I have been "visiting" the Health Law component on Jim
Milles-St. Louis University gopher and want to commend him
for providing easy access to quite a large body of useful
information. Certainly, one could have found all of this
information oneself, just as I suppose Jim did, using
Veronica or some other available tools. Yet I think that he
did a considerable service simply by establishing a home
where all of the links are in place.
Almost all of the law gophers do this to some extent but
I wonder whether the time is ripe for a more coordinated and
collective effort to add a measure of quality and value to
the growing amount of gopher-accessible material. There are
probably better models than the following but I would think
that the simplest would be for groups of persons interested
in an area of law to assume responsibility for developing a
gopher menu item about what exists on the Internet in that
area of law. The current model, in which those who set up a
gopher are exclusively responsible for the content of every
menu item on it does not really make sense and inhibits the
evolution of the Internet into a more serious research tool.
What I suggest is that those who do not have their own
gophers become involved in what at the moment is a not very
onerous task, namely, assessing what exists on the Internet
for some area of law and where it exists. What they found
would become a menu item on a new or existing gopher and
would thus be available to all of the law gophers.
I would think that such a proposal would take advantage
of some of the special expertise of librarians, in organizing
and structuring information collections, of faculty with
interests in particular legal areas, and technology experts
familiar with what is or is not possible on the net and I am
posting this to the lawlib, teknoids, and lawprof lists. Any
suggestions or comments?
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! Ethan Katsh Internet: Katsh@Legal.umass.edu !
! Professor and Chair VOICE: 413-545-5879 !
! Department of Legal Studies FAX: 413-545-1640 !
! University of Massachusetts !
! 216 Hampshire House !
! Amherst, MA 01003 !
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