Monthly Archives: June 2010

New Free United Kingdom Primary Law Legal Research Tool

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Posted in Case Law, Government, Legislation, U.K. | Tagged ,

The UK FreeLegalWeb.org is now in beta and is an interesting looking alternative to BAILII, the current go to source for free UK case law.  As their About page states, the problem is that the law just isn’t practically accessible.

FreeLegalWeb works like a library discovery tool.  It is not hosting the content.  It is aggregating links to the resources, so a single search will retrieve information about content from multiple sources but you will eventually link to the primary document on that source.  This means you still need to know something about the sources and what their scope is.

This resource has a lot of nice features in place already – a retrieved result has links to the full text and supplemental tools, like a citator to note up cases – and the development of subject classification through crowd sourcing will make the content aggregated that much richer.

The case law search on FreeLegalWeb relies on BAILII for case law and LawCite for its citator service.  This is a huge improvement, since you can now view both the BAILII text and run the link through LawCite, something which is not possible if you start your search directly on BAILII.

It will be interesting to watch this site develop and move from beta to a full online product.  It will be a huge time saver for legal researchers looking for UK primary legal information.

[thanks to the Legal Informatics blog ]

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Extend Your Web Browser Sync

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Posted in Google Chrome | Tagged , ,

I have already talked on this site about synchronizing your Web browser preferences, which is native in Google Chrome 5 and is now a part of Mozilla Firefox through the Weave project.  One thing that none of the synchronization tools has done, though, is to ensure that you are running the same add-ons or extensions on each installation of your browser.  This is not a huge issue, because you are probably not adding and changing extensions as often as you are bookmarks.  But there are still times when you add an extension to Google Chrome and you may not remember to add it wherever else you work.

Google has released a new feature into their developer stream that will change that.  If you use Google Chrome, you have three choices.  You can go with the latest stable version, the beta version, or you can join the developer version.  The last two may not be available on all operating systems, and are more likely to have problems in them, since they are still being modified and improved until they move to the stable stream.  If you cannot wait for extension sync, you can download the developer version of Chrome.  Otherwise, sit tight and look forward to this time-saving improvement to Google Chrome.

[Via the ReadWriteWeb]

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Real-Time Search Taps into Deep Web APIs

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Posted in Business Information, RSS, Search, Social media | Tagged ,

Stephen Arnold at Beyond Search gave an excellent presentation at the Special Libraries Association annual meeting in New Orleans on real-time search.  He liked Collecta too, a real-time search tool I cover in the book.

Two other sites he mentioned were Booshaka and OpenFacebookSearch.com.  Both use the Facebook application programming interface (API) to send a search query from the Web into Facebook and to retrieve matching results.  This allows you to search Facebook profiles without having to go to the Facebook site, and it means you do not have to have an account on Facebook either.

Neither site will return private information, since the Facebook API controls what is made available, and it is likely to adhere to whatever privacy rules are currently in place.  I tried a number of search queries at these sites and the results appeared to be about the same.  One feature I like about Booshaka’s site is that you can save your search query as an RSS feed, so that you can continue to monitor keyword activity on Facebook without returning to the site.  Both sites enable you to create a Web-based widget, but this is not very relevant from a research standpoint.

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Google Quick Scroll Pinpoints Relevant Content

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Posted in Add-on, Google, Google Chrome | Tagged

One of the frustrations with hypertext and linking is that, when you click on a link, you may not actually go to the most relevant content.  Say you are reading an article or case, and it links to another article or case.  It is common to find yourself, when you click that link, at the top of the new article or case, not at the actual spot that is referenced in the previous document.

This is especially true for search engines.  Where someone who is manually linking content may be able to link directly to the most relevant content, search engines invariably link to the top of whatever site or page they retrieve.  Then it is up to you to get to the right spot.  There are times when I find, after doing the common CTRL-F find command, that what the search engine indexed is no longer available on the page.

I talk about a couple of tools in the text that can help you navigate pages and save time in moving to the most relevant point.  One that I came across recently was a Google Chrome extension developed by Google itself, called Quick Scroll.  This is really nice because, if you are like me and the majority of Web searchers, you are using Google.  When you execute a search on Google and retrieve results, Quick Scroll changes what happens when you arrive at the actual content.

Once you click on a result, a small black box will appear at the bottom of your screen.  It will list each occurrence of your search terms in the page at which you are looking.  Click on any of the entries to jump directly to the reference point.  It shows the terms within context, so you can get a sense of what is at the reference point.  While there are tools that will jump to each iteration, this can help you to shortcut to the best iteration of your Google search query.

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