Two days ago, a colleague and I chatted briefly about this:

"Today…the library is relinquishing its place as the top source of
inquiry. The reason that the library is losing its supremacy in carrying
out this fundamental role is due, of course, to the impact of digital
technology. As digital technology has pervaded every aspect of our
civilization, it has set forth a revolution not only in how we store and
transmit recorded knowledge, historical records, and a host of other
kinds of communication but also in how we seek and gain access to these
materials." –Jerry D. Campbell, "Changing a Cultural Icon: The Academic
Library as a Virtual Destination," Educause Review January/February
2006, p. 16. [http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0610.pdf]

She was feeling a little depressed (the full report is actually more depressing). I was more optimistic at that time and said that there was too much money involved in legal and business information and hopefully our skills would be relevant for a little while. But I also mentioned to her that I am reading a book called "The Google Story." (very interesting to me) Engineers at Google were encouraged to spend 20% of their working hours doing anything they want. Who knows when one of them will dream up something so revolutionary that our skills will become obsolete overnight.

One of the sessions at Computers in Libraries 2006 (Washington, D.C. , March 22-24) is called "Is Google the Next Dialog?" Should be interesting.

Law Professor Thomas Smith (University of San Diego School of Law) has finished a law review citation study covering 385,000 law review articles, notes, comments, etc that appear in 726 law reviews and journals. The results are probably not too surprising to many of you. 43% of the articles have never never been cited. 0.898% of articles get more than 100 citations. He has also performed a similar study on 4 million US federal and state cases. Smith finds that "the distributions of cites to law review articles and to cases look the same."

What is really interesting is how he likens the Web of Law formed by statutes, cases, and other legal authorities linked together by citations to the World Wide Web and his suggestion that legal research technology can be improved with network science (see his working paper, "The Web of Law", available on SSRN). Different from other law review articles, this one is full of graphics, some neat and some daunting (to me).

The law review citation study results will be incorporated in this working paper later. For a more coherent abstract of Smith's law review citation study, read a blog entry written by Tom Smith himself.

Thanks to Law Librarian Blog for alerting me to this law review study.

Out of the Jungle: Thoughts on the present and future of legal information, legal research, and legal education is a new group blog founded by Jim Milles (Director of the Law Library at SUNY Buffalo), Billie Jo Kaufman, and Linda Ryan. It's going to have an American focus, but as we are all facing more or less the same IT issues, I thought Slaw readers would like to know about this blog.

Jim Milles wrote a provocative article "Out of the Jungle" for the February 2005 issue of AALL Spectrum whereby he advocates that librarians focus more on digital resources in their legal research teaching unless there is a "demonstrable and significant benefit to using print." If you are interested in some of the responses his article generated, check "Elevating Form Above Substance."

How ubiquitous, embedded, transparent and animated can the internet gets and what will happen then.  That was the topic of the plenary session at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Law Libraries last Wednesday.  It's adapted from the article Jerry Kang, the presenter (a UCLA law professor), co-wrote with an architecture professor:

Jerry Kang and Dana Cuff, Pervasive Computing: Embedding the Public Sphere, 62 Washington and Lee Law Review 93 (2005).

I enjoyed his presentation a lot, but could not help being distracted by the fabulous software program he used in his presentation.  Instead of using the rather static PowerPoint, he used a software called MindManager.  He typed as he expanded his themes, showing the context of his ideas.  He uses this program in his teaching as well.  It looks like it is a great teaching and presentation tool as you can save the thinking process for your students or your audience.  Something to check out in addition to the "brave new worlds" he suggested in his article.