Vendor v. Librarian – mega slam: Part 1

Sitting at dinner with executives from Thomson Retures Legal (TRL) in St. Paul, MN, one of my colleagues asked, “what do you expect from us?” The answer was that they simply wanted to tell their story. At the time I wondered if this was a direct hint toward a recent blog post I wrote, encouraging vendors to tell their story. I put the suspicion from my mind. My suspicions were re-ignited the next day at their headquarters in Eagan, MN when one of the reference attorneys presenting to us specifically referenced that blog post.

But the most amazing part of the trip was what TRL successfully did during that meeting, and have failed to do since. They told their story.

That’s why I had been planning on writing a post about the trip to Minnesota, and meeting with the WestlawNext folks. It was a unique experience and an interesting process that itself could be important, beyond the topic of discussion (WestlawNext).

And after February 1 when they unveiled WestlawNext at LegalTech in New York, I was prepared to blog about the value provided by the bloggers I sat in those meetings with, compared to the superficial tweets and posts coming from LegalTech.

But my friend and colleague Sarah Glassmeyer may have forced my hand a little by raising the issue of vendor swag and question of ethics, including the decision I and others made to accept an all expenses paid trip to Eagan Minnesota to meet with the WestlawNext team and preview the product.

Comments about this have ranged from the on point, to the factually inaccurate (all librarians on the trip had passwords which enabled them access to the product). And a larger discussion of librarian vendor relations has followed.

Now, I currently do not accept vendor swag. I used to. I do not remember the exact point at which I stopped accepting it (early 2009), nor do I remember the exact reasons (general feeling of ickiness). But I do not accept swag anymore. However, I did accept this trip to see WestlawNext.

I did not accept the trip immediately and not without some reservation. Yes, I questioned whether or not it was appropriate to accept a trip from TRL to preview this product. Beyond the ethical questions raised by accepting such a trip, flying to Minnesota, on about two weeks notice, in January at the start of the semester, is at best an inconvenience and at worst a pain in the ass. As my colleague mentioned this was not a trip to Hawaii.

Now here’s where it gets a little tricky.

I am a blogger – whatever that means to you – to me that includes some amateurish semblance of news gathering, editorializing, and simply passing on information. I decided long ago to not to place too much emphasis on counting how many visitors I have, subscribers to my feed, etc. I have had offers to monetize this blog and turned them down for one reason or another. But there are some people who do indeed read this blog, and find it valuable.

Now, since I am not employed as a professional news gatherer my organization cannot afford to send me to every event that may be valuable. I either use part of my professional development/travel budget, or pay my own way. Which is fine. In this particular instance, TRL decided to pay to fly me and other bloggers into Minnesota on their own dime. They gave me a place to stay for the night, and fed me. It was not a vacation. I spent most of one day traveling, and the second day in meetings.

I decided, right or wrong, that it was within my professional responsibility, and the scope of this blog to accept this trip. I mean that it may be advantageous to the organization that employs me (Yale Law Library) to have a staff member get an early insider’s view of an important new product, it may be advantageous to my career (I am up for promotion in a few years) to note that I was recognized as a blogger recognizable enough to be worth the cost to fly out to Minnesota, and valuable to the readers of my blog that I was at the meeting.

I stand by the decision.

Now some people,like this commenter, might think this makes me a less reliable authority on such matters. That doesn’t worry me. Long time readers of myself and Tom Boone know who we are and whether or not we are valuable, reliable sources of information. Frankly, I think devaluing our two voices (along with the other dozen or so bloggers there) is a disservice to any law librarian and their own professional reading.

There is of course a larger issue of vendor-librarian relations that I think should be addressed. And this is a wholely different issue than accepting an ipod (a gift I wasn’t offered and would not have accepted). FYI, I was offered but did not accept any swag while on this trip.

But I will save this larger post for later. Let’s consider this part 1.

Yale Teaching with Technology: Google Wave

On Tuesday, 2/2/10 I’ll be co-presenting about how to use Google Wave. We have created several waves for this presentation. This post is an will be an example of embedding a wave on a website or blog.

