STRAIT to the future

8th Asia-Pacific Specials, Health and Law Librarians Conference

Beyond reasonable doubt?

Academic experiences of the virtual law library

Jean Kotai, Murdoch University Library

Keywords: Electronic; Legal; Academic

Abstract

Like many similar institutions, Murdoch University Library has been moving rapidly towards the substitution of electronic for print resources, and access for holdings (document delivery). This move has been motivated by two compelling and common reasons. The first is a belief that electronic resources, by comparison with their paper counterparts, provide - or should provide - equal if not greater intellectual value, combined with greater accessibility. And the second is a gradually diminishing capacity to acquire all those print resources which would once have formed a substantial and focussed local collection.

Legal publishers were early adopters of the technology which permitted large bodies of literature to be made available online (eg Lexis-Nexis, WestLaw). Universities, with their experience of using services such as DIALOG to access bibliographic information, were quick to begin using this material. Their academic staff and students, however, have had some concerns about the quality of electronic legal publishing. Experience at Murdoch indicates that there are a number of issues which need to be resolved before academics, in particular, will be convinced that electronic documents are valid substitutes for printed ones, and that the "virtual" legal library with its reliance on off-site resources is an acceptable substitute for shelves of leather-bound volumes.

This paper outlines issues raised by a survey of Law staff and student use of electronic resources, and makes suggestions for resolving the problems which now exist in the area of legal electronic publishing.

Introduction

Murdoch University's Law School began in 1990, like most of the post-Pearce law schools with an integrated Law Library[1] (now the Law and Business Library). The collection is located on two discrete floors in the main Library building, services are centralised, apart from a separate Law and Business Information Desk staffed by subject specialist Librarians. There is a separate computing laboratory (eLibrary 3) close to the Law and Business Information Desk, students also have easy access to two further eLibraries in the "main" Library and a computing laboratory in the Law School. Access to most electronic resources is through the 'Databases' page on the Library's web site, wherever possible databases are networked and accessible throughout the Library, the University and from off campus.

New technologies were impinging on legal scholarship at the time the Law Library was being developed and it was decided to take full advantage of these new products and the access they provided. Initial purchases were electronic journal indexes and full-text case law databases, the resulting collection a mixture of printed and digital materials with an attempt to maximise economies while providing access to a large range of resources.

Sometimes the choice was for hardcopy rather than electronic access depending upon factors such as the functionality of new electronic product, our IT infrastructure, user preference and costs. Normally we do not provide both hardcopy and electronic access to the same resource, this has proven a conservative influence in that we have chosen to stay in the print environment if there is any doubt that the electronic product does not match up. Trials of new electronic products have helped in decision making when there is not the opportunity to subscribe to both versions, and we have gradually increased the range of electronic products.

The Law School staff under the direction of the inaugural Dean Ralph Simmonds, were mostly positive and supportive of electronic collection development. In 1993 the Law School's law review went electronic with the launch of E Law - Murdoch University Electronic Journal of Law[2]. Our Law Librarians developed and maintain a keen interest in electronic resources, especially information literacy training in legal research, and have developed training materials and programmes for academics, students and commercial clients (law librarians, members of the legal profession, article clerks and members of the community). Recent initiatives include putting our printed legal research guides[3] onto the Law Library web page and also producing web based teaching materials for law units offered through Murdoch Online. The Law Library has a well developed web site[4] with a host of useful links, and also maintains a specialist Government Information web page[5]. Each issue of ELaw contains NetWatch[6], a column of news of Internet resources for the legal community compiled by Anne Greenshields, one of our Law Librarians.

Against this background I was very surprised in mid 1998 to discover a reaction amounting to panic from many Law School academics on realising we had cancelled most of our US law reviews and case law available electronically on Lexis, ProQuest Direct and Expanded Academic Index! I decided this needed some serious investigation, I wanted to discover exactly what their concerns were based on and then try to develop some possible solutions.

