Feature

posted 2 Jul 2009 in Volume 3 Issue 5

Could law libraries be more social?

Social media tools are much maligned, with negative press stories the norm. So how – if at all – could law libraries use these tools to develop their services? James Mullan looks at the role social media tools have to play in service delivery and at some of the concerns associated with using them.

Unfortunately, there is a widespread misconception that social media is about poking people, throwing sheep and generally wasting time. This is certainly an element of social media usage, but in the context of law libraries, social media could mean so much more than this. For a law library, social media could be about harnessing some of these tools to improve productivity, knowledge sharing and creation, and to streamline existing workflows and processes. Increasing productivity has never been more important than in the context of the current recession, especially where law firms are looking to make significant savings.

The good news for law librarians and law libraries is that we’re already quite good at being social. Libraries are usually places where individuals come to meet and to work, not just take books out (yes we do more than just stamp books). Law libraries and librarians also already have a number of ways to network with other libraians. These include the BIALL Conference, the LIS-LAW e-mail list and the BIALL mailing list.

So, taking advantage of social media tools should just be a case of identifying an appropriate technology and implementing it, but is it really as easy as this?

Defining ‘social media’
Social media is certainly a phrase that is used a lot these days, but what are the technologies that make up social media and how are they defined?

Social media is best defined as a group of online websites or tools, which share most or all of the following characteristics:

Participation – social media encourages contributions and feedback from everyone who is interested. It blurs the line between media and audience;
Openness – most social media services are open to feedback and participation. They encourage voting, comments and the sharing of information. There are rarely any barriers to accessing and making use of content. Password-protected content is frowned upon;
Conversation – whereas traditional media is about ‘broadcasting’ (content is published or distributed to an audience), social media is seen as a two-way conversation;
Community – social media enables communities to form quickly and communicate effectively. Communities share common interests, such as a love of books, a football team or a favourite TV programme;
Connectedness – most social media thrives on its connectedness, making use of links to other sites, resources and people;
Social media sites are usually free to use (unless you start looking at tools you can use behind your firewall) and install;
Typically, social media sites are web-based, which means the number of users can potentially be huge. For example, Twitter1 has around three million registered users. Using a web-based tool also means that individuals avoid having to install applications on their PC or laptop, saving both themselves, and potentially their IT departments, time and resources;
Another key concept for law libraries is that the focus of these types of tools is around the creation of content rather then branding and look and feel. This means that the process by which content is created should be much more intuitive. This ensures the tool is used by as many people as possible, not just those individuals who are ‘tech-savvy’;
Law librarians deal with information everyday, so one of the most important concepts for law libraries is that information from social media sites is reusable. That is it can be assimilated and then disseminated in a variety of ways, although really simple syndication (RSS) is the tool generally used to disseminate information.

In terms of the technologies, social media tools can take many different forms. The following are those that law libraries are or could use to develop their services:

Social networks – these sites enable people to build personal web pages and then connect with friends to share content and communication. The biggest social networks are MySpace, Facebook and Bebo;
Blogs – perhaps the best-known form of social media, blogs are online journals, with entries appearing in chronological order;
Wikis – these websites enable users to add content or to edit existing content. The website then becomes a communal document or database. The best-known wiki is Wikipedia;
Content communities – these are communities that organise and share particular kinds of content. The most popular content communities tend to form around rich media formats like photos (Flickr), links (delicious) and videos (YouTube);
Microblogging is social networking combined with bite-sized blogging, where small amounts of content (updates) are published online. Twitter is the leader in this field.

How law libraries could use social media
Social media has the potential to significantly change the way in which law libraries deliver their services, especially around the production of current awareness. Current awareness is both time consuming and costly, but is a critical element of any law libraries service, especially where the information is being prepared for clients.

So, how could social media help? Well for one thing it’s usually cheap, certainly in comparison to some of the databases provided by the major legal publishers. Social media sites are also acknowledged as providing timely or breaking news in advance of some of the more traditional publishing mediums. They also offer innovative ways to disseminate or target users with information. From RSS feeds for specific groups of users to groups of bookmarks for clients, social media offers a number of opportunities for law librarians when it comes to providing current awareness services.

