After teaching legal information retrieval to first year law students for a few weeks, I started thinking about how we actually search for legal sources. Barbara Bintliff’s thoughts were very interesting in this regard: Legal research no longer requires beginning with knowledge of the law because the emphasis of electronic research is on facts and … Continue reading Quote of the month: Concepts and keywords
Category: quotes
Quote of the month: Legal information retrieval vs jigsaw puzzles
Though there are different theories on why people search for information - suggesting uncertainty, satisfying a goal or simple curiosity - a gap in knowledge seems rather convincing in a legal setting. Assuming that lawyers generally search for legal sources in order to deal with a working task, the following statement is very persuasive: Some … Continue reading Quote of the month: Legal information retrieval vs jigsaw puzzles
Quote of the month: Delete the law
Information overload is apparently not a new phenomena but was already noticed by Morris L Cohen, co-author of How to Find the Law (pdf), in 1968: […] the materials of our law seem to be marked by an accelerating birth rate, an almost non-existent mortality rate, and a serious resistance to contraception on the part … Continue reading Quote of the month: Delete the law
Quote of the month: Cognition vs context
Continuing on the subject of context ….. [...] the major different cognitive structures of individual users [...] may be represented to intermediary mechanisms and IR systems, e.g. the actual work task or interest leading to a current cognitive state which may end up in a problem or uncertainty state for the actual user. These mental … Continue reading Quote of the month: Cognition vs context
Quote of the month: users and procedural knowledge
Reading a lot of material on the user perspective of information retrieval, I came across the following quote: [...] despite experience with using general-purpose search engines, users may never discover strategies such as those known by the expert reference librarians. The knowledge to use such strategies needs to be explicitly taught. Furthermore, the decomposition and … Continue reading Quote of the month: users and procedural knowledge
Quote of the month: Keywords and context
Visiting the Annual Nordic Conference in Legal Informatics in Rovaniemi, Finland, I started thinking about the progress that information retrieval technology has made the last 30 years, and remembered the following statement from 1985: The user’s task is simply to find the right combination of search terms to retrieve all and only the relevant documents. … Continue reading Quote of the month: Keywords and context
Quote of the month: Context and association
A growing amount of legal information is in itself not a bad thing. Though quantity is not to be confused with quality, more data increases the chances of finding information that is applicable to one's question. The challenge is, however, how to access this information. Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a … Continue reading Quote of the month: Context and association
Quote of the month: The chaos in law
In the course of writing my doctoral thesis, I come across various quotes from various decades that I find interesting and of great value to the research community. Due to the vast amount of research articles, some of them might have been forgotten or at least not remembered. In an attempt to revisit some of these … Continue reading Quote of the month: The chaos in law
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