5 random thoughts about WestlawNext

So lots has been written about WestlawNext. Much more detailed analysis has been floating around. So rather than rehash what’s already been said all over the web, I’m going to provide some random thoughts I had about the project as I was sitting in the meeting at Eagan, MN. These are just from some notes I jotted down, that I think are interesting. Disclosure (again): Thomson Reuters paid my way to Eagan and put me up for the trip.

1. Attorneys do not look at documents on Westlaw beyond the first 5 to 10 results. I suspect it’s the same for Lexis, and pretty much any search site nowadays

This is what they found when researching how attorneys used Westlaw. I know that this is a problem on Google, one that has led to the emergence of the Search Engine Optimization industry, that search results beyond the first few almost do not exist. But to hear that attorneys by and large will rerun a search if desired search results don’t show up within the first few hits is very… I’ll say illuminating. Is this a failure on the part of firms, librarians, legal education, or attorneys themselves? Is it a failure at all, or just how research is done in the Google age, something that databases, search engines, librarians must simply accept as a modern research practice? WestlawNext is now accommodating this practice, as will other vendors I’m sure. Should librarians?

2. Analyzing customer usage to make the relevancy rankings more relevant, in particular measuring “meaningful interaction with documents”

For me, this may have been the most welcoming revelation about the new WestSearch relevancy rankings. They wanted to take user behavior into account in relevance rankings. But users click on documents in search results which are irrelevant. So how do you measure document relevance to a search. WestSearch incorporates what they called “meaningful interaction with a document” as signifying relevance to the search. Meaningful interaction may include actions like keyciting a document, printing a document, citing with reference, saving it to a folder, downloading, etc. These are the types of actions that were found to signify a relevant document. WestSearch will incorporate these actions into relevance rankings.

In addition to search results, WestlawNext will analyze documents saved to their folder system. The theory is that documents that appear in the same folder may have links between them and can also improve relevancy rankings.

What does this mean? It means that Westlaw’s relevancy rankings should continually improve as more people start using the system. Awesome.

3. All browsers will be supported. But Chrome is the best

Gone are those annoying pop-up windows, and messages telling us that something is best viewed on Internet Explorer. WestlawNext will be available on all browsers (Chrome is coming in mid-February). That means Mac users, Firefox users, Chrome users, Safari users will all be able to use WestlawNext on their desired platform. This is a very welcome development. It also makes me think that Westlaw may have been listening to all the user complaints about browser compatibility. Oh, by the way. Their studies found that Chrome was the most steady, fastest, most reliable browser.

4. Synchronization across all platforms

Save a document to your folder on WestlawNext online. Access it from your mobile device later. WestlawNext has been built with portability in mind. As we enter an age where people expect content to be accessible across multiple platforms, WestlawNext appears to deliver.

5. Possibility of command searching

Librarians seem to be worried about the disappearance of boolean searching. I am excited about the possibility of command searching. Currently in WestlawNext if you type “keycite [citation]” you go directly to a keycite report for that citation. Not a big deal, as Greg Lambert mentioned on the video I posted earlier. But imagine the possibility of typing “define [term]” and going straight to the definition in Black’s Law Dictionary. How about typing “ALR Index [term]” going straight to the ALR index. Do you see where I’m going with this? This system seems ripe for these types of shortcuts, and I am excited about some of the possibilities opened up by it. Whether or not others will be as impressed, or if and when these capabilities will be fully explored in WestlawNext has yet to be seen. But I would like to see it.

6. Super Bonus Final Random Thought

There is a lot more to think about with regards to WestlawNext. The system is by no means perfect. There are other issues to consider, like pricing.

But this new system is obviously a major shift in legal research. Couple this new product with Bloomberg, and the new Lexis product coming later this year, and alternatives like FastCase and the entire ecosystem of legal research may be completely different by this time next year.

I know some librarians and others are worried about what this means. But I think the application of modern search techniques, coupled with new web technologies may open up a whole new world of legal research for us. I look forward to some much needed changes.

