The Gazette 1994

GAZETTE

MARCH 1994

The I n f o rma t i on H i ghway: Us ing t he I nt ernet f or Legal Research

by Dr Gerard Quinn (Faculty of Law, UCG) & Paul Doyle (Computer Services, UCG).

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Introduction j Most solicitors are by now well

| acquainted with commercial databases ; in law. Many of these databases are quite extensive and reach beyond I purely legal information. They have j j j efficiently and quickly. The use of these facilities is likely to increase as the modern emphasis appears to be on making computers literate about people and their needs and not the other way round. The old and rather off-putting requirement of computer literacy was seen as a major obstacle to full use of the technology. All that is changing rapidly with the development of intuitive ! systems that can be mastered within j j an hour. I j Important though the commercial databases are, there are other electronic resources which solicitors should be aware of. The purpose of this article is to described one such resource, namely the Internet. | become indispensable tools in retrieving relevant information own academic computing network. , These networks carry information from one academic institution to i another and also enable researchers to ! remain in constant contact. Personal contact can be maintained through electronic mail (e-mail) which can carry not only messages but also | transmit whole files (e.g. a draft j j article). The Irish academic network is called HEANET and its British ; counterpart is called JANET. The global network of which HEANET and JANET form an integral part is called the Internet. j What is the Internet? ; Most countries in the world have their j

Paul Doyle

GerardQuinn

Searching the Databases Because the amount of information available on-line on the Internet is quite vast there are certain user friendly tools available to help the user navigate to what s/he actually needs. A tool called GOPHER, for example, uses a system of simple menus to carry the user to host institutions that carry relevant information. The World Wide Web tool is based on hypertext (and now effectively means that a document is displayed with highlighted words which, if clicked on or otherwise invoked, can branch the user out into other documents and databases and so on ad infinitum. One can even j j Access Access to the Internet was generally restricted to the academic community until quite recently but now the majority of new Internet users are private sector based. The Internet is rapidly becoming the de facto international standard for conducting electronic business. A useful side- effect of this shift in emphasis with the Internet is that whereas e-mail was j hyper or multi-media). This j download audio lectures in law through the LII provided one's hardware has a multi-media capability! j j

• to use electronic mailing facilities • to search the catalogue of many academic libraries around the world (e.g. Harvard, Yale, Oxford law libraries) • to search the databases of Í international and regional organisations (e.g. the United j Nations, its specialised agencies, the European Commission) | • to search public domain government documentation (e.g. the US Government's databases are vast and searchable) • to search commercially maintained j (fee-based) databases • to subscribe to specialist mailing lists (of which there are at least one hundred in law alone). The Legal Information Institute (LII) at Cornell Law School, for example, maintains an extensive library of legal J information. Once logged into the LII the user is prompted into more j specialist databases which include such diverse areas as recent Supreme Court decisions, constitutional law, health law, environmental law, international organisations, disability ! j interesting and useful law site or host computer is based at Washington & Lee University. law, commercial law, intellectual property, etc. Another extremely

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Having access to the Internet enables the user, for example,

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