Introduction
With many of our universities teaching law we recognise the importance of you being able to refer to these resources successfully. This article outlines what can be done and some tips that may help you when bookmarking.
Bookmarking resources
We know that you would like to be able to bookmark from Westlaw, LexisLibrary and other law sites. To understand how the bookmarking extension works please refer to this bookmarking article.
We have done extensive work with both Westlaw and LexisLibrary to ensure that they bookmark as fully as possible. We do our best to collect as much metadata available to create a complete bookmark, but legal resources are complicated in their setup and are often inconsistent from page to page. We do try to update our bookmarks on a regular basis, so if you ever notice a screen change within the law platform do let us know and so that we can adjust our bookmark and get the best user experience possible.
We are also aware that although it may be hard to get the information from the page itself, if you can create a manual record with the correct item type this will help you as well. We have now added to the item type list:
- Legal case document
- Legal document
- Legislation
We hope these new types will allow you to create a more accurate bookmark for your users.
Customer workarounds
We have had some workarounds provided by customers on how to deal with legal resources via lis-talis-aspire:
- Where sites have arranged individual Westlaw logins, a link builder button is available on the full-text page of an article.
- We first check that the resource is available on those sites, then bookmark to the top-level page providing a note for the students on which case/article to search for on the page. So far this has proved to work well for us, particularly as the course organisers are happy that it is encouraging students to search and locate the items themselves while still providing clear direction on where and how to do so. (University of Edinburgh)