Electronic books in an electronic library
Rainer von Königslöw Ph.D.
Appeared in CSALT Review, Vol. 8, Issue 1, April 1994 (Canadian Society for the Advancement of Legal Technology)
In this overview of electronic books in electronic libraries, we explore electronic libraries, and look at what they offer.
There are now a number of electronic books available in CD‑ROM or diskette form. Many firms are producing and "publishing" their own electronic books, generally for internal use. Electronic books are files on computers that can be viewed on a monitor with special software.
The main advantage of electronic books is that they let users "bounce around" in the book easily. There are three main methods of navigation. First, the table of contents and the index work like menus, so that one can jump directly to the content. Second, one can also jump directly from a references to the text being referred to. Third, all of the content is indexed automatically so that one can search for words or phrases and then step to the places where they occur.
Users may mark up the text by leaving bookmarks, highlighting the text, or adding annotations. Inserting or extracting text from or to a word processing package such as WordPerfect is straightforward.
Once one has many electronic books they should be housed in an "electronic library". We shall start off with the questions "what is an electronic library?" and "what functionality should it provide?". The next question is "how can we develop and maintain an electronic library?". The last question is "how can we train users to use an electronic library to best advantage?".
What is an electronic library?
Just as a traditional library provides and supports shared access to physical books, an electronic library provides and supports electronic access and sharing of electronic books. In practice this means that users can use their local computer to access electronic books stored centrally on a file server or on a CD‑ROM reader attached to a central facility. A catalogue is provided in electronic form, and access is managed on a first come first served basis, or with multiple simultaneous shared access. To simplify finding titles, the files for the electronic books can be arranged in standardized directories and with standardized file names which mirror the stacks and call numbers of a traditional library. As new titles are acquired and added to the collection or older ones removed, the catalogue is updated.
What functionality should an electronic library provide?
In general, an electronic library should provide all the functionality of a traditional library, with additional benefits due to distributed and simultaneous access: Books are rarely inaccessible, do not get lost, and do not need to be reshelved. An electronic library can also include access to remote collections of electronic books through wide area networks or through links to online databases. Additional benefits can be realized by adding functionality to the catalogue, to the electronic books, and re‑engineering the work habits of users. We will illustrate below.
How can we develop and maintain an electronic library?
An electronic library requires hardware, software, and titles (electronic books). The most common hardware configuration is PCs (or Macs) in the user's office, connected with a local area network to a fileserver. Another PC in the librarian's office provides management access. CD‑ROM players may be attached to the network to provide access to less used titles. Simple CD players require manual intervention to load the CDs, but "jukeboxes" are available which automatically load the CD. Modems provide dial‑out capabilities to databases and to remote electronic libraries.
The electronic book software ("viewer") such as Folio Views must be purchased for DOS, Windows or the Mac as required. Communications software may be required to provide access to on‑line services or to remote libraries.
Electronic book titles can be licensed from commercial publishers such as Carswell, CCH, and Prentice Hall. Single user, multiple user, and unlimited use licenses are available. Electronic book titles may be developed in‑house to support litigation for a complex case, to provide access to internal research memos, to support re-use of the contents of previous documents in crafting new documents, or to publish material such as internal policies and procedures..
The electronic catalogue ("directory of books") is an electronic book which is developed in‑house. It provides automatic access to electronic books in the collection. Table of contents and other catalogue information can generally be extracted automatically from electronic books and online databases to provide the core content of the catalogue. It is hoped that in the future vendors of electronic books and database services will provide catalogue information in electronic form to simplify adding their material to the library. The loading instructions for CDs in "jukeboxes" can be embedded in the catalogue. Table of contents for the databases and remote libraries can be added to the catalogue. References to traditional books and to word processing documents may also be added. Further extensions to the catalogue will be discussed below.
How can we train users to use an electronic library to best advantage?
In my experience generic training in the technology doesn't work. One has to focus on a specific application, on usage of the technology in context. There are three elements to this question. How can we train users to use the existing applications? How can we develop a more integrated, user‑friendly electronic library? How can we re‑design and re‑engineer some of the work to take best advantage of electronic libraries?
How can we train users to use the existing applications?