Social media sites potentially also have a key role to play in the capture and dissemination of information. This process, which is usually referred to as knowledge capture, can be hampered by an organisation’s culture, as well as the method or process by which knowledge is created, captured and disseminated. Social media sites offer many opportunities for law libraries and law firms to make this process simpler, timelier and more interactive. These are some of the reasons why law libraries could use these tools. Now, to examine some of the tools themselves.

Twitter
Twitter has taken the world by storm over the past 12 months and with good reason. Twitter is part social-networking site and part publishing platform. The idea behind it is that it offers individuals a way to provide more detailed status updates to their friends, family and other contacts. Think text messages or Facebook status updates and you’re almost there in terms of the concept. Although with Twitter, users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, e-mail or through applications like Tweetie2, TwitterFon3, Twitterrific4, Feedalizr5 or Facebook.

There are a number of misconceptions associated with Twitter. These are usually that it is just for individuals to post-trivial information and that the site is designed only for people who want to talk about themselves. Although these misconceptions exist, Twitter is actually an extremely powerful tool for law libraries and law librarians who want to monitor breaking news, view trends in real time and potentially publish to a continually increasing audience.

Another misconception is that you need to use Twitter to make the most of it…you don’t. The Twitter search engine6 is a useful tool to search for content being published to Twitter; importantly, users can subscribe to an RSS feed for search results, which ensure they don’t need to keep running the search. This is one of the simplest but most effective ways to use Twitter, especially if you’re looking to keep up-to-date with developments in your profession.

It is also a great way for law libraries to keep up-to-date with specific subject areas and with ‘trending information’ that lots of people are tagging at the same time. This is usually done via the Hashtags website7, which displays all the tags (#) currently used on Twitter and is fully searchable. Unfortunately, the Hashtag is open to abuse as anyone can start using one to tag any piece of content. Tools like Tweetbeep8 and Twilert9 could also be used by libraries to monitor content on Twitter. These tools will email you when a Tweet matches the search terms you’ve provided.

Law libraries could also use Twitter to ask questions, this becomes more useful if they ask a question and then respond to other questions posted by users they are following. The final and simplest way to use Twitter is to follow other legal Tweets. Increasingly, organisations are using Twitter as another means to publish information in the legal Sector these Tweets include @HMGov, @Legislation, @DowningStreet and @UKParliament

Social bookmarking
Social bookmarking is one of the easiest social media tools to use and law libraries are starting to discover ways in which they can use these tools both to promote resources externally and to share resources internally. The basic premise of social bookmarking is that instead of individuals saving websites to Internet Explorer favourites, they save them using a website like Delicious10, StumbleUpon11 or Digg12.

The benefits associated with doing this are that the links can be tagged and given a description so that finding them in future is much easier. These websites can then be organised by the tag(s) an individual has applied and shared with other users. For law libraries, social bookmarking tools have two potential applications, the first is a way to share links internally with a team or department. This is a much more effective way to share a resource then just sending the link in an email. These links could then be subscribed to via RSS, providing colleagues with an insight into reading habits and alerting them to resources they may not be aware of.

Libraries are also looking at how social bookmarking tools could be used to create sets of bookmarks for their clients. Traditionally, libraries have always produces documents or websites that contain lists of links. Social bookmarking sites take this concept one step further by categorising the links, showing users how many other people have saved the link and by making them searchable.

Social networking
Social-networking sites are being considered as serious tools by many organisations including law firms. Within an organisation, social networking tools could be used in many different ways – for example, to find someone who knows about a particular subject but might not work in the same office. Social networking tools could also be used to create groups around particular subject or themes, which staff from different locations can join and start networking with colleagues they may never get the chance to network with otherwise. For libraries within law firms opportunities afforded by social networking sites are few and far between, there are however some good examples of academic law libraries and other law libraries using Facebook to promote their services.

