It is important to remember that there is a lot of information that is not easily accessed via normal search means. The “invisible”, “under” or “deep” web as it has become known holds valuable information for a researcher. According to Zillman, the author of ‘Deep Web Research 2009′ states the Deep Web covers somewhere in the vicinity of 1 trillion pages of information. Check out the post.
Researching Deep Links
December 31st, 2008Have citators had their day?
November 30th, 2008There are many legal citators available. The best known is Shepard’s with other legal publishers producing versions. These are lists of authorities citing a particular case, statute, or other legal authority. The lists are used to find where an authority is referenced, such as where one case is cited as an authority in another case or where a case refers to a particular piece of legislation.
It has now become so that you can read a case or statute online and with a click of a button find other cases referring to it. AustLII’s ‘noteup’ function is an example of this. So with the increased amount of computerised legal system that allow you to find embedded citations in cases are these list still necessary? The answers is; of course they are still useful.
A computer program finds it very difficult to place the importance of an authority of one case over that of another case. Even lawyers argue about this. Relevance ranking of search results is not an indication of the importance of an authority (that’s a whole other post). The people putting together the citators take into account the elements, issues and preceding law to determine the importance of an authority. Not all authorities are included in citators, there would be to many making the list unusable. Citators are required to list only the important references, not every reference. Until computer can make a determination on the importance of a reference citators will remain a valuable legal research tool.
Human editors v computer editors (part 2)
October 28th, 2008What are the advantages of having so called ‘computer’ editors deal with legal information.
The first and probably most important advantage is that computers can do large repetitive jobs very fast. The best example of this is inserting links. AustLII uses a form of heuristics (rules) to work out where legislation and case names are mentioned in a document. It then automatically inserts a link to that piece of legislation or case. To do this using humans would take many people such a long time that it would be cost prohibitive.
The next advantage is the wholesale changes that can be made to a document. With the use of computers comes the ability to manipulate information in a convenient and quick way. Republishing a work can be updated at the click of a button to take into account the requirements of the user. In particular I am thinking about point-in-time legislation systems. A user can request a piece of legislation be reconstituted as per a particular date. To do this with human editor would again take a lot of working hours and would ultimately be cost prohibitive.