The most common applications are:
‑ support for legal research
‑ support for document drafting ‑ generally based on internal material
‑ litigation support (fast internal publication of transcripts & supporting documents)
The major benefits from use of an electronic library are:
‑ the speed of navigating through voluminous material
‑ the ability to find quickly all relevant chunks of information
The major disadvantage of current implementations of electronic libraries arises from the lack of integration of existing titles. Generally more than one software package has to be mastered. Even where there is standardization, e.g., using Folio Views for the catalogue as well as for most of the internal and commercial publications, the catalogue does not support rapid navigation. Generally there is a three step approach: look up the book in the catalogue, then look through the TOC or index for a selected book, then look for the information. Using a word or phrase search still involve three steps: select the book from the catalogue, formulate a word or phrase search within the book, then scroll through the "hits" to find relevant chunks of information. Automation with hyperlinks and searches generally is supported only within books but not across books. Going through several books or following indirect references involves repeats of the above scenarios.
How can we develop a more integrated, user‑friendly electronic library?
The goal is to be able to navigate quickly and easily to narrowly defined chunks of information. Narrowly defined chunks means text which is easily visible, i.e., is visible within one window or with little scrolling.
A more tightly integrated electronic library would extend the catalogue so that rather than pointing to entire books it could point to smaller meaningful chunks of information. This may involve concatenating call numbers with chapter, section and paragraph numbers that are internal to the material in the book. With hyperlinks one can then jump automatically from the catalogue directly to the paragraph within the book. The same approach can be used for following embedded references from one electronic book to another. (This approach is being beta tested for a "mini-library", a collection of primary and secondary materials dealing with tax.)
A second concept involves time stamping individually named chunks of information, as well as the links to the information. This allows keeping time variants of information chunks in the library, such as revisions of sections of legislation. One can then ask the catalogue, say, to reconstruct a statute as it was current on a specific date by reassembling the appropriate chunks according to their time stamps. (This approach has been successfully tested with a pension plan.)
The library should also support applying a word or phrase search across multiple electronic books. It would be useful to then have the same search be applied automatically to an online database.
How can we re‑design and re‑engineer user's tasks?
Four examples illustrate how some user tasks could be re-engineered:
Electronically supported telephone and video conferencing
Let us assume a lawyer is on the phone with a client and would like to investigate a point of law. In such a context speed is of the essence. One cannot hold a client on the phone while paging through books. Ideally one should be able to look up relevant information with very few keystrokes and display it on a convenient monitor. There should also be confidence that the risk of missing relevant information is as low as desired. If several disparate chunks of information are necessary, one should be able to display them in separate windows, possibly on multiple monitors.
Library alerts for work where legislation or a case has changed
It would be useful to receive an alert from the electronic library that a document needs to be revisited because there was a change in the environment such as a change in the legislation or a reversal in a case on appeal which materially affects the matter at hand.
Let us take a tax plan as illustration. Let us assume the plan is expressed in an electronic book with explicit references to narrow chunks of information which are time stamped. Let us assume that the references go through the central catalogue. Let us further assume that an update is acquired and integrated into the catalogue, the update has newer time stamps for some of the relevant information (the information has changed). Let us further assume that there is a program which sweeps through all internal documents to identify references to changed information (on the update disk). Authors of such documents can be notified automatically to decide whether they need to review the document; want to keep the reference to the previous chunk of information; or want to change the reference to the now current information.
Work in progress
A deal team is working on a very large and complex document. The essential logic is captured in a skeleton which functions somewhat like a catalogue or index to the document. As the members work independently on different segments of the document, the cross reference to key assumptions can be verified (and time stamped) to ensure that another member of the team has not introduced changes in key elements of the skeleton. Tedious and expensive rework is prevented.
Taking work home or to a client's site
One can have remote access to an electronic library and to one's files through modem communication (with call‑back modems high levels of security can be maintained). Alternatively one can copy the relevant information onto a recordable CD‑ROM. The latter approach is secure and does not require the firm to maintain a bank of high speed modems. One CD can store the word processing documents as well as a number of source texts (if they are available as electronic books).
How do we get there from here?
All the above examples can be accomplished with present technologies. Some of them will be clumsy until more standards and more mature technologies are in place.
To develop in-house publications or an in-house electronic library an organization needs both library management skills and project development by people that have the skills to deal with software packages such as Folio Views. It may develop skills in-house by hiring in or with training courses. It may have the publications produced externally by companies specializing in the field. A hybrid approach is often the fastest and most cost effective, where the first publications are done outside, but with the active participation of in-house staff in apprenticeship mode.