The Potential of Law Wikis
Stephane Cottin, head of IT and of the registry service with France's Constitutional Council, has created the tag "wikidroit" (wikilaw) on the del.icio.us social tagging website to compile a list of online collaborative sites (or wikis) on the topic of law.
By creating an account on del.icio.us, people can assign tags or keywords to websites they wish to bookmark and then share those bookmarks with others.
One of the sites Cottin references is LawLibWik created by Deborah Ginsberg (Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology) and Bonnie Shucha (University of Wisconsin). Ginsberg and Shucha gave a presentation on wikis and their potential application in the law context at the 2005 conference of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL). Ginsberg updated the presentation at the association's 2006 conference.
Ginsberg also published an article entitled Practicing Law Librarianship: A Wiki Wiki (Quick) Introduction to the Wide World of Wikis in the July 2006 issue of the AALL Spectrum.
The article examines a number of ambitious law-related wikis, including WikiLaw, Jurispedia and Wex. These sites claim to want to build online legal encyclopedias. While this is an interesting concept, it is hard to evaluate how feasible this really is. As well, since those projects are quite open to anyone, there is the problem of credibility and authority.
But the article also examines how libraries, including law libraries, have started using wikis to provide services to users by organizing electronic resources or to organize and exchange notes and documents about internal projects. Proprietary or confidential information for work-related documents can be kept behind a password-protected login.
Ginsberg concludes: "Legal research wikis ... would be of great uses to our patrons. They could be used in academic libraries to teach research concepts. They could be used in law firm libraries to showcase underused resources. Some day, we should all share our collective knowledge of legal research and law librarianship in a Wikipedia-like resource, each of us contributing with our particular area of expertise."
By creating an account on del.icio.us, people can assign tags or keywords to websites they wish to bookmark and then share those bookmarks with others.
One of the sites Cottin references is LawLibWik created by Deborah Ginsberg (Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology) and Bonnie Shucha (University of Wisconsin). Ginsberg and Shucha gave a presentation on wikis and their potential application in the law context at the 2005 conference of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL). Ginsberg updated the presentation at the association's 2006 conference.
Ginsberg also published an article entitled Practicing Law Librarianship: A Wiki Wiki (Quick) Introduction to the Wide World of Wikis in the July 2006 issue of the AALL Spectrum.
The article examines a number of ambitious law-related wikis, including WikiLaw, Jurispedia and Wex. These sites claim to want to build online legal encyclopedias. While this is an interesting concept, it is hard to evaluate how feasible this really is. As well, since those projects are quite open to anyone, there is the problem of credibility and authority.
But the article also examines how libraries, including law libraries, have started using wikis to provide services to users by organizing electronic resources or to organize and exchange notes and documents about internal projects. Proprietary or confidential information for work-related documents can be kept behind a password-protected login.
Ginsberg concludes: "Legal research wikis ... would be of great uses to our patrons. They could be used in academic libraries to teach research concepts. They could be used in law firm libraries to showcase underused resources. Some day, we should all share our collective knowledge of legal research and law librarianship in a Wikipedia-like resource, each of us contributing with our particular area of expertise."
1 Comments:
Les grands esprits se rencontrent... Je rencontre ce midi des gens du CAIJ afin de discuter d'un projet de wiki légal pour les civilises québécois!
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