Category «Technology Trends»

Preserving Born-Digital Legal Materials – Where to Start?

Sarah Rhodes discusses the monumental challenge of preserving our digital heritage. She argues that law libraries specifically have a critically important role to play in this undertaking as access to legal and law-related information is a core underpinning of our democratic society. Our current digital preservation strategies and systems are imperfect but tremendous strides have been made over the past decade to stave off the dreaded digital dark age, and libraries today have a number of viable tools, services, and best practices at our disposal for the preservation of digital content.

Subjects: Features, Information Management, Law Librarians, Legal Research, Legal Technology, Library Software & Technology, Technology Trends

Access to Social Websites in The Legal Environment – Fall 2009 – Part 1: Survey of Law Librarians in Selected Firms, County/State Law Libraries and Law Schools.

To ascertain the current use of social websites/media in law firms, a survey was conducted among Law Librarians entitled Computer Use in Your Organization. In addition to the responses from law firm Law Librarians, several Law Librarians from law schools and county/state government law libraries also responded as did an independent Law Librarian. The opinions of Law Librarians was sought since they are typically among the first professionals in the legal environment to explore, use and recommend new computer innovations and trends useful to attorneys, judges and legal scholars regarding information gathering, information sharing, electronic legal research and current awareness. Part 1 of the Survey details the responses of fifty-six Law Librarians regarding computer use in their organizations. Part 2 will review the responses and take a close look at the implications of the responses and what, if any, patterns can be predicted for 2010.

Subjects: Features, Legal Technology, Technology Trends

Legal Implications of Cloud Computing – Part One (the Basics and Framing the Issues)

Attorney David Navetta contends that there there will be significant financial pressure on organizations to take advantage of the pricing and efficiency of cloud computing, and if attorneys fail to understand the issues ahead of time there is a serious risk of getting “bulldozed” into cloud computing arrangements without time or resources to address some serious legal issues that are implicated.

Subjects: Features, Information Architecture, Information Management, Internet Trends, Law Firm Marketing, Legal Marketing, Legal Technology, Technology Trends, Web Management

The End of Institutional Repositories & the Beginning of Social Academic Research Service: An Enhanced Role For Libraries

Stuart Basefsky advocates broadening the concept of institutional repositories (IRs) to serve as full-fledged electronic libraries and documents how they can then serve the greater purpose of collecting, disseminating, analyzing and exchanging useful digital information for academic purposes.

Subjects: Features, Information Management, KM, Libraries & Librarians, Team Building, Technology Trends

Bridging the DiGital Divide: Custom Search Engines Put You in Control

Law librarian, legal research expert and blogger John J. DiGilio’s new column focuses on technology trends that leverage the web to achieve more efficient and effective results. Here John recommends using customized search engines to manage the sites you search.

Subjects: Internet Resources, Internet Trends, Law Librarians, Legal Research, Legal Technology, Libraries & Librarians, Search Engines, Search Strategies, Technology Trends

Navigating the Enterprise 2.0 Highway

Heather Colman provides an overview of Hicks Morley’s implementation of ThoughtFarmer, an Enterprise 2.0/wiki style intranet platform, one year ago. Despite a few growing pains, she describes how the application was successful at meeting the primary objectives to decentralize content updates and increase knowledge sharing and collaboration within the firm.

Subjects: Email, Features, Intranets, KM, Law Firm Marketing, Legal Research, Legal Technology, Litigation Support, Technology Trends, Wiki