Journal of Law, Information and Science
|
|
Home
| Databases
| WorldLII
| Search
| Feedback
Journal of Law, Information and Science |
|
BOB MOLES[1] AND EUGENE CLARK[2]
This article:
• flies a few educational kites about the possible roles for Australia's electronic clearing house in law;
• informs both our Australian audience and those overseas about the creation and development of the clearing house;
• seeks input and comments from all potential users of such a clearing house;
• invites comment from those who have developed clearing houses in other disciplines so that we may learn from their experiences;
• encourages and invites linkages between UniServe-LAW and other clearing houses, research institutes, etc.
UniServe-LAW is Australia's national clearing house for law. It has been initially funded by the Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching (CAUT) and the Australian National University (ANU) and is based in the Centre for Networked Publishing at the ANU. ANU Senior Lecturer, Dr Bob Moles, is the director and Professor Eugene Clark is a member of the Management Group comprised also of Bob, Dr Malcolm Pettigrove (Centre for Educational Development and Methods, ANU), Marlene LeBrun (Senior Lecturer in Law, Griffith University) Richard Johnstone (Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Melbourne) and David Grainger (SCALE Database, AGs Department).
This article aims to inform both our Australian audience and those overseas about the creation and development of the Australia's clearing house in law. It will also discuss the educational, administrative, political and social roles for such clearing houses. We contend that the advent of electronic publishing, ready availability of access to the INTERNET and the development of electronic clearing houses will lead to fundamental changes in university teaching, research and publication. A second aim is to seek input and comments, especially from potential users of such a clearing house and those who have developed other clearing houses in a particular discipline. Because one of the major benefits of a clearing house is the creation of linkages, we also encourage and invite comment from those interested in establishing such links between UniServe-LAW and their clearing house, research institute, etc.
Many people are unsure whether the near hysteria in the media about information superhighways is really justified. For those many millions of people who have found their way into the INTERNET system, very few of them have been able to obtain anything worthwhile. They have opened folders with nothing in them, and found a good many "roadwork" signs, indicating that something is being developed. In terms of hard, useful information which they can take away with them, there is often too little to show for the time spent. A good many others have no idea what it is all about.
We take the view that the developments here will prove to be as important as the printing press or the industrial revolution were in their time. They will affect the lives and opportunities of us all. Traditionally, academics have spent a great deal of time in obtaining or developing their information base - their research - but have spent much less time in ensuring that the results of their research could be effectively communicated to those who may benefit from it.
With the proliferation of journals, many of them becoming ever more specialised, even the keenest of researchers is bound to miss much useful published information. For some authors, the publication of the article is the goal - the end result. With the move to an electronic information network, things are very different. Publication is just the start. In this new environment, the author does not just publish and hope for the best. The author can track how often the files are opened and where the interest is coming from and can obtain virutally instant feedback from the readers. Readers can can feel more engaged with the issues and in providng feedback to the author, can see their suggestions take effect in the subsequent development and improvement of the material in the light of these suggestions. Scholarly activity may become less of a fragmented and isolated activity and become more of a living and engaged disourse.
This is not to say, of course that people will read all of their information off the screen, although as the screen technology develops, it will become more feasible to do this. People will certainly use the screen to track down and preview relevant information. For those whose material is not represented within that electronic environment, then its value, in terms of its being able to affect the understanding of others is considerably diminished.
So, the electronic information network is not just for people who like that sort of thing - it is for everyone. However, until recently, it was very difficult for anyone without a specialist interest in the area, to make much sense of it all, and even more difficult to know how to become a player. But just as word processing started with a few devotees, and became more widely used as the tools improved, so it is with the electronic networks. However, as the tools in this area are developing more quickly, and the advantages, both personally and institutionally, are so much greater, the rate of change is that much quicker.
However, if these networks are to become as important as we would suggest, then it is incumbent upon us to explain the workings of these things in ways which everyone can understand. So let us start with some of the background to it all.
The Australian Academic Research Network - it is one of the service providers in the Australian sector of the INTERNET and is operated by a team based at the Australian National University. AARNET is managed by the Australian Vice Chancellors Committee who have been responsible for its funding and development. Until 1993, access to it was restricted largely to those engaged in academic and research work - largely the universities and research institutions. Over the last two years, access has been opened up, so we now have commercial firms set up to be "access providers" and who can assist commerce, industry and private individuals with access to the internet.
We now need to look at the way in which our capacity to function in different ways has changed and how this might in turn impact upon the institutional and social structures of which we are a part.
The basic achievement was the ability to send electronic messages directly to individual computers across the world. It established that the different national systems were in fact sufficiently integrated, to enable reliable communications to take place. Undoubtedly, this has been an important key to the much wider social involvement with computer systems. The analogy with postal services is obvious, and it is simple, and extremely useful, irrespective of the subject areas which one may be working in. Once we had established basic levels of electronic mail, we found that it would be helpful to group together on issues of common interest.
Newsgroups or bulletin boards enable people to put up electronic messages on a computer to which the public have access - rather like putting up a poster on a wall in town, and to which anyone else coming across it can respond. It developed the idea of a public access or shared computer as a means of extending our range of contacts. Because anyone can join in, and some do it for fun, whilst others take it more seriously, it meant that the serious points were often hidden amongst a lot of casual exchanges.
