Thing 2: reading and thinking

The concept of Library 2.0 is going to mean different things to different libraries. I work in a public law library, which has important differences from the public library that most of the articles are written for and about. For example, John Blyberg raises the issue of how to make available non-authoritative data generated by our patrons. The concept of authority in legal research is more complicated than in other areas. There is the authority that a court must listen to when deciding a case (mandatory, primary authority) and there is scholarly writing (secondary authority.) The latter is the type that Blyberg is talking about. Authority is important in legal research because of the potential real-world consequences of acting on the results of your research. (I imagine medical libraries think the same way.) A child citing a hacked article from Wikipedia in a school report might be embarrassed, faulty legal information can cost you money. Wex, Cornell’s law wiki, doesn’t “radically trust” just anyone to participate. Another related concern for law libraries is the line between legal information and legal advice. Our determination to avoid the latter makes us cautious in all we do.

This doesn’t mean that law libraries are tied to the “come to us” model of service. Our library is endeavoring to make more resources available on the Web. One of the things I hope to get out of this course is some ways to make the starting points of legal research more accessible to members of the public. Comprehensive legal research (finding that primary, mandatory authority) is going to remain an arcane exercise, however.

The people making the most use of social software seem to be the Millennials, those born after 1980. In our library, these are the judges’ and justices’ law clerks. We have not been pushed to the cutting edge like public and university libraries have, but we can’t ignore demographics. I would love to put a Meebo Me box on the court’s intranet page and see how many of our clerks use it.

The vast amount of information available on the Internet is a huge time sink. I didn’t find any dog stories on the Hennepin County Library’s Marley and Me discussion site, just a lot of “I laughed, I cried” reviews. Jumping over to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I found a comment that listed all the characters who die in the book. I’ll stick to the reviews in Library Journal, thanks.