New LLRX Resources For February 2007

The LLRX.com current awareness and research website has added a whole list of new resources for February 2007 including:

• Creating Intranet Applications for Knowledge Sharing Within Law Firms (Jason Eiseman): "A knowledge-sharing, collaborative application can be as simple as a system for routing reference questions to appropriate librarians, or an expertise locator. The key to making these applications valuable is by leveraging that user-generated content so the entire organization can learn from it. Instead of simply routing reference questions, why not store them in a searchable application, place them on a blog, a wiki, or otherwise make them available so other employees can learn from the answers. This may not always be possible for a variety of logistical reasons, but it is surely an ideal we can strive for. These types of solutions are becoming easier to custom build or implement. Today, intranet applications can be custom built with simple programming languages and databases. Often open-source applications like blogs and wikis, costing very little (if anything), are easy to customize (...) are being deployed inside organizations as well." [Steven Matthews at the Vancouver Law Librarian Blog comments on Eiseman's article]
• Technology and Policy Issues With Acquiring Digital Collections (Roger V. Skalbeck and Iva M. Futrell): "Companies from Google to the Thomson Corporation, from Microsoft to LexisNexis are all undertaking large digitization projects focusing on better access to paper-based resources. Undeniably, many law firms have a need for some of the digitized products being produced through these efforts, and it’s hard to imagine that interest in digitized collections could wane in the near or distant future. In acquiring access to new digital collections, law firms and other information consumers need to think about issues of cost, technology requirements and ease of use. Beyond that, merely acquiring a new collection will not ensure that all people who need the information will know it exists when the need to access it arises. In this article, we address several topics relating to digitized collections, framing the discussion by first discussing two legal-specific digitization projects available for anybody who wants to acquire them, including firms, courts and schools alike."
• Seven Legal Technology Trends for 2007: Widening the Digital Divide in Law Practice (Dennis Kennedy): "By the end of 2007, we will be talking about a clear and growing digital divide between technology-forward and technology-backward firms. It will happen slowly, barely perceptibly in some cases, but we will see growing evidence of that gap and a restructuring of the practice of law. Expect uncertainty and confusion over new Microsoft versions and electronic discovery to create a bit of a lull in legal technology. Some firms will take advantage of that lull to re-evaluate and refocus making solid business decisions, but many firms will not. More than any other factor, this will lead to a growing digital divide between the technology-forward firms and the technology-backward firms, with fewer and fewer firms left in the middle, which probably will not be a great place to be over the long term. Security and portability will be important watchwords. However, the place to watch is the Internet and the tools to consider carefully are the collaboration tools."
• The Tao of Law Librarianship: Using RSS Feeds for New Book Titles - Calling All Publishers (Connie Crosby): "Why do the publishers not just each have their new titles in an RSS feed, which I could read in my aggregator (feed reader) like I do a number of the blogs and news feeds I follow? And why could those feeds not be taken together into one feed, or filtered according to my collection subject needs? Why could my library association not pull all feeds together onto one webpage for those people who don’t use an aggregator? I quickly surveyed the websites of major Canadian legal publishers, and discovered not a single one had an RSS feed of new titles, or any other RSS feed for that matter. Clearly this was something to work on (...) Then at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) last May I talked to a number of publisher reps and fellow librarians, trying to build some groundswell for the idea."