‘I’ll just Google it!’: Should lawyers’ perceptions of Google inform the design of electronic legal resources?

Lawyers, like many user groups, regularly use Google to find information for their work. We present results of a series of interviews with academic and practicing lawyers, where they discuss in what situations they use various electronic resources and why. We find lawyers use Google due to a variety of factors, many of which are related to the need to find information quickly. Lawyers also talk about Google with a certain affection not demonstrated when discussing other resources. Although we can design legal resources to emulate Google or design them based on factors perceived to make Google successful, we suggest this is unlikely to better support legal information-seeking. Instead, we suggest the importance of taking a number of inter-related tradeoffs, related to the factors identified in our study, into account when designing electronic legal resources to help ensure they are useful, usable and used

This is what I'm doing and why: reflections on a think-aloud study of digital library users' information behaviour

Many user-centred studies of digital libraries include a think-aloud element – where users are asked to verbalise their thoughts, interface actions and sometimes their feelings whilst using digital libraries to help them complete one or more information tasks. These studies are usually conducted with the purpose of identifying usability issues related to the system(s) used or understanding aspects of users‟ information behaviour. However, few of these studies present detailed accounts of how their think-aloud data was collected and analysed or provide detailed reflection on their methodologies. In this paper, we discuss and reflect on the decisions made when planning and conducting a think-aloud study of lawyers‟ interactive information behaviour. Our discussion is framed by Blandford et al.‟s PRET A Rapporter („ready to report‟) framework – a framework that can be used to plan, conduct and describe user-centred studies of digital library use from an information work perspective

A Study of Legal Information Seeking Behaviour to Inform the Design of Electronic Legal Research Tools

Our work is motivated by the desire to support digital library users in ?getting to grips? with electronic resources. More specifically we are motivated by the desire to support users in understanding how to use, and in which situations it is appropriate to use, particular digital library or electronic resources. This work focuses on lawyers as a specific category of user; Callister [5] highlights that lawyers been traditionally regarded as having poor research skills. Electronic research skills are no exception: Howland and Lewis [8] surveyed U.S. law firm librarians to examine the quality and extent of the electronic legal research skills of summer clerks and first-year associates. They found that these graduates were unable to efficiently or effectively research issues that appear routinely in actual legal cases and concluded that they were not efficient or cost-effective users of LexisNexis and Westlaw (the two biggest digital law libraries in terms of case, legislation and journal coverage). This was despite all of the students having received some training on how to use the libraries while in law school. Digital libraries have traditionally been regarded as difficult to use [4] and based on our contextual observations with academic lawyers, digital law libraries such as LexisNexis Professional and Westlaw are no exception. We believe that this difficulty of use contributes to the problems that lawyers face with electronic legal research. Furthermore, we argue that developing better research skills goes hand-inhand with developing an understanding of the electronic environments in which these skills must be practiced. Our current work is focused on gaining a better understanding of legal academics? and professionals? information seeking behaviour when using existing electronic resources. This understanding will then be used to inform the design of user-centred support tools for digital law libraries (and potentially the design of the libraries themselves)

‘I’ll just Google it!’: Should lawyers’ perceptions of Google inform the design of electronic legal resources?

Lawyers, like many user groups, regularly use Google to find information for their work. We present results of a series of interviews with academic and practicing lawyers, where they discuss in what situations they use various electronic resources and why. We find lawyers use Google due to a variety of factors, many of which are related to the need to find information quickly. Lawyers also talk about Google with a certain affection not demonstrated when discussing other resources. Although we can design legal resources to emulate Google or design them based on factors perceived to make Google successful, we suggest this is unlikely to better support legal information-seeking. Instead, we suggest the importance of taking a number of inter-related tradeoffs, related to the factors identified in our study, into account when designing electronic legal resources to help ensure they are useful, usable and used

Studying Law Students’ Information Seeking Behaviour to Inform the Design of Digital Law Libraries

