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

Stephann Makris.makri@ucl.ac.uk

Ann Blandford Anna L. Cox

Outline

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

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

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).

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.

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.

Approach• Naturalistic study based on Beyer & Holtzblatt’s (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).

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.

Findings: Access knowledge

R3-RF: This is Westlaw America and sometimes it lets you login now and sometimes it doesn’t. 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 we’re in the UK] because it’s got ‘Westlaw UK’ [on the menu bar].

Findings: Awareness knowledge

R6-P: [Speaking about Westlaw]… it just doesn’t help me… I can’t recall now, but I’m not prepared to analyse the problem too much… whether it even has the capability of finding anything that’s reasonably discoverable on a particular subject. I’m 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 you’re in a case, but if you wanted to find all the cases on a particular subject, I don’t think you can use Westlaw for that. That’s what I would really want.

Findings: Usage knowledge• Coverage/scope: R3-RF: I’ve 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] you’ve 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].

Findings: Usage knowledge• Authority: S4-PhD: So far it’s very disappointing, because we can’t

find anything interesting about ‘utmost good faith’ in insurance from a serious journal. I: How do you know if it’s from a serious journal? S4-PhD: Well, I know all the journals from experience that are not serious… like Law Gazette. Basically, they’re just news… not academic… they’re very short.

• Search knowledge: S4-PhD: I can set rules [about where the system should look for my terms], but I’m not very good at that. Partly because I don’t 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.

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).

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 one’s 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).

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

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

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.

Flexible support in situ

• Based on Spiro & Jheng’s (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.

Flexible support in situ

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.

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

Stephann Makris.makri@ucl.ac.uk

Ann Blandford Anna L. Cox