Evaluation criteria of legal electronic resources. A case study of Italian legal web resources' selection

• Autore: Ginevra Peruginelli
• Carica: Scholarship holder at Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell'Informazione Giuridica
• Pagine: 211-243

Ginevra Peruginelli Scholarship holder at Istituto di Teoria e Tecniche dell'Informazione Giuridica of CNR and Phd student at Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University College of London. Web resources have been last accessed April 12th, 2007.

Page 211

@1. State of the art of legal electronic resources

The rapid explosion of electronic information on the Internet is an unquestionable reality, as well as its enormous impact on research, business and every social activity.

However this electronic transformation has its drawbacks; in fact navigating through such an amount of information sources, often unstructured, may make people waste their time and miss their expectations¹.

Badly designed web pages, characterised by inaccuracy and lack of currency of content, unreliability of data, uncertain authority, missing description of data sources are only a few of the limitations that hinder effective access and use of electronic information.

This is the reason why a strong movement is underway for establishing evaluation criteria to be used in selecting electronic information resources. The primary goal of such recommendations is to ensure that information selected be authoritative, reliable and effectively usable. These requirements have been at the heart of the collection development activity for printed materials, undertaken by information professionals and librarians, who since long have devised and applied criteria to assess the usefulness of resources, mainly in print. Many criteria elaborated so far are applica-Page 212ble to electronic resources, but the peculiarities of web-based materials require specific assessment methods in regard to their origin, content, form, process or system supporting the information concerned².

In this study evaluation criteria of legal web sites are examined focusing on attitudes, beliefs and behaviour of legal information experts committed to select law materials on the web within the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques (ITTIG)³. As it is commonplace on the web for valuable resources to coexist with low quality information, whose provenance is questionable and authority is uncertain⁴, and having verified that this is particularly true for Italian legal electronic information, the need is felt of evaluation criteria to be adopted in selecting electronic documents, now that some developments are underway in publishing legal electronic resources on the Internet.

To that purpose it is essential to study and define a set of evaluation criteria for Italian web-based legal information resources in order to assist users in the selection process and foster producers to publish quality digital law information.

In particular it is useful to: a) identify characteristics of success of electronic legal resources to be taken into account by users and providers of legal materials; b) verify whether evaluation criteria vary in relation to the different legal sources (legislation, judicial decisions and legal literature); c) investigate and document the methods of ITTIG's experts in selecting legal materials from the net; d) develop a systematic understanding and provide evidence of the need of appropriate criteria for evaluating legal web resources.

It is worth noting that all over the world legal electronic information has appeared on the web with some delay as compared with otherPage 213 resources, but it is now available in a variety of forms and its use is becoming increasingly popular among professionals, administrators, scholars, citizens. This occurs in different measures in the various countries. In Italy, in particular, recent developments date to the last few years, especially as regards legal literature.

Web-based law material follow the pattern of worldwide production on the Internet in a variety of formats and undoubtedly its emergence has its origin in the ease in creating documents and sites and in the availability of facilities for connecting to the net. All these factors call for guidance and support to end-users as well as to producers of web information for the benefits of their customers.

As compared to what happens for general resources' evaluation, a limited amount of research and practical work is available to be used as a reference point to assess legal web sites. The sources provided so far have been analysed and taken into account with the aim to add, through a case study analysis of legal experts in selecting essentially Italian law electronic materials, some items of reflection and fresh information on quality indicators as well as on the process of evaluation.

The adoption of evaluation criteria of legal web resources is an essential factor for the selection and use of information sources and its seems important to analyse the work done and explore how the specificity of legal material affects evaluation.

@2. Legal research and users' attitudes in searching for information

Users of legal information on print and electronic format belong to different categories and have various requirements and competencies. They share characteristics, attitudes and needs of other users in seeking for information, but have peculiarities due to the sophisticated nature of legal information.

In general legal users have different levels of interests, according to their profession and specialisation, and discrepancies are found in the frequency of use of various legal information materials and in the activities for which legal information is needed⁵.

Page 214

They use legal information for various purposes, and differences exist in the way such information is disseminated. To ensure access, commercial publishing is insufficient. In fact, although commercial publishing can serve the needs of legal professionals, by the experience of some countries it results that such services only indirectly benefit the general public⁶.

New forms of dissemination, such as Internet distribution, have made it possible to reach large segments of population, even if information should be conveyed by intermediaries before reaching their final recipients.

However in the legal environment, electronic resources are traditionally regarded as not familiar tools and problems are connected with managing electronic legal research. Gaining a better understanding of legal academics' and professionals' information needs, their seeking behaviour in using existing electronic resources, satisfaction or discontent of available actual legal web sites would help to have a clear view of the state of the art in Italy of issues concerning the use of such resources and hence to inform the design of user-centred information-seeking support for digital law libraries.

There are few studies, both at international and national level, which focus on legal users' requirements of electronic material, on their information seeking behaviour of digital law libraries and related tools⁷. Available research mostly concentrate on a specific aspect of legalPage 215 research of electronic resources, represented by user interface issues of retrieval systems providing access to legal information. This is the reason why user interface is often retained as an important limitation to usage.

At international level few reports on surveys and case studies specifically dedicated to legal users have been carried out. These investigations have been undertaken in specific environments and institutions, but the methodology, the topics investigated and their results can provide useful insights to surveys and research projects in different law contexts.

In general, findings show several concerns by users of legal electronic resources on both the quality of content available and the systems providing access to law material.

As regards the most important desired features, users tend to favour free access and currency, followed by coverage, integrity and authority. Among the benefits of accessing legal information, free access is mostly appreciated.

Quality of resources and persistency of links are retained crucial issues to be carefully considered for accessing legal material and the lack of quality control is often claimed as a serious limitation that hinders extensive use of law-oriented Internet sites.

What users mostly require are facilities for simpler and at the same time more accurate searching, better currency, especially of legislation and judicial decisions, improved coverage, both in terms of the breadth of databases (more legislation and courts) but also the depth (older court cases, missing local regulations and Public Administration acts).

The ability to list regulations made under an act while viewing an act is retained an important feature, although very few systems at the moment can afford providing such functionality.

Site design, easier navigation, quality of the search engine and of user interface are addressed as important features by a relevant number of users. Here a distinction can be derived from the surveys where concerns on the search engine functionalities and on ease of use of the system are mostly expressed by legal professionals who complain the inability in many systems, to easily refine searches and to search within acts.

Sorting of search results and flexibility in assembling and rearranging information is also a feature which is highly requested, and claims are made concerning the difficulty in doing so in a number of implementations.

Page 216

As regards navigation between the three essential components of legal research: statutes, judicial decisions and literature, the need is emphasized of systems where hypertext links allow legal users to move between references in such a way that any source mentioned in a database (a case, a statute or a journal article) can directly lead users, by a simple click, to the referenced source. This is an extremely important functionality which users have found missing in many systems.

A number of complains regard the scarce ability found in several...