Evaluation criteria of legal electronic resources. A case study of Italian legal web resources' selection
Informatica e Diritto › Numero 2006-2, Giugno 2006
Legato come :
Riassunto
1. State of the art of legal electronic resources. 2. Legal research and users' attitudes in searching for information. 3. Evaluating resources on the web. 3.1. Evaluation criteria of general web resources. 4. Investigation on the activity of assessing the quality of resources. 4.1. Findings of the investigation. 5. Conclusions. 5.1 Main achievements. 5.2. Final remarks and recommendations.
Vedere l´intero contenuto di questo documento
Riassunto
Evaluation criteria of legal electronic resources. A case study of Italian legal web resources' selection
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.
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-ble 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 other 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 creati...Vedere l´intero contenuto di questo documento
Collegamenti sponsorizzati
