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Health & Fitness

LIBRARIES ARE ESSENTIAL COMMUNITY RESOURCES

I attended a lecture sponsored by The Friends of Montauk Library and presented by Montauk Architect Richard Scheckman, AIA, on Sunday.  In East Hampton we are very fortunate to have beautiful, as well as, well-stocked libraries with courteous and professional staff members.

I started thinking about how underutilized the library is as a resource as we become more dependent upon technology, which made me think of how much legal research has changed since I attended law school.

Legal research underwent a huge transformation since I began law school.  In the beginning, electronic research tools, like Westlaw or Lexis Nexis existed, but we were cautioned that only the biggest law firms used these freely.  The rest of the world was still using books.  So we learned with the books.

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We actually shephardized cases by using Shephard’s.  This was the way to determine that the case law we were using was current and not overruled.  We had to walk through the stacks of the law school’s library looking up cases, finding practice manuals, consulting statutes and their legislative histories. It was incredibly time consuming, but it was an art.

By the time my wife started law school in 2005, research was done exclusively using electronic research tools. She told me of one assignment where she was required to do research using the books in her school’s vast four-story library, but likened it to a treasure hunt rather than actual research, complete with competitive students who hid the books necessary to complete the assignment.

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Even the DA’s Office has Westlaw now—though when I worked there, we used a proprietary research program that was often less reliable, and we would borrow the bureau chief’s Westlaw password to check cases.

Now, the world wide web has opened up many new resources.  Not only can I get Westlaw anywhere with a smart phone, but I can look up cases on Google Scholar, I can read law blogs (“blawgs”) to stay current on relevant issues, often with specificity.  However, information obtained on the internet is often disparate and incomplete, and can even be unreliable.

Whenever I have done research to really understand a topic in-depth, I have always found it was most productive to consult an actual book in the library, and when I started my practice and needed a quiet place to work. I went to the library. When my computer didn’t work-I used one of their computers.  Our libraries are critical components of any community.  Ours, especially with their great local and Long Island collections, are tremendous resources for our community.

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