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The Wide World of the World-Wide Web

International Law Resources on the Internet: A Description of Web Browsers and Search Engines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2019

Extract

A prominent jurist once described the law as a “seamless web.” This description of linked knowledge actually applies to all fields of scholarship and investigation, and it is not only lawyers who experience the need to move through the library constantly, each open text citing another or suggesting another avenue of inquiry. The pile of open books on the library table, and the constant recourse to catalogue and stacks, epitomize the image and the process of textual research, both for the advanced scholar and for the school-child writing her first essay. Computers clearly have the capacity to enhance the quality of our lives, but in my opinion their contribution to library reference work lies chiefly in this: to liberate us from the “up-and-down-and-fetch” mode of research as well as the “scissors-and-paste” method of text revision. This liberation is promised today in the hypertext features of all Windows-based or icon-clicking applications in use now, particularly with the incorporation of graphics and images, be they decorative or illustrative, from Netscape creatures to art, archaeology, or architecture.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 by the International Association of Law Libraries 

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References

1 F.W. Maitland, A Prologue to a History of English Law, 14 L.Q. REV. 13 (1898).Google Scholar

2 Well, if you believe this, you are truly lost in cyberspace, and more comfortable with indeterminacy than all but the most advanced textual scholars, who have taken years to get used to two King hears and multiple Biblical texts. See, inter alia, G.O. Sayles, “Clio's Web” as Introduction to Scripta Diversa (1982).Google Scholar

3 The corporation recently created a stir in going public with its free product as evidence of excitement about its capabilities. See “Underwriters Raise Offer Price for Netscape,” The New York Times, August 9, 1995, Sec. D, p.2, col. 5.Google Scholar

4 Karen Heyman, “Search Engines that Make the Most of the Internet's Marketing Excitement,” Home Office Computing, June, 1996 (retrieved from Lexis NEWS library, files PAPERS, MAGS).Google Scholar

5 Jeff Prosise, “Researching with the Web,” PC Magazine vol. 15 no. 11 (June 11, 1996), p. 235.Google Scholar

6 Prosise, Ibid., under “Alta Vista.”Google Scholar