Studying law students

1
Studying law students information seeking
behaviour to inform the design of digital law
libraries

• Stephann Makri
• s.makri_at_ucl.ac.uk
• Ann Blandford Anna L. Cox

2
Outline

• Aims and motivation
• Existing work
• Approach and findings
• Potential feed-in to the design of digital law
  libraries
• Planned future work

3
Aims and motivation

• To study academic and practicing lawyers as a
  cross-section of digital law library users
• To observe information seeking behaviour with
  existing digital law libraries
• To observe related resource-centred knowledge and
  rationale
• To design digital law libraries to better support
  lawyers behaviour
• To integrate knowledge support into the design

4
Existing work

• Lawyers find information seeking difficult and
  are not efficient or effective digital law
  library users (Howland Lewis, 1990).
• Users do not delve beyond the basics of the
  library system, yet are able to get by (Yuan,
  1997).
• Some lawyers embrace electronic legal information
  seeking, others do not (Elliott Kling, 1997).
• The interface of digital law libraries may be a
  significant barrier to usage (Andrews, 1994).
• There is a need for increased tailored training
  assistance (Elliott Kling, 1997).

5
Existing work

• Digital law libraries can be redesigned to help
  lawyers to acquire a mental model of the legal
  domain
• Lexis and Westlaw should embrace a dynamic
  behavioural model of system users and assist
  mental model building at all points along the
  knowledge continuum from base-level modeling
  through context-sensitive exploration to model
  disambiguation. (Sutton, 1994).
• We can also redesign digital law libraries based
  on user behaviour.
• We can integrate knowledge and rationale model in
  to the design to help users acquire a mental of
  the digital library system and transferable
  information seeking knowledge.

6
Approach

• Twenty student participants LLB (4 1st year, 3
  2nd year, 2 final year), LLM (8), PhD (2),
  Vocational LPC (1).
• Six members of academic staff (1 Senior Research
  Fellow, 2 Lecturers, 2 Senior Lecturers, 1
  Professor of Law).
• Five Law Librarians (1 from academic institution,
  2 from vocational institution, 2 from nearby Law
  Library).
• Two DL trainers, each working for a different
  major digital law library publisher.

7
Approach

• Naturalistic study based on Beyer Holtzblatts
  (1998) Contextual Inquiry.
• Broad task of finding some legal information that
  they currently need to find as part of their
  academic work.
• Think-aloud with opportunistic and probing how,
  what and why questions.
• Transcribed and analysed using Grounded Theory
  (Strauss Corbin, 1998).

8
Findings

• Seven broad categories of legal materials known
  materials, unknown materials, old materials,
  recent materials, obscure/unreported materials
  and international (i.e. non-UK) materials.
• Three broad types of resource-centred knowledge
  awareness knowledge, access knowledge and usage
  knowledge.
• Rationale about in which situations to use
  certain resources based on hard and soft
  factors involving subjective perceptions.
• Similar behavioural characteristics to Ellis et
  al. (1989, 1993, 1997) and Meho Tibbo (2003)
  but additional characteristics identified.

9
Findings Access knowledge

• R3-RF This is Westlaw America and sometimes it
  lets you login now and sometimes it doesnt. So
  sometimes we could login to Westlaw USA and
  bypass our subscription and get access to
  whatever else is going on in the world. It seems
  to recognise that were in the UK because its
  got Westlaw UK on the menu bar.

10
Findings Awareness knowledge

• R6-P Speaking about Westlaw it just doesnt
  help me I cant recall now, but Im not prepared
  to analyse the problem too much whether it even
  has the capability of finding anything thats
  reasonably discoverable on a particular subject.
  Im not sure, so I go straight into Google punch
  in the phrase, see what comes out. You can do a
  word search subject search once youre in a
  case, but if you wanted to find all the cases on
  a particular subject, I dont think you can use
  Westlaw for that. Thats what I would really
  want.