Attempts to make Murdoch's 'Virtual' Law Library more acceptable
To defuse the fracas over the cancellations, five key North American law reviews were re-instated to provide "browsability", however other measures were undertaken to encourage acceptance of electronic versions. Information was provided to all academics on how to search Lexis to find the most recent issues of law reviews and details of the sites containing tables of contents for legal journals - Tarleton Law Library at University of Texas and the University Law Reviews Projects at FindLaw.[7] Some found these alternatives acceptable, many did not and quite obviously felt their Library under threat.

The Library became a main agenda item for the annual Law School Retreat for which I prepared an Issues Paper about the Law Library. It covered budgetary issues facing the Library, trends in libraries and legal publishing, and events, particularly on the national and international arena which influence directions in our Library. Then at the Retreat there was time to explore these issues.

In 1999 the Law Library Sub-Committee of the Law School's Research Committee met to discuss the print v electronic debate, and recommended a survey of academics to help determine their preferences and also use of electronic resources. Given the current situation facing the Library which includes a major review of all serials titles with cancellations in the order of one quarter of current subscriptions and increased reliance on electronic titles and/or document delivery, a survey of Law academics seemed a useful project.

The questionnaire on the use of electronic resources

I prepared two versions of the questionnaire, one for academic staff and another for law students. They were distributed via e-mail, with additional print copies for students in the Library and Law School computing Labs. The questions are highly structured so include in the answer boxes options for most of the issues that should be considered when answering that question. There is also opportunity for comments under each question. Results for both academics and students have been converted to percentages and all 'comments' made by academics and students compiled into a list.

What did the survey show

Internet! Internet! Internet!
Confirmation of my hunch that academic staff and students use the Internet as a key research tool, where 88% of academic staff and 65% of students indicate frequent use of Internet search engines, Internet sites e.g. United Nations, WIPO and AustLII.

Particularly good for submission papers etc on government websites.
Excellent for international websites eg Supreme Court of Canada etc.

At Murdoch we try wherever practicable to offer web access to electronic resources, and these findings reinforce this policy.

Access issues are important
35 % of students claim not enough workstations in the Library, 20% not enough in the Law School, and 35% experience difficulties connecting to the Library from the Law School Lab.

It is quite difficult to get a workstation sometimes when many units have assignments due at the same time.

There is also the critical issue of the slowness of the network. Only 12 % of academics noted this as a problem, whereas students, dependent on the student network, find network speed an issue (35%).

Takes 15 minutes to download 120 K of information!
Off-campus use is a waste of time - getting kicked off after a ridiculously short time.

A proposed upgrade to the University network in 2000-2001 should help resolve this access issue.

Slightly more academic staff (25%) responded to the "Information is not structured in a helpful way" and more students (20%) to the "interface is not intuitive". Publishers are creating more electronic resources structured in a different, non-linear way and within a short time we look to improvements in the structure and 'searchability' of resources.

Why some people prefer print
"Printing the article/case anyway" as a reason not to use electronic resources was given by academics and students, with a quarter of students mentioning the additional cost of printing from electronic resources (at Murdoch University printing from electronic resources is 20 cents per page, whereas photocopying is 10 cents per page).

Only 3% of students found the electronic version did not contain the same material as the print, whereas a quarter of the academics found this to be the case. This could reflect the academics comparative familiarity with a particular print resources.

Surprisingly 42% of students give "prefer reading print" as their reason not to use electronic resources, compared with 25% of academics, although the academics frequency of use of specific electronic resources was far greater.

Nearly half the students and a third of the academics mention "lack of knowledge of availability" as a reason they didn't use electronic products. To me this indicates a failure by the Library to promote resources adequately, although we use a variety of means - the Database access point on the Library's web page, signs in the Library, information literacy classes and e-mail information to academics. We will obviously have to be more promotional!

Those who favour electronic access
For academics convenience (88%), currency (88%), comprehensiveness (50%), ability to download (50%), cut and paste options (50%) were the main reasons to favour electronic access. Students also like convenience (69%), then ability to download (61%), full-text searching (46% compare with academics 38%) and concurrent searching across a range of years (42%, compare with academics 37%).

