Transcript Low Cost Computer Assisted Legal Research

Scout Portal Toolkit For
Web/Database Legal Material
2004 CONFERENCE FOR
LAW SCHOOL COMPUTING
Introduction
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Making useful information available on the
Internet more accessible for law students
without expensive software and without
significant expertise in web page creation
or database design
Agenda
The Idea
 The First Solution - Filamentality
 The Second Solution - Microsoft Word
 The Third Solution - Microsoft FrontPage
 Fourth Solution – Microsoft FrontPage and
Access
 The Fifth Solution - Scout Portal Toolkit
 Other Solutions
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Overview
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My idea was that law students, lawyers,
and others researching the law could find
valuable assistance in doing their research
if they could easily find various
pathfinders and annotated bibliographies
created at many American law schools.
First Solution - Filamentality
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Lacked any skill building web pages
Lacked an ISP to post my web pages
Found a tool that seemed to offer me some help
on the Internet requiring no expertise and costing
nothing
Offered by Pacific Bell Telephone Company now
SBC Communications for school teachers
The web product is Filamentality
http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/fil/index.html
First Solution - Filamentality
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The problem with Filamentality is that it
did not have very much functionality.
Second Solution – Microsoft Word
In order to create an alphabetic list I used
Microsoft Word.
 Allowed creation of a web page from a
Word file
 Then I used a student assistant to improve
the layout.
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Second Solution – Microsoft Word
Problem creating detailed subject listing
with Word
 Difficult to keep up entries for up to a
thousand or more pathfinders on one page
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Third Solution – Microsoft
FrontPage
Work in Microsoft FrontPage
 Eliminate problems with porting pages
from Word
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Fourth Solution – Microsoft
FrontPage and Access
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Learn Microsoft Access and create an
Access database and link it to FrontPage
web pages to create dynamic web pages
Fourth Solution – Microsoft
FrontPage and Access
Decided this solution would require too
much time to learn
 Lacked confidence in my ability to pull it
off
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Fifth Solution - Scout Portal Toolkit
Solution
A low cost open source solution that offers
sophisticated database software.
 A web interface designed for librarians and
subject specialists who lack database and
web page creation expertise.
 It allows the creation of a subject portal.
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Fifth Solution - Scout Portal Toolkit
Software comes from the Internet Scout
Project at the University of Wisconsin
 Funded by a Mellon Foundation Grant
 http://scout.wisc.edu/index.php
 http://scout.wisc.edu/Projects/SPT/
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Scout Portal Toolkit Solution
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The Scout Portal Toolkit (SPT) allows
anyone or group that has information
resources they want to share via the
Internet to make that information available
through the use of dynamic web pages.
The investment of time and money is
small.
Scout Portal Toolkit Solution
The Scout Portal Toolkit (SPT) offers a
number of features that would be hard to
duplicate at low cost.
 If one uses a number of fields they all can
be searched in fairly sophisticated ways.
 One can allow users to propose comments
to enrich the individual records or add
records.
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Scout Portal Toolkit Solution
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Users can create a current awareness service to
tell them when new resources of interest are
added.
Users can rate individual records for their value.
The developer tools are sophisticated but simple
for the subject specialist to use.
One can create a classified subject index which
can supplement the other search capabilities.
Scout Portal Toolkit Solution
What you need to use Scout Portal Toolkit.
 A web server with Apache server software,
PHP 4.0.6 and MySQL 3.23 or later.
 Linux is the operating system being used.
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Scout Portal Toolkit Solution
Support from Internet Scout Project is
limited to an announcement list, a
discussion list, and some email assistance.
 Periodic upgrades and bug fixes are
available.
 There have been three upgrades in the past
year to improve performance and
functionality.
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Summary
Scout Portal Toolkit is a low cost method
to create a sophisticated Internet accessible
database of information sources.
 It is useful for the subject expert who has
little time, interest, and money for
database development and web page
construction.
 Other users of the Scout Portal Toolkit
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Where to Get More Information
An Article in D-Lib Magazine
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november02/alma
sy/11almasy.html
 An American Library Association
presentation PowerPoint at the Law Scout
Toolkit web site
http://scout.wisc.edu/Projects/SPT/index.p
hp
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Other Solutions
SWISH-E http://swish-e.org/
 ResearchGuide from the University of
Michigan
http://researchguide.sourceforge.net/index.
html
 MyLibrary
http://dewey.library.nd.edu/mylibrary/
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