Teaching Legal Research and Providing Access to Electronic Resources

Book excerpt: Teaching Legal Research and Providing Access to Electronic Resources is an essential guidebook to teaching lawyers and legal researchers how to find the information they need. Law librarians and reference librarians will welcome its timely, effective, and innovative techniques for facilitating their patrons’legal research. According to the MacCrate Report, legal research is one of the ten essential skills for practicing law, and educating users in research skills is a crucial part of the law librarian’s job. Teaching Legal Research and Providing Access to Electronic Resources provides you with techniques for training your patrons in effective search strategies. This comprehensive volume will help you offer much more than a list of information on where the data is located. This helpful volume covers the full range of both users and resources, from helping first-year law students find cases in print to helping attorneys learn to use new Web sites and search engines. Its range includes academic, company, and public law libraries. Teaching Legal Research and Providing Access to Electronic Resources discusses formal ways to teach the skills of research, such as scheduled workshops, one-on-one tutorials, for-credit courses in law schools, and CLE-credit courses in law firms. In addition, it offers hints for seizing the teaching moment when a patron needs help doing research. Teaching Legal Research and Providing Access to Electronic Resources presents practical advice for all aspects of patron education, including: the rival merits of process-oriented versus results-oriented learning strategies; coordinating library education programs with courses in legal writing; teaching foreign and international legal research; using learning style theory for more effective classes; helping patrons overcome computer anxiety; lower-cost alternatives to Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw; using technology to deliver reference services.