Studying Law Students’ Information Seeking Behaviour to Inform the Design of Digital Law Libraries

Abstract

In this paper, we describe our ongoing work which involves \nexamining the information seeking behaviour of legal \nprofessionals. This work involves studying the behaviour of both \nacademic and practicing lawyers with the long-term aim of \nintegrating user-centred legal information seeking support into \ndigital law libraries. We report preliminary findings from the \ninitial phase of the study, which comprised a series of semistructured interviews and naturalistic observations of academic \nlaw students looking for information that they require for their \nwork. This group of academic lawyers often found it difficult to \nfind the information that they were looking for when using digital \nlaw libraries. A potential symptom of this difficulty was that \nhazy and incorrect knowledge of the digital library system and \ninformation sources within the system were rife. This suggests \nthe need for students to understand more about the digital library \nsystems that they use (within-systems knowledge). We also \nfound that although this group of academic lawyers often used \nseveral electronic resources in a complementary fashion to \nconduct legal information seeking, they often chose to rely \nprimarily on one of either the LexisNexis or Westlaw digital law \nlibrary platforms. Their preference was often based upon vague \nor sometimes flawed rationale and suggests the need for students \nto appreciate the situations in which different electronic resources \nmight be useful (between-systems knowledge).

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