Of Patrons, Portals, Partners and Pedagogues What might a true Law Sources Portal look like?

A gateway? A catalogue? Bookmarks? A tutorial? Or, how does a librarian (blinded by a variety of patron needs) describe an information elephant? A gateway? A catalogue? Bookmarks? A tutorial?

What will a portal provide? Hypertext guides? Metadata for texts? Intelligent links?

Examples of Hypertext Guides LLRX GlobaLex (NYU) Academic law school guides Some law review articles as viewed on electronic databases Some research guides of International Organizations, e.g., EU, WTO, UN

Examples of Metadata for Texts EISIL (ASIL) U of Toronto Women’s Human Rights Resources UMinn Human Rights Constitutions, cases, statutes at government sites

Examples of Intelligent Links British Academy Portal, http://www.britac.ac.uk/portal/index.html My.library software, http://dewey.library.nd.edu/mylibrary/ Courseware-based course pages Topical and source portals, such as FindLaw and WorldLII and scholars’ portals such as Yale UN Scholar’s Workstation http://www.library.yale.edu/un/ (not to be confused with software of that name)

British Academy Portal

Super Tutorials become Portals University of Melbourne Legal Resource Centre’s Legal Information Skills Tutorial Training, tutorials and workbook section of Law Gateway at SOSIG project of Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London, http://www.sosig.ac.uk/law/

Gateways to texts, sites, databases Droit.org for France, http://www.droit.org/index.html Pace CISG, Worldtradelaw.net Transnational Law Database, http://www.tldb.de/

Metadata itself is customized and categorized for the user (think: Amazon); Georgetown’s “Find It Fast” project shown below)

Catalogues and Aggregators Bibliographic utilities TD Net and other e-journal finders Google Scholar and Print Feeds and Blogs, new Yale Law Library/Innovative project to integrate user account with new information or titles in catalogue and web site

Always comes back to My Library Intelligent links are those that appear in a hypertext guide or gathered by librarian, and Are then selected by the researcher, along with shortcuts to folders and PDF briefcase-style documents All are based on context and user profile, e.g., a page is set up for links to paid and free electronic databases or specific texts created by the user and also fed by the new information on the site/catalogue: voilà- the true portal.