Blogs
Out of all the tools currently available, blogs have been around the longest (ten years) but it’s only been in the past five years that corporate organisations have begun to recognise their value. Within law libraries, blogs are being used extensively to replace or improve many of the services they deliver. One law library using blogs is Osborne Clarke13, which has established several blogs internally. One blog is used exclusively by the information services team to share information across several sites. Another is being used by the professional support lawyers, again to share information.

At CMS Cameron McKenna, the knowledge and information services team blog is used primarily to capture knowledge around new purchases, new websites, new databases, research tips and any news the contributors feel is appropriate for the audience. Using the blog has significantly cut the number of e-mails sent by the team. Also, information, that would previously have been filed in Outlook has now become much easier to find. There are also a number of other team blogs, which are being used to increase the amount of information being shared internally.

Blogs are also being used within law firms as internal communication tools and as a replacement for internal (hardcopy) newsletters. Compared to hard-copy documents, Blogs have the advantage of speed, cost and their interactive features, which allow fee-earners to comment on items published. Microblogging is also beginning to take off within law firms, with a number of firms looking at how they can use tools like Yammer14 and Jaiku15. These tools, which are similar to Twitter, have the potential to replace what are already overburdened e-mail systems. Microblogging could also be used as forum for bouncing ideas off of people or generating ideas around a particular subject without having to send an email to everyone you think might be interested in your idea.

Wikis
Wikis perhaps have the most potential. Because anyone can contribute to a wiki, they are an excellent way to capture knowledge held by people within a library. Typical uses for Wikis within law libraries include the creation of knowledge bases, subject guides and FAQs. However, an area where wikis have the greatest potential is around subject specific legal guides. Because the law can change quickly, a dynamic, easy to update ‘website’ where fee earners can see the latest changes and any new additions has the potential to deliver huge benefits.

Wikis could also substantially reduce the number of e-mails sent by individuals, project teams, sector groups and departments. Wikis are also great tools for librarians to use because we tend to have a lot of documentation that could be better managed online. These might be best-practice guides, information on how to use databases or documentation related to IT Systems. Wikis are also being looked at as replacements for mailing lists. Mailing lists are fine, in principle, until you remember someone posted some useful information. How would you try and find this again? Would you try and remember who posted the information and when? Would you search you deleted items or would you try and search the mailing list archives? For these reasons, simply consolidating questions and answers into a single searchable database seems a much better approach.

RSS
RSS is one of the key elements of any social media site. Simple to use and easy to administer, RSS feeds already enable law libraries to provide fee earners with targeted, relevant news stories direct to their desktops or RSS feed readers. For law librarians, RSS has huge potential, especially around the delivery of current awareness. A number of law firm libraries are already looking at how RSS Feeds can be published to intranets or portals. These feeds range from general news feeds, such as the BBC, to more specific feeds, which the legal publishers PLC16, Westlaw17 and Justis18 continue to develop.

CMS Cameron McKenna has looked in great detail at how we can use RSS Feeds to streamline some of the work we do around current awareness. In practice, this means we’re now using RSS feeds to monitor changes to a set of websites, rather then visiting each of those websites on a daily basis. We’re also looking at how we can replace some of the information we publish manually to our intranet with automatically updated RSS feeds. RSS also has the advantage over other social media tools in that it’s not a site but a technology, which makes content from these social media tools available. So, if a user navigates to a page on an intranet, they probably won’t even realise that they’re looking at content that has been generated from an RSS feed. In this way, libraries can slowly introduce RSS to their users without having to talk about RSS readers.

Concerns around adoption
One of the biggest concerns for law libraries about the adoption of these tools is the quality of the information that comes from them. Twitter could potentially be a great tool to monitor breaking news in a particular subject area or for a particular company, but how reliable is the information that is returned from searches? Is it just speculation, rumours and hearsay, or can it be relied on as accurate? This concern can be applied to many of the free tools available, including Google Alerts and Google Blog Search, Wikipedia and many more. Unfortunately, this issue will remain as long as the information is being created on a collaborative basis and to stop creating content in this manner goes against many of the principles behind social media sites.