Two students' comments...

Using AustLII is very easy and accessible as I can get it easily from home.
Mostly electronic is easier as it searches for you

Another student's comment highlights an important reason to provide electronic resources.

I love the ones I do use and when doing clerkships soon learnt you have to HAVE these skills.

We have a responsibility to expose students to electronic resources, the legal world has become digital (courts, processes in law firms) and most work environments will expect familiarity with electronic resources from law school.

Interestingly 61% of students say they enjoy using electronic resources, compared with 38% of academics.

Electronic v print: comparison of different types of materials

Journals
Academic staff reaction to electronic access for journals was the main catalyst in developing the survey on the use of electronic resources. Coincidentally percentages for both academics and students were 50 - 50 in favour and against journals in electronic format!

Some academics' comments

I dislike reading from the screen and enjoy browsing through journals. Electronic for US journals very useful; but prefer to browse the major publications e.g Harvard, Michigan, Yale, Stanford, California, Columbia.

And a student comment

Electronic easier to search and quicker to find articles than printed materials.

Web publishing and law reviews
Elaw, Murdoch Law School's electronic law journal, was one of the first law reviews to be published on the web. This trend has continued and it will be interesting to see if the predictions that "cyberspace" will make law reviews more accessible once they are no longer bounded by the walls of the law library. There are inevitable assumptions about particular spaces and how they are to be used[8]. The web provides opportunity for interactivity, forms of argument that are nonlinear and an environment where print and graphics can co-exist.

Indexes
Responses from students and academics show an almost total acceptance of electronic journal indexes. Indexes in electronic form have been available for over ten years, familiarity may encourage this mostly favourable response to the electronic version, although the comments suggest enhanced functionality.

Electronic much more convenient than paper version whose print is small. More comprehensive and much quicker and easier to search electronically.

However one dissenter suggests

Print indexes give greater flexibility and reliability (Note: If hard copy indexes to periodicals were available and electronic access to journals was available, that would be minimally satisfactory).

I have recently learnt that sometimes the electronic version's timeliness is a problem, e.g. AGIS vis a vis the paper copy of the C&SLJ.

Currency is an important criteria in the assessment of the quality of an electronic resource, it is easy to assume electronic resources are up-to-date, librarians should maintain checks on resources and provide feedback to publishers where currency is lagging.

Case law
Again preferences for print and electronic were almost evenly divided for both academics and students.

Case law needs both, electronic for currency, print easier to read. Electronic for unreporteds. Can easily search for case by citation, but many different formats used by different suppliers can be difficult to learn. Prefer print because AustLII has no headnotes.

Legislation
Almost three quarters of staff and students like using electronic access to legislation.

Electronic for currency, cut and paste capability. Cheaper to download from State law Publisher.

Looseleaf services
Students, the main users of looseleaf services, prefer print (76%). This concurs with the findings that it is easier to 'conceptualise' where we are given a looseleaf publication in print rather than its electronic equivalent[9].

Prefer print, can't find information electronically.

Services that facilitate access

Training in electronic resources - what works?
Offering training in information literacy skills is a key task for Murdoch Law Librarians who offer the following types of training in legal research skills. Tutorials and lectures as part of course work, voluntary training sessions on specific resources, self-paced tutorials, printed guides to online resources and recently legal research and citation guides on our web page and web based instruction for inclusion in online units.

In the survey, academics and students indicate the desirability of follow up sessions, and also that they did not feel competent at the end of the session. This could be the nature of the skills learnt - they improve with practice. With current staffing levels it is not always practicable to schedule further training and we are hoping the new Research Guide on Legal Research on the web[10] and the online instruction will provide further assistance.

The question as to the relevance of sessions when initially offered was pitched more at academic staff, however none indicated this as an issue, whereas 35% of students did. This provides the impetus to produce more web-based instructional packages for students to work through as required.

Help pleeeease!
The Law and Business Library Information Desk is staffed 9 am to 6 pm Monday to Friday during semester and we receive at least six, often many more requests for information about the technology or content of electronic access. We receive frequent phone calls about access/specific database problems from off campus, and have implemented an e-mail reference service this semester.

