In my blogging, I have always had a focus on online information, rather than libraries as physical repositories of physical objects. Even the name of this blog suggests this.
But I’d like to think that I’m not a fundamentalist about this. Recently I’ve been thinking about the relationship between online and print, especially in law firm libraries. This post is a collection of these observations.
Print is not just going away
There are two parts to this, working with library users who have a preference for print resources and the role of print resources in historical legal research
Of course, sometimes it goes beyond a preference for print resources - sometimes it’s an obligation, thanks to the need to provide authorities to Court which are in an authorized format. Because legal databases are increasingly providing cases as pdf replicas of the print version, this is becoming less of an issue, but it’s not going away entirely.
But a lot of the time, it is just a preference. We continue to get requests for print copies, even when information is available in an online databases, where it is searchable, where it can be used by more than one person at once, and depending on the database, there are other useful ways to work with the information. The benefits of the print version, we are told, are that it is easier to use, easier to read, and makes it easier to view the information in context. I have a confession to make: I would do what I could to chase down the requested print copy, but I did not feel at all sympathetic about these requests. Maybe I was annoyed because I saw this rejection of online information as a failure of our training or marketing. It’s been interesting, because there have even been graduates and new solicitors who prefer printed information over online information.
This issue leads to one of the fundamental questions about law libraries: Do we give people what they want, or what they need? I guess this question can be considered a few different levels. We’ve all had those reference interactions which may have initially been expressed as a want to locate a particular case or article, but after further conversation, we see that the actual need is something else. On the other hand, nobody likes a paternalistic librarian who ignores what users actually want, so they can push their own agenda.
I still think that online information has a lot of advantages and when somebody rejects it in favour of print information, I’m interested in knowing why. But where I’ve possibly become more moderate is realizing that sometimes these individual preferences can’t be changed by more education/training or marketing. They run deeper than that, and should be respected accordingly - even if they can’t always be prioritized.
I can imagine that at some point in my library career, we will reach a point where current legal materials are all paperless, whether it be cases or statutes or articles or books. But I can’t imagine that anyone will ever bother to digitize a long forgotten textbook on Admiralty law from the 1850s, or every single unreported decision from every jurisdiction in Australia.
I am aware that many important old materials have been digitized, but what about the long tail? Would Google or anybody else digitize a document which has a 99% chance to never be needed again? And what about smaller jurisdictions? It’s one thing to digitize historical legal documents that are relevant to the huge US legal market, but what about smaller jurisdictions such as Australia? Within Australia, what about smaller jurisdictions such as Tasmania?
I know that most of us will cope with this by interlibrary loans or arranging access to libraries with good historical collections, but that only goes so far. The time for the fastest possible document delivery can be unacceptably long in a law firm library. I just wish the powers that be would realize that the paperless library involves a trade off.
It would be nice if a good historical collection of legal materials were seen as a competitive advantage for a law firm, rather than just wasted floor space.
Law firm libraries are under constant pressure to become smaller
Floor space is expensive, and its allocation is highly competitive, which means that it is a very rare or lucky law library which has managed to keep all of its space after a move. In addition to that, decreasing floor space is connected to with reducing a firm’s carbon footprint.
Libraries need space for two main things, housing print resources and providing a conducive place for studying and research. One difficulty is that both of these things are difficult to put a dollar value on.
Another difficulty is that when we try to use space more efficiently for housing the collection, it can detract from the use of the space as a place of research. Compact shelving makes a lot of sense, but I don’t think it’s as visually attractive as less efficient low shelving. Offsite storage makes sense too, but it disrupts the browsing process.
I’ve heard many example of new solicitors getting stuck on a research problem, and basically going around in circles on it for hours, even days, before contacting the library for help. I would like the law firm library to be the antidote to this problem, with a pleasant and non-intimidating environment, so people go there for hard-core research - sooner rather than later. It could provide a shelter from the constant interruptions and has experts -librarians - at hand, who can help with smaller questions (such as using a research database effectively) as well as the bigger ones (such as consulting on a research strategy). I can’t see this happening as effectively in a broom closet or a corridor, to use some extreme examples.
The challenge for law libraries is that the people who prefer printed information, whom I discussed above, are often not the same people who make decisions about the size of libraries.
It’s an awkward time, where most information that is needed most frequently is online, but there is still a vast expanse of historical information which is occasionally needed. If the trend of physically smaller libraries continues, will historical information end up being held by fewer libraries, causing it to become less accessible? Will this trend cause a vicious cycle - or virtuous circle - so that as historical information becomes less accessible, it is used less and therefore needed less, causing it to become more obscure?
