I enjoy cooking. The food I prepare is usually flavorful, tasty, and not -usually- terribly burnt. However, I do not understand the magical alchemy of food science. I wish I did- then, maybe, I could finally understand how my mother-in-law makes such incredible ceviche- but instead, I am left trusting in the recipe, the step-by-step process, that my mom or grandmother taught me and hoping for the best.
I felt the same way about legal research while in law school. I knew how to find things—where to look, which database to find x source within, the recipe, but I did not understand that each piece of information I found was a carefully curated piece of information catalogued in a specific manner, identified using unique metadata, and held within a vast, information system construct. I was unaware of the magical alchemy of information science. It was only when I was in advanced legal research that I gained awareness of the complexities of the information world, and only during library school did I obtain a proper understanding of that world. It felt like following Alice into the rabbit hole, except with taxonomies and controlled vocabularies instead of tea parties and bird based croquet matches.
What helped me establish a framework for understanding this new fantastical world was performing a detailed investigation and critical interrogation of popular databases. To continue the cooking metaphor, database investigation felt like learning to butcher. We were slicing the database to pieces and examining the choice cuts.
My instructor had us interrogating multiple ProQuest databases [I believe, I have slept since then and lost my class notes…]. This assignment stuck with me for some time. I initially hated it and found it a waste of time [the signs of a great assignment] and then I became obsessed. It was fascinating to poke and prod and test what sources I could pull using what combination of keywords and compare it to the results gleamed using terms and connectors. I was shocked how, across databases on the same platform, I would be given different results using the same combinations of filters and search terms.
This type of assignment could be helpful for legal research and advanced legal research. Some may already do this type of assignment, if so, awesome! I can attest to its effect on students. It allows students to engage critically with how information is structured, organized, and retrieved.
I think for maximum effectiveness, incorporating a brief bit on bibliographic objectives can be helpful. I do not believe it needs to be comprehensive, but an introduction to the concepts. I tend to use Svenonius’ terms of “finding, collocating, choice, acquisition, and navigation objectives” from The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization (2000).
For example, it is intuitive that the point of a database is to be able to find the information held within it without accidentally grabbing the wrong piece. Svenoius calls this the finding objective where the user seeks to be able to easily locate the desired items using distinctive identifiers such as title, author etc. Having a term to hook a concept is great and can make it a lot easier for students to look critically at the structure of the database.
Further, I think it is important to encourage students to either raise or answer questions such as how does this database differentiate between these pieces? This leads to a discussion of Metadata which leads to the question, who chooses how data is described? These simple questions force students to really wrestle with the organization and structure of legal data. Why does Westlaw have headnotes? Who created them? Why are they structured in such a way? Which bibliographic objective does this feature satisfy?
I performed a similar analysis independently while studying AI systems and found it extremely beneficial to comprehend how little we see behind Oz’s curtain of grand promises. There is no way to confirm the identity of the item, examine how it was grouped together [collocating objective], provide me with a choice of source, obtain certain paywalled sources the AI pulled via reference, or navigate the results. [side rant over].
Again, to continue the cooking metaphor, I think of this as learning the core principles of utilizing salt, fat, acid, and heat to understand the fundamentals of cooking. Bibliographic objectives give the fundamentals of how a bibliographic database is created.
I believe examining legal information constructs and tools through a critical investigatory lens could be greatly beneficial to students first engaging with legal information. The structure of the thing greatly influences the perception of the thing. When we look at a bookshelf, it is easy to see the deliberate cataloging choices that were made to collocate certain types of works together and the taxonomy employed. We can see, to some degree, the worldview and message being stated by this taxonomy structure.
However, this is much harder to see visually via legal databases. Westlaw, Lexis, and Bloomberg do not present things in a clear hierarchy unless you know where to look. I think encouraging students to dig into these systems and see how legal information is structured is pivotal to teaching them how to be a proper chef, instead of having them rely on tried-and-true recipes.