacy, it does
propose some minimum standards that librarians and other educators can
rely on. Titled “Basic 21st Century Technology, Information &
Communication Skills for Successful Citizens,” (http://www.tblc.org/DigitalSkillsChecklist.pdf),
it was written by Paul Alford, the Learning Services Manager for the
Citrus County (Florida) library system. The ambitious list suggests
skills in three areas, Digital Skills, Information Resource Skills, and
Communication & Cognitive Skills, that are necessary for people to
be fully prepared to address their own information needs. The list
builds on basic skills to support more complex ones. It outlines the
sills necessary to make important decisions, learn for themselves, and
be engaged with society and government–very important for the law
student and lawyer.

Overdue praise

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I picked up This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All, by Marilyn Johnson.

I'm only five chapters into the book, but I think Johnson really gets the importance of librarians and libraries. As she writes:

Google and Yahoo! and WolframAlpha can help you find answers to your questions, sometimes brilliantly; but but if you don't know how to phrase those questions, no search engine can help provide the answers. It can't explain in simple language how e-mails (let alone the rules of capitalization!) work, or how to navigate government websites. You can only get so far without human help (p. 20).

On the next page, she gives an excellent example: a library patron looking for a book on "bootyism." What the patron really want: books on Buddhism. Try entering that into a search engine!

Bing vs. Google

Bing vs. Google is a great new resource that allows you to search both Bing and Google, and lets you compare the results. You can format the results as a split screen, either horizontally or vertically; you can also look at only Google results or only Bing's. Just one minor inconvenience about the split screens: each half appears to have its own scroll bar, but they don't operate independently; scrolling up or down on one automatically moves the other as well. Because related searches are displayed on the top left portion of the screen in Bing, and at the bottom of the screen in Google, it's really hard to compare those, unless you have a photographic memory! Over all, however, this is a very useful site that can help you find what you might be missing by using only one of these two search engines.

THELAW.NET

This now-venerable tool for lawyers, found at TheLaw.net, looks like a useful, cost-effective research source for the practicing bar.  Its usefulness positions it as a low-cost rival to Westlaw and LexisNexis.  Costs range from $575 annually for 1 lawyer to $1995 for 5 lawyers.  It bills its search engine as modeled on Google’s, confined to pre-selected databases to avoid irrelevant search returns.  Those databases include:  statutes, rules, forms, news, courts, administrative law, executive, legislatures, topics, bars (one of which is Half-Norwegian on mother’s side!), and internet.

Coverage of federal courts is back to 1 U.S. 1, 1 Fed. 2d 1, 1 B.R. 1.  State court coverage begins in 1950.  Using the system requires downloading and installing their proprietary LawNet Equalizer 7.0 software.  A head-to-head comparison with Westlaw using a TheLaw.net suggested search (Federal Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, search for cases containing the phrase “alternate bid”) found that TheLaw.net had some advantages over Westlaw.  Right on the search results page it shows you which case is most relevant, and how many times that case has been cited.

Bottom line:  not a tool for an academic law library, as it would duplicate databases already available there, but definitely worth a look for the practicing bar.

-By: Deborah McGovern

 

 

Customize Your Search Using Google

Google has a feature that lets you cut down on the sometimes overwhelming number of results you get from a query.  It can be useful if yours is a specialized area of research and you want to exclude irrelevant sites from your search. 

Go to the Google main page, at google.com  At the top of the page, click on more, and below that on even more.  On the page that comes up, under Search, click on Custom Search.  On the next page, click on Create a Custom Search Engine.  You fill in the name you have decided to give your search engine, its description, the language you want to use, etc., then you paste in the sites you want to search.  In my test case, I created a search engine to search banking law research guides from various law school libraries.  When I tried out my search engine with a search for “comptroller,” it returned three pages, each of which contained my search term. 

Google also lets you collaborate, inviting others to contribute to refining your search engine.  To access your customized google search, you can use the widget Google provides to add its box to your iGoogle page – it doesn’t appear on the Google main page. 

- By: Deborah McGovern

Bing Has Lots of Microsoft Bling

I have to say that I began looking at Bing , Microsoft’s attempt to become a search destination rather than an accidental tourist repellent (“Oh no, I’m using the MSN search function, what happened to my Google Search Bar?”), predisposed against it.  The reports of how much money Microsoft had spent developing it primed me to expect something baroque and non-utilitarian.  To a certain extent, those expectations were fulfilled. 

I did an image search for Franz Kafka (it’s been that kind of week) on Bing and on Google.  At first glance, Google results and Bing results were remarkably similar, but Google found 447,000 results, while Bing returned 65,500.  Does this mean that Bing did a better job of screening out duplicate images, or that it didn’t do as thorough a job of searching?  Hard to say. 

Bing’s first 730 results were all on one extremely lengthy page, so lengthy, in fact, that some of the images never loaded.  Google, on the other hand, showed 18 images per page, so repeated clicking through was necessary to see the next set of images.  Google’s images sit quietly on the page, Bing’s swoop forward at you like the mad scientist in early 3-D movies.  The information provided is the same.  I did appreciate the Bing feature that enabled me to give them feedback on the images – I let them know that the picture of the dahlia was non-responsive. 

Bing won the numbers game in finding Franz Kafka videos.  Both engines drew heavily on YouTube, as one might expect.  The major bservable difference here was that the videos on Bing don’t wait for you to click on them, they start to life as you mouse over them.  Is this feature an improvement?  It is raising some fair use issues – where in many cases, Google sends you to the referring sites, saying that you can’t play the video on Google, Bing merrily plays them all. 

First impression:  interesting, but not a Google-killer.

By: Deborah McGovern

Want a Web Site that Does Calculus?

Have I got a site for you!  Try Wolfram|Alpha .  It’s a whiz at math, and knows where all your genes are (handy if you habitually keep them in a pile on your bedroom floor).  It can tell you the phase of the moon and what time the sun set on the day you were born.  This site finds, then manipulates, data.  As others have pointed out, though, it’s not at all useful for legal research.  Inputting “mortgage-backed securities” resulted in the rather pathetic admission, “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input,” the strong implication being that I had upset its little tummy.  I typed in “lemon law” and got a rather humorous demographic break-down of the people in the United States with each of those nouns as a surname.  Law was in 1037th place, Lemon in 2283rd place.  Wolfram|Alpha may make it unnecessary for any human ever to do math again, but it won’t help you with fee simple. 

- By: Deborah McGovern

Search with RedZee

RedZee search engine displays thumbnails of websites results in a graphical arch of information. Warning: Addictive. Check out the Beta RedZee.

- By: Robert Hudson