Re: David Badertscher's inquiry about computer assisted
legal research between now and the year 2000.
My view on approaching a topic such as this is to try
to understand the novel capabilities of the new information
technologies, e.g. what they make possible that has not
been possible with print, and try to understand how far we
currently are from achieving these capabilities. Here are
three examples: support for graphics, hypertextual
capabilities, and artificial intelligence or expert
systems.
Let me outline some thoughts about the first of these,
graphics, just to give you a sense of how I think one
might try to get a handle on future challenges and
opportunities. Print was a medium that, in my opinion,
nurtured textual activities more than artistic ones. It
also separated the textual from the artistic in ways that
had not occurred earlier. Suffice it to say, it is also my
view that putting data in electronic form puts graphics and
the visual on firmer ground. It is as easy to manipulate
images as it is to manipulate text. Or, at least, it will
be.
Here is where we need to be cognizant about how
rapidly current deficiencies are being overcome. For
example, it is not as easy today to send images as it is to
send text. All of you are reading text now but I can't send
LAW-LIB any images for you. WESTLAW and LEXIS have even
taken whatever was graphical in print out of the electronic
database. But this is all temporary and as the right side
of the lawyer's brain starts to be nurtured, all kinds of
new approaches to problem solving and to training will
emerge. It would seem to me that accessing and using images
will provide librarians with a whole host of challenges
that will rival the challenges that have been provided by
electronic retrieval of text.
I think that the same mode of analysis can be applied
to hypertext and expert systems. These represent getting
accustomed to more non-linear thinking and relating to
information in a much more interactive manner than has
heretofore been possible. We see examples of hypertext and
expert systems but they all will probably look quite
primitive in the year 2000. And all of this will affect our
information resources, where librarians are located at a
most strategic place.
As long as I am sending the above to all of you, I
would like to take the liberty of adding a possibly
unrelated postscript to all this. Some of you may have
attended the session Teaching Legal Research to the MTV
Generation at the AALL New Orleans meeting where I showed
the beginnings of a program entitled ROCK'N ROLL LEXIS. It
seemed to me that it was possible to create very visual,
graphical and colorful instructional software that might be
much more interesting and reinforcing to students than most
existing computer assisted instruction. Tom Bruce of
Cornell Law School and I have finally managed to finish the
thing and I wonder if any law librarians or others on this
list would be interested in looking at it, perhaps using it
with some students, and providing me with some feedback.
Since most of you were probably doing other, more
interesting, things that Monday morning in New Orleans, let
me just say that this software is intended to teach,
clarify or review how to use Lexis. Its novelty, if there
is any, lies mostly in its design, in its attempt to use
humor, surprise, movement, a little music, some
irreverence, and a lot of images to encourage students to
view the computer as something that can be as interesting
as a provocative lecturer.
The software runs on IBM or compatible machines. The
principal requirements are a VGA color monitor and a hard
disk. If you don't have any other machines like this, all I
would say is that the Lexis 2000 machines have such a
configuration.
Since this may become a commercial product at some
point, I add this postscipt a little hesitantly. There
seems to be no clear line between commerce and education
these days, however, and at the moment this is just an
experiment in pedagogy anyway. But if my request looks to
some to be more like an appeal for beta testers than for a
review of a manuscript, I apologize.
If any of you are interested in this, call or contact
me at
Ethan Katsh
Department of Legal Studies
University of Massachusetts
216 Hampshire House
Amherst, MA 01003
Tel. 413-567-7602
Internet: Katsh@Legal.Umass.edu
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