In this paper, we describe our ongoing work which involves examining the information seeking behaviour of legal professionals. This work involves studying the behaviour of both academic and practicing lawyers with the long-term aim of integrating user-centred legal information seeking support into digital law libraries. We report preliminary findings from the initial phase of the study, which comprised a series of semistructured interviews and naturalistic observations of academic law students looking for information that they require for their work. This group of academic lawyers often found it difficult to find the information that they were looking for when using digital law libraries. A potential symptom of this difficulty was that hazy and incorrect knowledge of the digital library system and information sources within the system were rife. This suggests the need for students to understand more about the digital library systems that they use (within-systems knowledge). We also found that although this group of academic lawyers often used several electronic resources in a complementary fashion to conduct legal information seeking, they often chose to rely primarily on one of either the LexisNexis or Westlaw digital law library platforms. Their preference was often based upon vague or sometimes flawed rationale and suggests the need for students to appreciate the situations in which different electronic resources might be useful (between-systems knowledge)

Studying Lawyers’ Information Seeking Behaviour to Inform the Design of Digital Law Libraries

In this paper, we describe our ongoing work which involves examining the information seeking behaviour of legal professionals. This work involves studying the behaviour of both academic and practicing lawyers with the long-term aim of integrating user-centred legal information seeking support into digital law libraries. We report preliminary findings from the initial phase of the study, which comprised a series of semistructured interviews and naturalistic observations of academic law students looking for information that they require for their work. This group of academic lawyers often found it difficult to find the information that they were looking for when using digital law libraries. A potential symptom of this difficulty was that hazy and incorrect knowledge of the digital library system and information sources within the system were rife. This suggests the need for students to understand more about the digital library systems that they use (within-systems knowledge). We also found that although this group of academic lawyers often used several electronic resources in a complementary fashion to conduct legal information seeking, they often chose to rely primarily on one of either the LexisNexis or Westlaw digital law library platforms. Their preference was often based upon vague or sometimes flawed rationale and suggests the need for students to appreciate the situations in which different electronic resources might be useful (between-systems knowledge)

Central Exclusive Di-jet Production at the Tevatron

We perform a phenomenological analysis of dijet production in double pomeron exchange at the Tevatron. We find that the CDF Run I results do not rule out the presence of an exclusive dijet component, as predicted by Khoze, Martin and Ryskin (KMR). With the high statistics CDF Run II data, we predict that an exclusive component at the level predicted by KMR may be visible, although the observation will depend on accurate modelling of the inclusive double pomeron exchange process. We also compare to the predictions of the DPEMC Monte Carlo, which contains a non-perturbative model for the central exclusive process. We show that the perturbative model of KMR gives different predictions for the di-jet ET dependence in the high di-jet mass fraction region than non-perturbative models.Comment: 17 pages, 15 figure

Supernova Remnant in a Stratified Medium: Explicit, Analytical Approximations for Adiabatic Expansion and Radiative Cooling

We propose simple, explicit, analytical approximations for the kinematics of an adiabatic blast wave propagating in an exponentially stratified ambient medium, and for the onset of radiative cooling, which ends the adiabatic era. Our method, based on the Kompaneets implicit solution and the Kahn approximation for the radiative cooling coefficient, gives straightforward estimates for the size, expansion velocity, and progression of cooling times over the surface, when applied to supernova remnants (SNRs). The remnant shape is remarkably close to spherical for moderate density gradients, but even a small gradient in ambient density causes the cooling time to vary substantially over the remnant's surface, so that for a considerable period there will be a cold dense expanding shell covering only a part of the remnant. Our approximation provides an effective tool for identifying the approximate parameters when planning 2-dimensional numerical models of SNRs, the example of W44 being given in a subsequent paper.Comment: ApJ accepted, 11 pages, 2 figures embedded, aas style with ecmatex.sty and lscape.sty package

Stereospecific synthesis of the aglycone of pseudopterosin E

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