All academics and law students indicate they ask the Law Librarians if they require assistance with electronic resources, followed by colleagues. Students do often cluster around workstations in the student labs helping one another.

Document delivery
Law academics do not use document delivery as frequently as some other disciplines, however this may change after the proposed serials cancellation exercise which will concentrate on expensive less used titles. Both Murdoch and the University of Western Australia Law Libraries will be canceling titles this year, we propose as far as possible, to cancel in a complementary manner so that outside core areas where duplication is unavoidable, there will still be one copy of a title in the state. Ariel 2 is used for the request and delivery of materials within the WAGUL (Western Australian Group of University Librarians) ILL/document delivery consortium and eligible users may request their documents though the Library's web site, or its INNOPAC catalogue, thus expediting the exchange of documents between Murdoch and UWA. Also we are a participant in the WAGUL consortium's LIDDAS project, aimed at facilitating electronic request and delivery of documents, and due for release in mid-2000.

I was interested in the indication in the survey that commercial document supply is used because it is faster. This indicates that unless the LIDDAS project gets started on schedule and without hitches, more and more academics may go direct to commercial document supply services.

Online teaching
Law units have only recently been included in Murdoch Online[11] offerings, Library staff have been proactive in offering assistance with links to relevant web resources and databases, as well as constructing teaching resources for the web which are planned as assessable components of the units. Not all academics embrace the University's enthusiasm for its online offerings.

On-line teaching should only be used as a last resort and then confined to Distance units!

The path forward...

Reflecting on the responses elicited in the survey I felt encouraged that academics and students display a pragmatic approach to using electronic resources, they are critical where a product does not satisfy their needs or access is difficult, however the sheer convenience of immediate access to resources, in a form that can be easily manipulated, has won their support. I don't think client resistance will prove the barrier that it may once have been, however there are other factors that will influence digital directions.

Publishers

Development of the Virtual Law Library is widespread due to the amount of publicly available primary legal materials on the web, and we are fortunate to have access to such an affordable range of resources. The traditional legal publishers were involved in early electronic publishing endeavours, academic law libraries were early customers for these products as it fitted well with university initiatives of the time. It is interesting that though the products have developed and new ones introduced, many of the issues and concerns remain unresolved.

To the credit of the legal publishing house representatives there has been constant dialogue between them and the law librarians in attempts to obtain resolutions. Over the years many publishers' representatives and law librarians have become good friends (remember the reaction when Clive McMurray left LBC a few years back). In Western Australia we have excellent relations with the publishers' representatives, who act as conduits to and from head offices, most conscientiously relaying our problems and concerns.

The following discussion is a general airing of some of my concerns which mitigate against more widespread use of, and satisfaction with, electronic resources. It is not directed at individual companies.

Costs
These products are expensive to produce and maintain and we expect to pay fair subscriptions. However, fair is the critical word. I can think of few products where the price of the electronic version is not considerably more than the printed equivalent. Yet we are still working with the same, or even a reduced, acquisitions budgets and want to provide clients with a range of resources. We also want our users to benefit from the nature of electronic access, especially in universities where academics and students so dearly want remote access to support online teaching. However costs for this privilege often make it impossible to provide.

I think the problem arises from a confusion of the university market with the commercial market. Our vice-chancellors may speak of a diversified funding base, however we are in no position to pass on costs to our clients as occurs in law firms.

Simultaneous users
As well as paying hugely for remote access we are often asked to pay large fees for making a database available over a network and for simultaneous users. Again the university environment is not being understood in these calculations and the pricing parallel which is often made with multi-employees in a large law firm is only minimally comparable. Semester schedules result in peaks and troughs of usage, which usually coincide with assignment dates and the lead up to exams. During these periods a high number of users may want simultaneous access, while at other times, such as over the summer break, a database may be unused for long periods. One chiefly non-legal publisher takes this into account in its pricing policy, and averages out the usage over the year when calculating the number of simultaneous users. For example the library purchases 4 to 8 simultaneous users on the understanding that at some times there may be 15 to 20 users and at other times only one. This seems a fairer pricing model.