11
Findings Usage knowledge

• Coverage/scope R3-RF Ive never understood
  the Westlaw American version seems to give you
  full-text articles and here in the UK version
  we get summaries a misconception as the content
  in the UK and US versions of Westlaw are the
  same, just accessible from different parts of the
  system.
• Content/structure S5-1UG On the top of them
  case reports youve got a list of keywords in
  the headnote and you want to get a particular
  keyword to come up by choosing that keyword as
  one of your Boolean search operators.

12
Findings Usage knowledge

• Authority S4-PhD So far its very
  disappointing, because we cant find anything
  interesting about utmost good faith in
  insurance from a serious journal. I How do you
  know if its from a serious journal? S4-PhD
  Well, I know all the journals from experience
  that are not serious like Law Gazette.
  Basically, theyre just news not academic
  theyre very short.
• Search knowledge S4-PhD I can set rules
  about where the system should look for my
  terms, but Im not very good at that. Partly
  because I dont really want to rely on electronic
  systems to filter for me. So I know you can, for
  example, define how many times Carter and
  Boehm the search terms have to show up in
  the document or how close they should be
  together.

13
Findings Rationale about why to use certain
resources or information sources

• Based on subjective perceptions
• Hard factors surrounding the properties of the
  material or resource (such as the subject/nature,
  structure, authority or comprehensiveness/quality
  of the material or resource).
• Soft factors surrounding the usage of the
  material or resource (such as perceived ease of
  use/simplicity, Speed/time savings,
  familiarity/comfort, recommendation).

14
Findings Information seeking behaviour

• Similar behavioural characteristics to Ellis et
  al. (1989, 1993, 1997) and Meho Tibbo (2003)
  but additional characteristics identified
• Authority checking (ensuring that the
  information sources used and material located are
  as reliable, authoritative and bias-free as
  required by the particular issue at hand)
• Updating (ensuring that ones understanding of
  relevant material is as accurate and up-to-date
  as required by the particular issue at hand)
• Crosschecking (using multiple materials or
  resources in a complementary fashion to ensure
  that the information found is useful and/or to
  have greater confidence in the process or tools
  used to find the information).

15
Findings Information seeking behaviour
High-level behaviour Mutually exclusive behaviour type(s)
Surveying Lightly directed
Heavily directed
Accessing Direct accessing
Indirect accessing
Chaining Forwards chaining
Backwards chaining
Across resource chaining
Within resource chaining
Browsing Across document browsing
Within document browsing
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Findings Information seeking behaviour
High-level behaviour Lower-level behaviour Mutually exclusive behaviour type(s)
Verifying Authority checking
Updating
Crosschecking
Differentiating Distinguishing Direct distinguishing
Indirect distinguishing
Filtering Direct filtering
Indirect filtering
Using Analysing
Synthesising
17
Potential feed-in to the design of digital law
libraries

• Hazy and faulty knowledge/rationale rife at all
  stages of the academic career, across all
  categories of materials sought, all behaviourial
  characteristics and all categories of
  knowledge/rationale.
• Googalising digital law libraries may not be
  the answer.
• Integrate support for acquiring and strengthening
  knowledge/rationale and avoiding and addressing
  misconceptions into the design.

18
Flexible support in situ

• Based on Spiro Jhengs (1989) Cognitive
  Flexibility Theory.
• Users can acquire and strengthen system and
  information source-related knowledge by being
  exposed to overlapping subsets of the system in
  different situations.
• System exposure in different situations can also
  facilitate the transfer of knowledge to other
  systems and information seeking situations by
  allowing users to gain meta knowledge relating to
  the information seeking process.

19
Flexible support in situ
20
Planned future work

• Study information seeking behavior, knowledge,
  rationale and support needs of a vertical slice
  of practicing lawyers.
• Perform larger scale survey-based study feeding
  in claims of behaviour from current study and
  practicing lawyer study.
• Use survey results to construct a set of
  representative scenarios based on findings.
• Use scenarios to spur design of integrated
  knowledge support in digital law libraries.

21
Studying law students information seeking
behaviour to inform the design of digital law
libraries

• Stephann Makri
• s.makri_at_ucl.ac.uk
• Ann Blandford Anna L. Cox