Wednesday, January 29, 2003

the losing battle to debunk the full-text myth Is more information always better?. "We're throwing masses of full-text information at the students, and it's overwhelming them," says Steven J. Bell, library director at Philadelphia University, in an interview published by The Chronicle of Higher Education today. (The interview was a follow-up to an article by Mr. Bell in this month's issue of American Libraries.) His point rings true in many of my own experiences, both interviewing students and coping with my own research quests. I want to get a full copy of his article, as well as the article he mentions from College & Research Libraries News. His words imply a larger challenge: Are we able to balance research that is helped along by human beings with research that is accelerated by automated search technology? Is automation winning the game? He mentions a "full-text fixation" among students who will only use databases (the Web included) that give them the full page or full article or full book. With full-text resources out there, why bother with citation databases? Why make the effort to walk to the stacks? Why take the time to ask a reference librarian to help find a subset of journals that cover a topic, when it's easier to get what looks like a pile of texts on that topic by plugging in a few keywords? [Lisa Guernsey's Weblog] For the next 2 weeks, I and the other reference librarians at my library, will busy be teaching the basics of using Westlaw to our first year students (we did the Lexis training in November). We'll be giving a demonstration of the full-text JLR database of law journals. We take pains to mention that the JLR database does not contain every law review article ever written - not even all the recent ones. We also try to empathize that full-text searching is the most difficult type of searching and that human-indexed databases such as the Index to Legal Periodicals and LegalTrac may give them more relevant results (hence, less information overload) from a broader pool of sources. But it's hard to interest them in this two-step process, especially when Westlaw offers free printing and spends millions on marketing themselves to law students. 8:43:08 AM     using google or vivisimo for legal reference questions Free Net Search Engines vs. Westlaw & Lexis. Are free Internet search engines like Google ever better places for legal research than paid services like Westlaw and Lexis? More. [Internet Tools for Lawyers] It's curious to see how the generational differences can work here. One of my older colleagues, whom I greatly respect as a reference librarian, will usually turn to the library catalogue first. Alternatively, he will know of a great reference book off the top of his head. Thirdly he will use Lexis or Westlaw. If I come across a more challenging question, I will often turn to Google first. It's a very quick way of giving me ideas for better search terms in the catalogue or Westlaw or Lexis. I find it particularly helpful for finding books when I'm missing a piece of crucial information about the title. There have been several instances when a law student has spent an hour searching in vain for something in Lexis or Westlaw (which would be horrifyingly expensive in "real world" Wexis billing), and then I find the document in a minute or two with Google or Vivisimo - my other favourite search engine. I guess my point is that web search are a very helpful supplement to the more established research methods, but you would be most unwise to rely on them exclusively. 8:05:16 AM

© Copyright 2003 Morgan Wilson. Last update: 5/14/03; 12:24:07 AM.