The Case for Curation: The Relevance of Digest and Citator Results in Westlaw and Lexis

Abstract

1This is a preprint of an article accepted for publication in Legal Reference Services Quarterly © 2012-2013.Legal reference Services Quarterly is available online at: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/. Abstract:Humans and machines are both involved in the creation of legal research resources. For legal information retrieval systems, the human-curated finding aid is being overtaken by the computer algorithm. But human-curated finding aids still exist. One of them is the West Key Number system. The Key Number system's headnote classification of case law, started back in the

Mapping the Achieved Values of Legal Reference Books onto the Digital Future

“…Susan Nevelow Mart has conducted some studies trying to ascertain this. 19 She concluded that human editing contributes to better results and therefore remains a crucial component of online research tools. 20 There are some, like futurist Richard Susskind, who insist that search algorithms and other intelligent systems will be able to do for us what currently still requires human indexers.…”