Robert Ambrogi writes – “Knowing whether a case is good law is elemental to legal research. To do this, lawyers have long relied on citator services such as Shepard’s from LexisNexis and KeyCite from Westlaw. Now, the legal research service Casetext has introduced a citator of its own, called SmartCite, with many of the features you would expect to find in a citator, plus some that make it unique.”
It is helpful to classify documents or other content items to make them easier to find later. Searching the full text alone can retrieve inaccurate results or miss appropriate documents containing different words from the words entered into a search box. A document or content management system may include features for tagging, keywords, categories, indexing, etc. Taxonomist Heather Hedden identifies the difference between these elements to facilitate the implementation of more effective knowledge and content management.
Nicole Black documents best practices for your firm’s process of transitioning to a paperless environment that includes an infographic on how to train your staff on the ins and outs of working with PDFs.
Marcus Zillman’s guide highlights multifaceted browser alternatives to mainstream search tools that researchers may regularly use by default. There are many reliable yet underutilized applications that facilitate access to and discovery of subject matter specific documents and sources. Free applications included here also offer collaboration tools, resources to build and manage repositories, to employ data visualization, to create and apply metadata management, citations, bibliographies, document discovery and data relationship analysis.
Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Google to roll out auto-delete controls for location history and activity data; Rights groups challenge warrantless cellphone searches at U.S. border; U.S. cyber spies unmasked many more American identities in 2018; and Spies, Lies, and Algorithms.
As we are challenged each day to expertly respond to an overwhelming amount of information, much of it not relevant to our requirements, it is a major undertaking to exercise our choices skillfully as well as to balance our knowledge resources to best serve our objectives. Marcus Zillman’s guide offers both broader resources on how to manage information overload, as well as sources, tools and techniques to facilitate research productivity.
Kristina L. Niedringhaus calls our attention to a recent article by Paul Heller whose research identified 357 citing relationships that one or more of the three major citators labeled as negative. “Out of these, all three citators agree that there was negative treatment only 53 times. This means that in 85% of these citing relationships, the three citators do not agree on whether there was negative treatment.”
Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: WikiLeaks set 21st century model for cyber-leak journalism; Your car is watching you. Who owns the data?; Facebook, lose my digits: Here’s how to unlist your phone number; and What e-books at the library mean for your privacy.
Taxonomist Heather Hedden compares and contrasts the work of creating a taxonomy to that of creating a knowledge model, which also involve inputs of people and content, but where more emphasis is on stakeholder/user input. As Hedden says, “content contains information, but people contain knowledge, so knowledge modeling requires the input of various people, with the input gathered in a comprehensive and systematic way.” This article clearly identifies more facets of the role of knowledge management within organizations in many sectors.
Pete Weiss is the author of Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security. He is a strong advocate of RSS to keep pace with rapidly changing updates in the news, research and technology to name but a few subjects. Using Sabrina Pacifici’s blog, beSpacific, as an example, Weiss offers more than a dozen regularly updated subject matter specific feeds that you should consider adding to your research portfolio.