Last updated 09/07/24: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2019
As a result of my work on the Australasian Legal Literature Index (ALLI) at Monash University, Melbourne, I was invited to the Harvard Law Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to assess their foreign and international law journal collection and to set up a system to index the journals in the collection that were not indexed elsewhere. The primary purpose of my study was to identify the problems and to attempt to provide solutions. The project metamorphosed into evaluating the basic current awareness needs of the Harvard Law School Faculty and finding a solution for providing access to the journal collection. An indication of the enormity of the task is to compare the holdings of the Harvard foreign and international law collection, (some 4,000 journals), to the some 500 publications indexed by the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, the major U.S. index to foreign materials.
1 Only 7.8%, at the most 13%, of all legal materials are available in electronic format. See Hazelton, Penny, “How much of your print collection is really on WESTLAW or LEXIS-NEXIS?,” Legal Reference Services Quarterly 18 (1999), p. 3; MERSKY, Roy, “Why We Still Need Books, or Bad News for Trees,” lecture, April 28, 1999, at Australian National University, Canberra (transcript on file with author).Google Scholar
2 This includes several hundred newsletters. At present there is no way of extracting them from the foreign and international law journal collection records. The newsletters would be helpful in electronic format.Google Scholar
3 The University of Washington Law Library provides a current awareness service to 475 U.S. law journals and had reached their maximum capacity. Broad subject headings were keyed in using the word-processing package WordPerfect, and the data was subsequently transferred to an in-house computer system.Google Scholar
4 Klaiber, Diane, Executive Director, New England Law Library Consortium, e-mail correspondence, June 1997. See also Rhonda Abrams, The Successful Business Plan: Secrets and Strategies, 3rd ed. (Palo Alto: Running ‘R’ Media, 2000).Google Scholar
5 Without substantial funding, indexing of 2000 titles is impractical and over-ambitious. Scanning of contents pages may suffice. As mentioned, many of the titles are newsletters and bar journals.Google Scholar
6 The closest comparable service would be the University of Texas Law Library's electronic scanning service, the Table of Contents. However, this service is not subject indexed. This service is offered in two parts: as current awareness directly to an e-mail address, and as archives. The archives are kept for three months, and are accessible from a website: http://tallons.law.utexas.edu. The service includes English language foreign law review contents pages. The archived contents pages can be accessed by keywords in the title.Google Scholar
7 Several major law firms (e.g. Covington & Burling, Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering) expressed an interest in this project, as they do not have the resources of a Harvard Law Library. For the first time, U.S law firms are making a profit from their overseas branches, and so a current awareness database would be extremely valuable as a major research tool for their foreign and international legal needs. For a discussion, see Blume, Lawrence D. “Why have an overseas office? Market analysis determinative,” New York Law Journal, 30 November 1998. The Financial Times in an article about law firms in overseas markets stated, “There were also signs last week of the beginning of a sea change in international legal practice that in five years time will have produced a markedly different legal services industry from today's.” The article continued on to discuss the globalization of commerce and the increasing importance of US capital markets which has forced a change of strategy. To compete, firms must develop dual capability in the jurisdictions in which they practice. (“Hotter competition in global law race,” Financial Times 17 June 1997).Google Scholar
8 “… In practice the behavior of experts is not the same as the behavior that would be expected from a formalized model of the procedures.” In Brittain, J. Michael, “Implications for LIS Education of Recent Developments in Expert Systems,” Information Processing and Management 23, no. 2 (1987) 149–52.Google Scholar
9 Sormunen, Eero, “Free-text Searching in Full Text Databases: Probing System Limits,” Online Information 93, 17th International Online Information Meeting Proceedings (Oxford:Learned Information Ltd., 1993): 433–442.Google Scholar
10 Blair, David C. & Maron, M.E., “An Evaluation of Retrieval Effectiveness for a Full-text Document Retrieval System,” Communications of the ACM 28, (1985): 289–299.Google Scholar
11 See the results of three surveys of CDROM end-users searching: Nash, Stanley D. and Wilson, Myoung Chung, “Value-added Bibliographic Instruction: Teaching Students to Find the Right Citations. Instruction in Interpreting CD-ROM Search Results at Rutgers University,” Reference Services Review 19 (1991) 87–92; Azzaro, Shannon and Cleary, Kaye, “Developing a Computer-assisted Learning Package for End-users at the University of Ballarat, Victoria, Australia,” CD-ROM Professional 7 (1994): 95; Efthimiadis, Efthimis N., “A Study of End-user Behaviour in Searching CD-ROM Bibliographic Databases,” National Online Meeting 15 (1994) 113–120; Marylin MacKellar and Franki Elliott, “The Importance of Training CD-ROM End Users,” Computers in Libraries 19 (1999) 63–6; Worley, Joan H., “The CD-word: Reflections on User Behaviours and User Service,” The Electronic Library 14 (1996) 411–413.Google Scholar
12 Oppenheimer, Todd, “The Computer Delusion,” The Atlantic Monthly 280 (July 1997) 45.Google Scholar
13 Much of the following information is amended from the ALLI policy and procedures manual. ALLI was developed to index current journals speedily. The software used was the forerunner of that used for AUSTLII.Google Scholar