It’s been a little over two weeks since the ALLA conference finished in Darwin. This time, I have notes about most of the conference. These notes are a collaborative work between me and Allison Jones of Minter Ellison, who worked with my rough notes from FriendFeed, tidied them up and supplemented them with her own notes and has given permission for me publish them here. It’s worked well, because we generally chose different break out sessions, and so had better coverage this way.
Some of the notes are quite short, where both of us struggled to take down information which would be relevant to the work of a law firm librarian. It’s not meant to be critical, after all, we all have different interests.
I’m sharing these notes here as a public service to the librarians who attended who will need to make some kind of report back.
One of my responsibilities at work is media monitoring – finding everything that is being said about my subject (usually a company or a person or an issue) in the relevant media.
Traditionally, lawyers only cared about what was being said in the mainstream print and broadcast media, but online sources are becoming increasingly important in law firms.
I am both excited and disturbed by this idea.
It is exciting because I think that what is said and done online matters. This motivates my blogging and my reading. I enjoy developing ways of tracking online media. It is particularly satisfying to see free online monitoring services performing better than the expensive and dinosaur-like traditional media monitoring services.
So why do I feel ambivalent about this?
There are some very insightful comments following what I think is a significant blog post by Kathryn Greenhill. Should professional associations such as ALIA be paying attention to back channel discussions by its members – or potential members?
What struck me was the idea expressed in a comment that for an organization to be doing this monitoring was something out of 1984, an Orwellian invasion of privacy.
My perspective is that we’ve already gone a long way down the Big Brother road. There are lots of people playing a little/big brother role, and sometimes I’m one of them. If there’s relevant information to be found in Twitter, then I’ll monitor Twitter. I don’t see this as crossing any particular line – no more so than deciding to monitor somebody’s blog or website or making a Google alert.
There is no magical division between online and real life. Online speech has consequences in real life. Ignoring online speech also has consequences.
It is disturbing to think that everything we write online is stored and indexed and can be searched and used for purposes we may have never contemplated. There are things we can do, such as having our Twitter account protected, but that will not prevent the searcher from finding replies to a protected account, or RTs from a protected account or unprotected mentions of that person.
I can see two different ways people can react to this situation. One way is to limit your exposure to online speech. Opting out is more difficult these days, but it is not quite impossible. Just don’t be on Facebook or Twitter, don’t have a job which involves using email, never comment on a blog post. And make sure none of your friends or enemies or family members or co-workers mention you online either.
The other way is to accept the benefits – and the drawbacks – which are involved in online participation, and act accordingly. I think that the benefits are far greater, but I admit to being biased.
For some reason I can never find the free version easily on search engines. I wonder if they’re using robots.txt to turn them away… – so I’m linking to them here. In case the URL changes, here’s how you navigate to them from Thomson Reuters home page:
Business Units / Financial / then in the Resources section on the lower right hand side of the page.
Although there are commercial services which also monitor deals, most of the people I work with only care about these free ones. I wonder if it’s because they are free and accessible, that they have become the defacto benchmark.
For people who can’t afford a Bloomberg terminal or products like FinAnalysis, Yahoo Finance (or Yahoo7 Finance as it’s branded in Australia) is the next best thing. Even the Australian Stock Exchange, which only provides extremely limited historical share prices on its official website, unofficially recommends Yahoo Finance for historical research. The site isn’t perfect – its share prices certainly don't go back to the 1980s, but for a lot of the requests I get, its range is sufficient and it is very easy to use.
The biggest difficulty with using Yahoo Finance is to get my internal clients to accept it as a legitimate information source. If there’s no “official” source for this data, they’re all unofficial. Then it all comes down to how the brands of the different sources are perceived. Let me just say that Yahoo is not a brand that is highly regarded by Australian lawyers. But if they cross checked the Yahoo data with prices from back issues of the Australian Financial Review newspaper, and saw no difference, would that change their perception?
Researching privately held international companies is one of the more difficult things to do in business research, especially when you’re not at all familiar with how a country regulates companies. Karen Blakeman’s list provides a very useful starting point.
Because in the USA, private companies are registered by state governments, Karen also has links to the relevant state government agencies.
Do you know of any other good free business research resources? Hoarding information is unlibrarianly (if that's a word) and ultimately self-defeating, so please leave a comment with your business research tip or secret.
One of the posts which has generated a few questions for me is this one from 2005, where I mention returning to the US once a year in order to retain my US permanent residency.
Since I made that post, a couple of things have changed.
