Back to the Future of Legal Research Symposium – Web 2.0, Teaching Cost Effective Searching & Evaluating Subscription DBs

I’m back from Chicago Kent where I attended the Back to the Future of Legal Research Symposium. I was unable to live blog the afternoon sessions, so I’ll share a few thoughts now. Right after lunch, I participated on a panel with Professors Doug Berman of the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University (Sentencing Law and Policy Blog & Law School Innovation) and Richard Friedman of University of Michigan Law School (The Confrontation Blog). The session, which was moderated by Debbie Ginsberg, was on Web 2.0: New Tools for Doing and Teaching Legal Research. The panel began with each of us discussing how we got into blogging and the place of blogs in legal scholarship. I then explored a number of Web 2.0 technologies and discussed their role in legal research. They included:

• blogs
• podcasts
• wikis
• scholarship repositories
• other content sharing tools
• RSS
• instant messaging
• live chat
• micro-blogs
• social networking sites
• virtual worlds

I created a handout which defines each of the above with links to examples. There is also a wiki for the panel to which you are invited to contribute Later that afternoon I attended two more sessions. Alison Julien & Kira Zaporski from Marquette University Law School, Rosalie Sanderson of New York Law School and Sarah Valentine of CUNY Law School gave an interesting presentation on Being Research-Selective for Efficiency and Economy. They shared the strategies that they use for teaching law students cost-effective legal research strategies. I was particularly impressed with the time sheet exercise used at Marquette. The last session I attended was on Evaluating Subscription Databases. Julie Jones from Cornell Law School began with an explanation of how the eye tracks a web site. Then she offered suggestions on how Westlaw and Lexis might improve their search interfaces so that law students could learn to use them more efficiently and cost effectively. I was glad to see that there were representatives from each vendor in attendance because she had some great suggestions.