Video: discussion of WestlawNext

ABA Journal and New York Times have already written about it. Lisa Solomon and Robert Ambrogi have seen it also. On Feb. 1st Westlaw unveils it’s new product WestlawNext to the world at LegalTech.

Yesterday they met with a group of legal information professionals to talk about the product and it’s creation. I was lucky enough to snag an invite to the meeting. Disclosure: they paid our way out there and put us up for the trip.

Soon I will post some (hopefully) cohesive thoughts about it, including some discussion of the meeting itself, but in the meantime…

After the meeting Tom Boone, Greg Lambert of 3 Geeks and a Law Blog, Jason Wilson and I sat down at the Minneapolis airport and talked about our thoughts about the product and the meeting. I videotaped it.

The video includes discussions of features, potential price considerations, and other issues raised by the new product.  So please enjoy, the video runs about 40 minutes long.

Discussion of WestlawNext from Jason Eiseman on Vimeo.

Please Tell Me a Story

When I received a phone call from Yale asking me to come out for an interview for my current job the person on the other end of the conversation informed me I would have to give a 20-minute presentation about the future of emerging technologies in law libraries. I was shocked. At some point during my education I was informed that academic librarians often have to give presentations as part of their interview, but it just hadn’t crossed my mind when I applied for this job.

As I was thinking of what I wanted to say about technology and how to start my presentation, I went to my good old-fashioned standby – tell a story. And I started with one of my favorites. It seems to be something of an academic folktale, told differently by different people to illustrate different points. And if you hang around me enough you’ll probably hear me tell it.  The basic story can be found at this 37 Signals post. Some of the interesting twists and takes on the story can be found here. The story loosened me up, set a good tone, and made the presentation a successful one.

Whenever I don’t know what to write or how to start a presentation I try to start with a story. And if you look at some of my previous blog posts you’ll see many of them start with stories or feature them prominently (including this one). When I think of my favorite blog posts and presentations, and professional interactions, stories are always prominently involved.

I was reminded recently about the power of storytelling after watching the video of Scott Berkun’s keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in NY last month.

What I love best about his talk is the application of storytelling to the vendor – customer dynamic. As many law librarians are aware vendor – librarian relations have been rocky for a while and 2009 was a particularly bad year for vendor relations with law librarians.

It occurred to me as I was watching the video that my interactions with vendors almost always tend to be sales pitches. A sales rep, not “someone who was in the room” as Scott says in the video, tries to sell me on a product or feature. They tell me what librarians love (if I had a nickel for every time a rep said “librarians love this” …), they give me slogans and buzz words. These sales pitches are missing the two important aspects of storytelling touched on in the keynote, honesty and authenticity.

Telling a story is not the same thing as a case study, although a good case study tells a story. And I’m not referring to an off-hand comment like ‘professors at x school like to do this’, and ‘this library has tried this’. Tell me the story as you might if we were sitting together at a bar. Why did these professors and libraries do what they did? What problems were they trying to solve? What was culture of the organization and did that factor into the choices made?

Maybe getting back to this basic storytelling could be a great way to rebuild the trust between librarians and vendors. Storytelling can restore the honesty and authenticity that’s been missing from this relationship. To change the game from a struggle between spending money and cutting resources and selling products to a conversation between partners helping each other solve problems.

There are a lot of good resources out there for storytelling. Scott Berkun’s blog is very good. Anecdote is also a good resource. There are others who advocate for this, but these are just two who come to mind.

It may be naive to think that storytelling will change this too-often dysfunctional relationship. But I am going to try to start doing it anyway.

So Librarians: When I network with you at a conference tell me a story about what’s going on where you work. What are some problems you’re facing? How are you dealing with those problems? I’ll share stories about what’s going on at Yale.

And for vendors: next year at AALL, or online sometime, or if you come to visit me – I am going to ask you to tell me a story. You can tell me a story about how the product was developed, or why. You can tell me a story about someone using the product right now, or how you were able to sell the product to someone else.

But please, when I ask you to tell me a story have one ready.