Target Audience: Technical services librarians, public services librarians, information system managers, database managers, library directors
Learning Outcomes:
1) Participants will tour the key features of Google Scholar’s search service for legal opinions and journals.
2) Participants will discover indexing problems with legal collections and the approaches Google Scholar has adopted to solve those problems.
Google Scholar has recently implemented an extensive database of U.S. case law. Legal professionals, law students, and other users can find and read the decisions that govern their lives. Google Scholar is not only used by students, faculty, librarians, and researchers, it is also used by professionals in many large law firms. For the first time, one of the founding engineers of Google Scholar, Dr. Anurag Acharya, will join AALL to share the approaches taken to meet the challenges of legal materials. Dr. Acharya will present Google Scholar’s search service for legal materials, describing and illustrating key features. He will also explain how Google approaches problems specific to indexing legal collections. The program will conclude with a 30-minute question-and-answer session.