Stephen P. Weiter earned his MLS from the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University in 1995. He is currently the Senior Law Librarian for Automation at the New York State Appellate Division Law Library, Fourth Department, in Rochester, NY. He has experience working in public, academic, and library automation vendors. Stephen has written for Computers in Libraries, and teaches a graduate level course in government documents at Syracuse University.

These costs are among the major reasons why CD-ROM and other forms of locally mounted databases (magnetic tape, optical discs, etc.) will continue to supplement and compliment printed, microform, Internet, and online databases for some time to come. Librarians will continue to rely on all of these information formats to provide answers to patrons’ legal information needs. Statistics from the publishing industry tend to support this claim. Instead of moving away from CD-ROM databases, information providers are producing more of them. This includes the federal government which – through the Government Printing Office – is publishing more information on CD-ROM as well as online. CD-ROMS in Print, published by Mecklermedia listed 2,900 CD titles in 1992 and 6,000 in 1994. The 1995 edition lists over 8,000 titles, 449 of them under the “legal” subject heading. CD-ROMs are getting faster, are now read-writeable and, especially with DVD technology, can contain a great deal more data than in the past. Overall, CD-ROMs in the legal publishing field have better and more consistent search interfaces than external databases.

I would hesitate to rely on online or Internet databases as my sole source of legal information. The trade-off between reliability and costs has not, in my opinion, been resolved in favor of online resources, especially the Internet. The Internet is not entirely stable or predictable. At best, speed of access varies from hour-to-hour, servers crash or are taken off line for maintenance. (Try to connect to the Library of Congress’ Locis server on any given weekend and you may or may not find it.) Information moves from place to place, Internet service providers go bankrupt, domain names change. Sometimes the whole network collapses as happened on July 17^th of this year, when as reported in the New York Times operators at Network Solutions Inc. ignored automated alarms and all Internet address information was temporarily lost (Markoff, New York Times, 7/18/97).

Additionally, the Internet is not yet a comprehensive source of legal, or other, information. William Miller, writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education points out several of the myths people share about online information. Those myths include: “All information is now available electronically;” and “All information is available for free somewhere on the World Wide Web if only one is clever enough to be able to find it.” (Miller, p.A44) Mr. Miller is correct. There are very good, detailed sites on the Web containing legal information. The federal and many state governments have dramatically increased not only the legal content of their sites, but also the ease with which information can be found. Many of the major research institutions in the US have also developed high quality sites for finding legal information. The Legal Information Institute at Cornell University is a great example of the quality information which can be found on the Internet. Many law schools are posting a great deal of valuable information, most of it from the public domain, on their Web sites. But much of the information that is not in the public domain is not likely to be available on the Internet for free any time soon. In spite of the volume of information available for free on the Web, most publishers will not post copyright protected information there for free, especially if there is a significant market value for that information.

At our library we try to find a balance between the use of the resources available. We want to provide accurate and timely information to our patrons, but don’t want to waste taxpayer dollars. That means that our searching usually starts on our CD-ROM network, especially for broad topical questions. If the topic can be sufficiently narrowed to a few cases or a given section of the code, we can then print the full text or an abstract. The official copies can be accessed in print or microform. We are aware that print and CD-ROM sources are not the most current. At this point the reference librarians can access Westlaw or Lexis/Nexis, to check the citations and to “shepardize” the law or case in question. Utilizing all available formats of information we can provide an accurate, timely, and cost-effective answer to most reference questions.

Conclusion

The fact is that one source of legal information, be it paper, microforms, CD-ROM or online data, will not now (nor ever, I predict) serve to meet all of our legal information needs. In all likelihood we will continue to use a broad mixture of these formats in our libraries. No single technology is capable of replacing the others, and each will continue to coexist in law libraries for the foreseeable future. So plan on keeping those little silver discs spinning and don’t expect to reach the end of the CD-ROM “bridge” any time soon.