CALI 2000, Going the Distance

Beyond Brochureware

Sieglinde Schreiner-Linford

A. The standard law school website – a template

The standard law school web site in 2000:

About us - Reasons to go to xxx law school
Academics – Faculty, Students
(Administration)
Admissions – Future students
(Alumni)
Career planning/services
(IT services)
(Law Links)
Library
News and events (Calendars and schedules)
Programs – Degrees – Exchange programs – Programs of study – (International)
(Publications)
Resources
(Staff)
Sitemap
(Virtual tour)

B. About Brochureware

Presentational material, organizational descriptions
Designed for the initial contact with the institution ‘Law school’
Everybody needs to have a decent brochureware website, but ...
Presentation takes precedence over content

C. What can and what should be done with websites

Part of need for information flow or of a problem with information flow - ‘Not knowing why’ is the top misstake in website management(Jakob Nielsen)
Multiple audiences with multiple interests:
- Audiences: Future Students, Current Students, Faculty/Staff, Parents/Families, Alumni/Friends and ‘Visitors’ - Readers, community at other academic institutions, legal community, general public, journalists, high school students, anybody with interest in legal information (many of the people in all these groups may be from an international context)
- Interests: General or specific and practical information about the institution, “What are they doing” and “How are they getting on” from point of view of potential, present and former students and their families and friends, “What work are they doing?” “Anything I need to know about?” “Anything useful for me?”, “what is (American) law on … and how does it work?” from other academics and all the other groups
- Locations of websites: Institutional presentation (ads, admissions, organizational information) – institution based, Research support (guides, hotlists) – duplication of effort to have separate ones at every law school (law library), Research, teaching and publishing – partially school based, partially subject oriented cooperation

Distribution of advertising material and support for applications
Distribution of organizational information (address, directories, courses, degrees, admission info)
Support for organizational information flow (internal and external)
Publication of teaching materials
Online teaching
Publication of research (journals, working papers, books, teaching materials, works in progress)
Publication of collections (Preservation, accessibility to limited collections)
Research support (research guides, ‘hotlists’)
Research community building (conferences, collective work on ‘work in progress’) – the original goal of the www (of which we have seen very little!)
Research tools – awareness services, searchable or otherwise categorized document collections
Social community building (?)
Reusable data collections (?)

D.Practical and organizational problems in web-publishing

Recent Teknoids thread: Who wants their faculty to do html-editing – really???
Web training, work infrastructure and technical support for a diverse group of web authors - ‘educational technology staff’ to support ‘efaculty’
Over-all professional architecture to integrate single content units – not to subject it to hierarchical rigor
Professional web design requires cooperation between authors and web producers
Weight given to technical capabilities in job adverts
Conversion problems
- Quality of source material
- Single best trick: Rtf files
- Second best trick: Don’t mix different tools on the same document
- Biggest time saver for users: Optimizing graphics
- Most important: simple conversion of word-processing to html neglects presentational and navigational issues. It fails to provide the added value of the web, just uses it as a delivery mechanism (which is great in itself, but ….)
- Degree to which program allows control over attributes of html created
No ideal tool - as examples
- Hotmetal
  - Clean code
  - Possibility to edit in ‘tags on’ or ‘html source’ mode
  - Clean conversion, but limited control over modalities of conversion
- Frontpage
  - Yes, much better than prior versions – cleaner code, footnotes don’t get dropped anymore
  - Still pretty baroque code
  - Still tries to emulate layout which does not need to travel from print document to an online document
  - Still hard to hand-edit or to work on with any other program ever again
  - Filesize
- Transit
  - Very extensive control over conversion (attributes of entities), recognition of styles
  - Extensive possibilities of graphical layout
  - Navigational elements, breaking up of files
  - Price
- Rtf2html
Access rights, version control and timeliness.
Web content has to be provided by the content’s owners, but for them web-publishing is just another (and often the last in sequence) task in an already busy schedule.

Ghost-sites

E. Navigability, integration and cooperation

The site was created based upon the infrastructure of the university. By 1999, it became clear that the majority of users did not care about the infrastructure of the university. They wanted to be able to quickly get their hands on the information that they needed.
Sue Van Sickle, University Webmaster, Washburn University

Quick links
‘Portal sites’ versus ‘content providers’
Luminosity versus visibility
Overlaying design of sites instead of hierarchical structure
BBC
Harvard environment initiative
- http://environment.harvard.edu/

F.Academy of European Law online

1.Teaching materials

Not online teaching, but teaching materials for use in courses

2.Working papers and EJIL

Integration! Creating accepted quality service.

6.European Research Papers Archive

Integrated access point for all series (raises visibility for all participating series) with keyword search (one stop)
Quality control
Keyword search of single series

http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/JeanMonnet/papers/search.html

7.Site statistics

Two overlaying curves

(about) doubling every year (relatively old site)
seasonal

http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/JeanMonnet/stats/

G.The changing market for legal education: will distance learning replace law schools?

Oh, no! I'm not going to do this!

H.Why off-line education will not go away

Legal education is not only about 'legal' and not only about 'transferring knowledge', least of all it is just about acquiring information

Socialization, social networking
Coming of age rituals
Human skills and human qualities
Structure and 'time-out' for learning
Guidance, advise and personal support during learning
Hands-on experience
Trade-marking (elite schools)

For every single of these points there are groups of people for whom they are irrelevant or impractical

I. Online publishing and changes in legal education

The new medium
- Mega-jump in educational, guided experience from flat, written materials to well designed, hyperlinked, multimedia online material
- Speed of distribution
- Lowered cost of distribution
- Outreach to new communities
- Asynchronous and geographically unrestrained participation

Institutional factors
- No rewards for web-publishing at the moment for faculty members - Institutional pressure to use the web for legal information dissemination and legal education in (lucrative) 'fringe' areas
- Split between those whose online courses are taught and those who become adjunct teachers
- Chances to provide broader curriculum at smaller/poorer schools with resource pooling
- Effects on institutional loyalties
- Strange economics of legal academic life

Possibilities
- Publicly available free legal information can be a by-product of reworking internal systems
- Growing role of vendors in teaching legal research.
- Chance to 're-brand' in a changing market

J.Conclusions: Make it useful! There is (still?) a chance.

Huge national and international audiences for very divers offers of legal information, knowledge, and education
Law school websites have to a great degree become stuck in presentational self-advertising
There is a discrepancy between the perceived institutional need to ‘get into the market’ and the reality of ‘daily’ use of web-technology
Library sites may actually say more about what is happening at the place than the Law school sites themselves
Need for content - possibility for content
If there is content, why hide it?
Alternate homepages (with adequate underlying structures!) focusing on different kinds of information are a possible solution:
- Admissions
- Institutional and organizational (probably including resources)
- Research and publishing
- Teaching
- Community(ies)
Providing content requires involvement of different author groups
Building of ‘human infrastructure’ - as long as the organizational and institutional problems in web publishing are not addressed websites will not become better

None of this can happen if there is no infrastructure, understanding of good principles of web management and design, adequate and timely funding not only at the ‘over-all’, but also for the capillary level

schreine@law.harvard.edu