Most importantly, there’s updated information from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services about this. It’s not very long, so anybody with a real interest in this topic should read the “Maintaining Permanent Residence” section for themselves. I’ll just point out one thing:
You may be found to have abandoned your permanent resident status if you: Move to another country intending to live there permanently [my emphasis]
When questions of intention arise in this context, it is not so simple that an immigration officer might ask you what you intend, you tell her/him that you don’t intend to live in the other country permanently, and they just accept your word. No, US Citizenship and Immigration Services determines this intention from your actions.
I have found a few online sources which provide some information about how this intention might be determined. See here, here and here.
The bottom line is that just as it is usually a lot of work and hassle and paperwork to initially obtain a green card, it is not a trivial thing to keep it while while living long term in another country.
This leads me to the other thing which has changed since 2005. Since learning more about the requirements for maintaining permanent residency, I decided that I couldn’t justify doing all these things to keep open the extremely slim possibility that I may one day return to live and work in the US on a long term basis. In my first year back, which was fairly difficult, it was nice to keep that option open. But things have changed, and I feel a lot more at home in Australia. I’ll definitely return to the US as a visitor. Who knows what the future holds, if I wish to work there again, I’d rather take my chances with one of the new E3 Visas for Australians.
Something I’ve learned, both from moving to the US as well as returning to Australia, is that changing countries is not easy - at least for me. In fact it becomes more difficult as you get older. Let’s say that one day I do return to the US for several years, well if that happened, I couldn’t ever see myself moving back to Australia - except for short visits. I don’t feel ready for that.
Almost ten years ago I read librarian.net and the Shifted Librarian on the web. I had no idea there was such a word as "blog", I had no clue about RSS readers.
Three years after that, I could no longer ignore the word "blog", I decided to learn about it and discovered the amazing thing about it - that they weren’t very difficult to make.
Despite the title of this post, I have little use for nostalgia. I don't wish to relive those early years of blogging, but I would like to understand and communicate how it felt back then.
It was extremely liberating. Some of that was the technology, the blogging software combined with the rise of Google. For the first time, self-publishing was inexpensive, easy and viable as a way of reaching an audience. But it wasn't just the technology, there was the notion that the blog was your own platform, use it to express yourself and say whatever the hell you want to say. After all, most people didn’t even know about blogs.
Gradually things changed, more people started blogging and more people started paying attention to bloggers, and things got more serious. But those changes were flowing on from the growth of blogging and were to be expected.
What I’m more interested in is the disruptive change, the changes which I wouldn’t have imagined in 2002.
MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and similar services. Although I have described blogging as "not difficult", publishing via these new services is extremely easy. Although blogging has become fairly mainstream now, the ease of use factor of Twitter particularly has helped it become way more mainstream.
The difference between an old fashioned blog and somebody's Twitter or Facebook or MySpace page is that a blog is published for the whole world to see, whereas it’s possible to control who can access the newer services. This may sound fairly obvious, but I think it's caused a difference in how people use these newer self-publication services.
The really interesting thing is that most of the time, a blog is external to its author. Even the most personal blog is still a creation of its author, and not an extension of the author - like someone’s Facebook page. There are exceptions, such as the fake Stephen Conroy on Twitter. My own twitter handle is explodedlibrary, which may have been a mistake because my tweets are often quite different from my blog postings, which is one reason why I keep them protected.
I wonder, if more and more people can express themselves via Twitter or Facebook, does that mean that over time less people will be interested in starting or continuing blogging?
Guessing the future is always hazardous, because the things which cause the biggest change can never be predicted.
But even if blogging does go into a gradual decline, in terms of its popularity or influence (it's possible that if the mainstream news media continues in its downward spiral, blog posts may gain even more influence), I'm not worried that all of a sudden blogging will become meaningless.
There used to be a time when Monday was my biggest blogging night. Well I did do some blogging tonight, over at Libraries Interact.
In that Monday Muse post, I was attempting to be a little more detached - because I was posing questions, rather than just stating my point of view.
Stating my point of view is what I do shamelessly here. For the record, personally I am inspired by the Darien Statements. As some one who doesn’t get to go to a lot of conferences and the like, reading it (as well as being aware of how it was made), was like the distilled essence of a good conference.
At the end of the day, they are just words, and yes, there are often chasms between the words stating our aspirations and how things really are. But still, we need these things, or all we’re left with is the day to day grind or short-term maneuverings. And besides, words are what I work with everyday, I must think they have value.
To use a hiking analogy, it’s a matter of reaching the right balance between paying attention to each step forward (not losing the track, not tripping over rocks or sinking into the mud) and paying attention to the beauty around - whether it be inspiring views of mountains or the wildflowers which are just off the edge of the track. Sometimes the track is very difficult and treacherous, and demands extra attention. But when we stop paying attention to the vista, the reason for the bushwalk disappears - and we may as well be on a treadmill in a gym.