Transactional pricing
This may be appropriate for infrequently used titles, for example works relating to another jurisdiction. Especially where the subscription price is dependent on EFTSUs this may be a viable means of subscribing electronically to a title that would otherwise be too expensive to consider. Purchasing "searches" in advance would make budgeting for transactional pricing easier.

I suppose we do inevitably "vote with our feet" by not subscribing to as many products as we may wish to expose our students, something which does intrigue me. Surely a marketing strategy which provides maximum opportunity for students to use their product would prove advantageous in the long run. It's the Lexis - Westlaw argument that does result in US law schools having wonderful access to both of those databases. Unfortunately it seems the market in Australia is just not large enough for this to be a persuasive argument to publishers.

Archives
To my knowledge no Australian legal publisher offers archival access to electronic resources (especially important for cases and journals). We really do pay for access, if we want to be assured of permanent access to these resources after the subscription period ends we need to also purchase the print version, albeit at a reduced rate, or to be guaranteed ongoing electronic access (even for a small fee). When I mention my concerns about archival access to publishers representatives the response is either a flat 'no we don't and won't' or an indication that it is too hard to organise. More about this under licensing.

Hardcopy too?
One of my concerns is the plight of personal litigants, with reduced access to legal aid, and in Western Australia no longer welcome to use the Supreme Court Library. They increasingly turn to the university law libraries, where if licenses don't preclude them from accessing a necessary resource the electronic format may! We may be offered hardcopy at a reduced rate, when there is a subscription to an electronic title, however for a library that is stringently trying to maximise their spending, hardcopy alternatives may not be affordable. One of Murdoch's academic staff who is very pro-electronic access, brought up the needs of personal litigants when we were discussing replacing some of our looseleaf services favoured by personal litigants with electronic access.

Beta versions
Premature release of electronic products which are really beta versions have frequently been sold to us for top dollars! They should never have been released at such a formative stage, where they require constant monitoring, liaison between the publisher and the librarian and adjustment of the product to correct the problems. Often where budgets are slim the library does not have the luxury of maintaining the hardcopy as a backup, we naturally feel highly resentful at paying large sums to "test" these products where our feedback assists in their development but with no recompense!

The extensive trial of one legal publisher's new online product still under development, which has been ongoing since last year and has recently been extended to provide free access to subscribers of their print or cdrom products. This seems a far fairer mode of operation, at least until the online version has been refined.

Dialogue
So important to keep talking! We need to continue to talk frankly with the legal publishers, air often opposing points of view with the hope of resolution, and as an outcome provide state of the art products for our clients at a fair cost for all parties!

Consortia purchasing

Many Australian law libraries benefit from the CAUL consortium arrangement to subscribe to Lexis-Nexis, making access affordable (just!) for some smaller libraries. Consortia must be the future direction in negotiations with publishers. I see the promotion of consortia deals as a key role of our Academic Law Librarians group, most likely in liaison with CAUL. Although consortia based on geographical lines or on types of libraries is also a possibility.

Balancing the competing interests of participating libraries to get the deal which best suits each individually may require careful attention. For example pricing based on each organisation's EFTSUs may suit a smaller university, whereas averaging across all participants would probably be the choice of a larger university. Solutions may involve a multi-tier approach to pricing.

Licenses

Tied in with consortia are licenses. With the proliferation of electronic products, librarians are flooded with a variety of license agreements which require careful reading and possible negotiation with the vendor to ensue the terms are satisfactory to meet clients' access requirements. In the past some of us may not have taken licenses seriously enough. They must be read in details and clarification sought if any section is ambiguous or unsatisfactory. Membership in a consortium may help to negotiate favourable terms on a license, where a single institution may not have sufficient "clout" to bargain successfully.

At a recent AIMA Workshop[12] conducted by Ann Okerson from Yale and the moderator of the liblicense e-mail list, Ann had some interesting tips.