Another issue for law libraries and law librarians is finding the time to use these tools and then spending too much time using them! Many law librarians work either as solo librarians or as part of very small teams. In practice this means that very often they will do everything from ordering new items for the library to loading know-how to the intranet. As a result, time (or lack of it) is a major issue. So finding the time to seriously look at these tools is a concern. Many people will argue that these tools have the potential to actually make individuals working within law libraries lives easier and more productive by filtering and organising the information they receive.

A related concern is that these tools will simply go away and the world will move on to something new. It’s true to say that social media tools come and go, but having an understanding of how these tools could potentially improve service delivery within a law library is important for all law libraries. Especially where these tools have the potential to deliver savings both in terms of costs and time saved.

Information overload is another concern for many law librarians. RSS feeds are great, but not if you subscribe to 1,000. Twitter has the potential to be a useful tool for law libraries, but not if you’re following too many people. Wikis are intuitive and easy to add content to, but if many people are adding content, you could quickly become overwhelmed by the number of updates. These tools all have the potential to add to what is already a very noisy world for law librarians. Managed properly, however, they could actually make law librarians and law libraries lives easier and provide value for our internal and external clients.

The language of social media tools can also be confusing – but is it a barrier to people actually using the tools? Some terms don’t immediately make sense to someone who doesn’t use them regularly. RSS, for example, has several different meanings from ‘really simple syndication’ to ‘rich site summaries’ to ‘read some stories’. All of these descriptions are valid, but none of them actually say what RSS is and, more importantly, its potential. So for law librarians, the challenge is to ensure users understand what the term means without using too much jargon or ‘dumbing’ the application or process down to the point a user thinks it isn’t relevant to the work they do.

A fundamental barrier to more law firms and law libraries adopting social media tools is the shift in culture both from the perspective of an individual using these tools to someone in IT or management who might be thinking about how these tools could be used. For individuals, the shift is seismic – from a culture of know-how created and captured on paper and stored either on their own PC or within a know-how management system, to a more collaborative way of thinking where documents are worked on with both your immediate colleagues and colleagues who may not even be in the same country.

Law firms are also fundamentally risk averse; which is a good thing when you’re dealing with confidential client information, but not so good if you are championing a project that looks at how fee-earners can collaborate and share information more easily. Many systems within law firms are also currently designed with security as a major feature, for example, document management systems, which actively encourage users to apply security to the documents they create. So telling law librarians that they are going to be using a tool that will expose all the websites they save or all the documents they create to the world may not go down too well in the first instance!

Another issue covers the concerns that might be raised by IT about the use of social media tools and services. IT professionals main concerns will be around two things. First, if the firm starts to use a range of freely available tools and services, many of which they may not be aware of, how can they possibly provide technical support? The second is around authentication and security. Just because a social media site tells you it’s secure and your details are safe are they really? These are real concerns that IT need to resolve either through a climate of trust (for instance, that individuals within the firm aren’t going to be downloading/using malicious pieces) or by blocking access to these tools.

Achieving potential
As leaders in their field from a knowledge point of view, law firms and the libraries within them are well placed to start using some of the social media tools that are available. Even though there are some very good examples of libraries doing exactly this, many law firms still lag behind other organisations in their adoption of these tools and practices.

The good news is that knowledge management (KM) and information services (IS) teams are ideally placed to oversee and manage the use of these tools. KM and IS teams should be the first teams to start looking at the development of these tools within law firms, even if that means starting small with a limited access blog or a wiki that uses free software. Showing the potential use of these tools within the firm will eventually lead to bigger and more inclusive projects.

James Mullan is the information officer at CMS Cameron McKenna. He can be contacted at james.mullan@cms-cmck.com

References

1. http://www.twitter.com/

2. http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone/

3. http://twitterfon.net/

4. iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific

5. http://www.feedalizr.com/

6. http://search.twitter.com/

7. http://hashtags.org/

8. http://tweetbeep.com/

9. http://www.twilert.com/

10. http://delicious/

11. http://www.stumbleupon.com/

12. http://digg.com/

13. http://www.osborneclarke.com/

14. http://www.yammer.com/

15. http://www.jaiku.com/

16. http://uk.practicallaw.com/home.do

17. http://www.westlaw.co.uk/

18. http://www.justis.com/