I don’t want my career to be an extended stay at the gym when it could be a challenging bushwalk which takes me somewhere I want to go.
The EM (Explanatory Memorandum) is an extremely useful document in Australian legal research. Many people just assume that every parliament in the Australian federal system has always produced an EM for every Bill. Unfortunately this is not true.
Last week I was asked to find an EM for a 1980 South Australian Act. But they don’t exist, instead the end portion of the their Second Reading Speeches is a lot like an EM, with a clause by clause discussion of the Bill.
I suggest that anyone who ever may need to find an EM should read the whole thing, there is very interesting and useful information about the history and purpose of the EM. There’s also information about the EM’s cousins, the Explanatory Statement (used for Commonwealth regulations) and the Comparative Memorandum.
But if you’re only interested in knowing if a particular state or territory produced EMs during a given year, go straight to Appendix 2, towards the end of the document. One of the best things about legal research is knowing for certain that something definitely does not exist – because then you don’t need to waste time trying to find it.
Even the most easy and simple task can be stressful if it needs to be repeated 100 times in 5 minutes. When the task is more complicated and it needs to be done in an unrealistic time frame, bad things can happen. I can see three usual outcomes to the unrealistic deadline.
The best outcome is when librarian receives some help – from other librarians or from paralegals or even from the lawyer, and is able to get the job done in the required time.
If there is no help forthcoming, the only way to meet an impossible deadline is to cut corners – do research which looks complete, but isn’t. That would be the worst outcome, and shouldn’t even be contemplated.
The only other alternative is that the deadline is not met – and the work is finished when it is finished.
Whatever happens, a stressful time is guaranteed for all.
Sometimes tight and urgent deadlines cannot be avoided. I know this. But sometimes they can. I heard of one incident when a paralegal had been charged with collecting a few dozen cases which needed to go to Court the next morning. He was given this task at 10 am and did not approach the library about this until 4 pm!
That incident made me wonder how often these urgent requests are only urgent because someone upriver stuffed things up. All I’m saying is that it’s never too early to come to the library for help with a big research job.
Rude
Rudeness is the easiest element to avoid and probably the most virulent when it’s triggered. Rudeness often accompanies urgency and arbitrariness.
By rudeness I mean deliberate rudeness, not unrefined manners. Things like snapping or shouting, or making demeaning remarks.
Rudeness causes problems in the short term and the long term.
In the short term, unless the librarian has the emotional resilience of a robot, rudeness can ratchet up the difficulty levels of all aspects of the request. An easy request within a tight deadline may be transformed into a difficult request with an impossible deadline.
The good thing about where I work is that this sort of rudeness is extremely rare. Because it doesn’t happen a lot, when it does happen, it really sticks out. Word of it gets around, and in the long run, it’s never a desirable reputation to have.
Arbitrary or Unnecessary
Arbitrariness is when work is done for no reason. The most common instance is when a librarian busts her or his gut completing a difficult research task within a urgent deadline, only to learn later that none of it was actually needed.
Another manifestation of arbitrariness is when a judge or barrister insists that cases must be photocopied and not downloaded from a database as a pdf - which looks identical to the printed version. This really happens.
Unnecessary work is slightly different, it’s when the librarian has do a lot of work that’s unnecessary, usually because of the requestor’s carelessness or indifference. One example would be a wild goose chase caused by sloppily cited cases.
Banal
Banality needs some explanation about why it’s one of the elements. It is to emphasize that the Request from Hell is not just any difficult request. I don’t mind requests which are difficult and really test my research skills. Even if a request is urgent and arbitrary, and even if the requester is rude, if it’s a challenging question, I’m likely to learn something from the experience.
For me, a nasty request can’t be a true Request from Hell unless it’s also banal (“Common in a boring way, to the point of being predictable; containing nothing new or fresh.” From the Wiktionary).
My definition of the Request from Hell is meant to be extreme, the absolute worst of the worst. All four of the elements must be satisfied. That hasn't happened to me in my current job.
Of course, such a scale is very subjective. I imagine there could be librarians who are accustomed to dealing with what I consider the Request from Hell fairly regularly. There may be others who might read some of the things I have described and think I’ve already experienced several Requests from Hell.
That is one of the interesting things about law firm libraries, there is such diversity in how they operate. I would love to hear other librarian’s opinions and experiences about this.
Please don’t name names of law firms or other employers in your comments.