Don't believe a publisher who says something like "it may be written in the license but we'll ignore that clause" (shouldn't have to tell law librarians how foolish this is, though may be tempting to sign just to get it settled). Know what your "deal breakers" are and decline to sign a license unless you are totally happy with it; inform your stakeholders why access is not provided to a particular resource (Ann had a story of screen savers at Yale with a message about why a major electronic legal publisher's database was no longer available to subscribers and invited subscribers to get in touch with the publisher!)

Permanent archiving facilities, try to include this on all licenses (OCLC does)

For creating standard licensing agreements, the Liblicense Project at Yale[13] provides standard license agreements.

Copyright

At a time when information becomes more accessible and readily available copyright appears to be getting more restrictive and potentially more enforcable through digital tracking capabilities. We still await the impact of the Copyright Amendment (Digital Agenda) Bill..

Authentication

Licenses for electronic resources, mounted locally or from remote sites, usually require access to be restricted to institutional members. Authentication is needed to check a user is authorised to use the product and can involve institution specific user IDs, passwords or access limited to specific IP addresses. All are labour intensive to implement and maintain, and national authentication projects are promising simplification through a single sign-on to the full range of electronic resources.

In the UK there is already the successful ATHENS/ISOS[14], the prototype for the Australia Management of Access to Networked Information Resources (User Authentification)[15] a joint project by CAUL, CAUDIT, CSIRO and IAC (Information Access Company) with a planned completion date by the start of 2000. The European PRIDE Project is being designed to enable users to have access to a global range of electronic resources and Australia is represented on the PRIDE Project through Macquarie University.

Conclusions

An initial misreading made me think its in no way 'straight' to the future, the complexity of the issues even apparent in this paper, make it obvious that implementation of the virtual law library is not a straight forward pathway. Even as I conclude this paper, there is notification of a yet another CAUL trial for netLibrary, an ebook publishing venture described in the publisher's promotion '...netLibrary creates a virtual world that is easy to use as a library, but is faster, more efficient and accessible from any location...' and I remember Anne Okerson from Yale, during her licensing workshop the week before, mentioned the ebook as the next major digital development.

The digital world is fast changing, as academic law librarians, we need to keep informed, maintain ongoing dialogues with our clients, the publishing companies and everyone/thing that may influence accessing that digital world, maybe we can then provide a 'Strait to the Future'?

Endnotes

1 For those interested in the early development of Murdoch Law School and Law Library see Simmonds, R, From Foundation to Ordinary Politics:Staffing, Financing and Promoting the School of Law at Murdoch University in Goldring, J, Sampford, C, Simmonds, R, New Foundations in Legal Education, 1998, Sydney: Cavendish, ch 12
2 Elaw http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/
3 Guides include Library Resources in Environmental Law, Legal Citation Guide, and Guide to Legal Research at http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/libinfo/libs/mdu/subjlibs/lawgde.html
4 Murdoch Law Library web page http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/libinfo/libs/mdu/subjlibs/law.html
5 Government Information web page http://wwwlib.murdoch.edu.au/ecolln/type/gov/govtinfo.html
6 NetWatch http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/indices/category/netwatch.html
7 Tarlton Law Library http://www.law.utexas.edu University Law Review Projects http://www.lawreview.org/ FindLaw http://www.findlaw.com/
8 Katsh, M, Akron Law Review http://www.uakron.edu/lawrev/w96v29n2.html
9 Pengelley, N, The Ebb and Flow of the Electronic Tide (1998) 6(3) Australian Law Librarian 155
10 op cit 3
11 Murdoch Online http://www.murdoch.edu.au/online/
12 Okerson, A, Licensing Negotiations for Electronic Information: Getting Value for Your Money AIMA Training and Consultancy Services [Workshop], Perth,1999
13 Liblicense http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/index.shtml
14 Athens/ISOS http://athens.ac.uk
15 Australia Management of Access to Networked Information Resources (User Authentification) http://www.anu.edu.au/caul/caul-doc/authenticat-rief.htm