Designing e-books for legal research

  • Authors:

  • Catherine C. Marshall;Morgan N. Price;Gene Golovchinsky;Bill N. Schilit

  • Affiliations:

  • Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way - 32/1079, Redmond, WA and FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc., 3400 Hillview Ave., Bldg. 4, Palo Alto, CA;FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc., 3400 Hillview Ave., Bldg. 4, Palo Alto, CA;FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc., 3400 Hillview Ave., Bldg. 4, Palo Alto, CA;FX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc., 3400 Hillview Ave., Bldg. 4, Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 1st ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

In this paper we report the findings from a field study of legal resea rch in a first-tier law school and on the resulting redesign of XLibris, a next-generation e-book. We first characterize a work setting in which we expected an e-book to be a useful interface for reading and otherwise using a mix of physical and digital library materials, and explore what kinds of reading-related functionality would bring value to this setting. We do this by describing important aspects of legal research in a heterogeneous information environment, including mobility, reading, annotation, link following and writing practices, and their general implications for design. We then discuss how our work with a user community and an evolving e-book prototype allowed us to examine tandem issues of usability and utility, and to redesign an existing e-book user interface to suit the needs of law students. The study caused us to move away from the notion of a stand-alone reading device and toward the concept of a document laptop, a platform that would provide wireless access to information resources, as well as support a fuller spectrum of reading-related activities.