New Rule of Three

In his presentation at the Canadian Association of Law Libraries Conference subtitled Triangulating Legal Literature, Paul McKenna offered that the idea of three is prevalent … Something that resonated with me as a process improvement professional. My first memory of the bell curve with Sigma lines being a visual in a CALL Conference slide. I was so astonished I didn’t get a picture!

Seeing the Forest for the Threes

McKenna brought up the Theoretical Perspective of Albert Borgman – Blending the social analysis and philosophy to argue that technology creates a pattern in human lives that consists of natural, cultural and technological information.

The fundamentals of designing or conceptualizing (designing), (collecting or coding) collecting, and consolidating (analyzing) as the components of legal research. Data – being compiled from reliability, measure ability and validity – also follows a triplet pattern.

Understanding organizational, operational, and occupational issues around legal literature is also an excellent triumvirate for cataloging the issues.

Parsing out this type of information – to use as a teaching mnemonic – in patterns that repeat is an accessible, entertaining, and memorable way to help understand the structure of the tasks required to research of …wait for it … Statutes, Cases, and Secondary Sources. The ultimate three.

As McKenna offers, the creativity and complexity may get complicated beneath the triplet structure, but it is an approachable way to manage a comfort level in understanding the systems that make up legal literature and legal research.