These are a bit like the club in town. The list "owner" will receive messages from those who have joined up and will either automatically bounce the message to all the other subscribers, or will moderate the list, and send only those messages which are thought to be important enough. By restricting the range of users, the information providers can have a clearer idea of their audience, and this may result in the communication being more focussed.
The major difficulty with newsgroups and mailing lists is that once you have subscribed, you are then listed, publicly or otherwise, as a person who wishes to receive communications of that sort. Apart from this you have no control over the number or the content of the messages which may be sent to you. Many have experienced the frustrations of arriving at the office to find dozens of email messages which have been bounced to them from the list. You then have to decide whether to look at them all, and when you have done so, whether to save them, and whether / where to file them.
This style of communication can be characterised as "pushy". Once you put a message into the system it is pushed out to all the subscribers who each have to determine relevance, use and what next to do with it. It is inefficient in that it generates a great deal of network traffic which might simply result in large numbers of people going through the messages and deleting them without reading them. The messages may well arrive with the recipient when it is not convenient for them to go through them and thus distract them from other tasks. It is also inefficient in that each subscriber is responsible for developing and maintaining their own information or filing system, and figuring out how this new information fits in with that. Many people, of course, do not have any system, and these messages add further to the already existing clutter.
The alternative system could mean that messages could be received at the central location, and instead of being bounced to others, they could be evaluated, sorted and stored. It is then up to the user to decide when they would like to go to the central store, and when there, they only have to look under the categories or sub-categories of particular interest. They also know that they only have to keep a note of the reference to important items, not the item itself, as they can always go back to look at the copy at the central location. Under this system, the user "pulls" information across the network on the basis of their own interests and understanding of what the document may contain. They may well, of course, end up looking at some items which turn out to be disappointing, but it is unlikely that the pullers will generate as much traffic as the pushers. So on this approach, the user really has to keep nothing more than a list or index of useful items, and can leave it to the central store to organise the rest. We should just add that the same principles apply whether you are thinking of the central store as being the administrative office of your department, or university, filing reports of meetings, or new publications, or the secretariat of the international research centre based in New York or Hong Kong filing copies of important research data. The point to remember is that somebody else can do the work and you can just go and look at the good bits.
As a development of this, some people might well develop special roles as good listers or pointers to interesting material found elsewhere. It is not that they actually store the information themselves, but that they know where to find it. By setting up their list of goodies on the internet, and because I have come to trust their judgement on these issues, I could, by going to their listing first, pick up more quickly on the material I want - just as you learn to trust a good librarian or research assistant. UniServe-LAW will be working with the university law librarians to find such nuggets of gold around the INTERNET, and to make these more easily available to those who do not have the time to go looking for them themselves.
The major difficulty, until recently, was that although one could receive these email messages from other computers, using the common TCP/IP protocols, the computers could not look directly at the documents on other incompatible systems. A PC based computer could not look at the information which you had set up on the public area of your Apple or Unix server. With the development of the Mosaic program from NCSA - the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications in the USA, all this changed and the enjoyable cycle path became the superhighway. Mosaic was a "client program" which would be installed on your desktop computer (the client) and which enabled your computer to then read / translate documents off any server - whether it was otherwise compatible with your computer or not. If we bear in mind that any computer can be set up as a "server" - that is, enabled to provide public or group access to the information on the computer's hard drive, then Pcs could now read information off Apple or Unix servers across the network, or vice versa.
Whilst some people had been working at the level of networking the computer systems, others had been working on the idea of networking the information which the computers contained. For example, if you could have a table of contents, or indeed, any listing of information, would it not be useful to have the computer link that item with the substance to which it refers, so that when you click on the item, you automatically go to the other end of the link. Footnote numbers could be linked to their references, complex terms could be linked to further information about them. Indeed, this is what you get in modern computer systems, where the list of items which appears under the "help" file, is linked to the explanations of those terms.
At this stage, we can begin to see that this type of interlinking can have enormous educational benefits. Reading lists can be linked to the introductory explanations to which they refer - and they in turn can be linked to more detailed books or case studies on those topics. The user can now dip into or investigate the materials in a way which is appropriate to their level of understanding.
Hypertexting programs have become quite sophisticated and enable the user to backtrack, look at histories of their progress to date, and to edit those histories for future reference. They can also engage in full-text searching of the databases and build up complex search strategies. They can also execute personalised standard searches so that whenever you go to look at the database, you will be given notice of any items relevant to your area, which have been added to the database since your last search.
What we now need to do is to combine this interlinking - known as hypertexting - with networking to facilitate the emergence of new ways of working.
Hypertext was initially used to establish links within a document, or between documents on the same computer. However, with the emergence of Mosaic and Netscape, it not only became possible to look at information on another computer, but also to establish an automatic link between two computers. This means that a person can build up a list of useful files or documents on a computer, and link each of these items automatically to the files to which they refer, and which may be on a range of computers, both at home and abroad. All someone has to do to call up the file is to click the cursor on it. At the present moment, because the interlinking depends on using software installed on the client machine, and has to view documents off a range of platforms, it works rather better if the documents are set up in a simpler manner than is the case with hypertext systems operating in local mode.
At the present time, most of the interlinking taking place on the INTERNET is between lists of documents, and the documents to which they refer. But as the range of material available on public access servers increases, the interlinking will become more sophisticated. If teaching materials, books and articles and the full text of cases and legislation become available in this way, then the teaching materials can become much more sophisticated. By clicking on the case names in lecture notes, the reader could pick up cases from the SCALE[3] database, or - if publishers had their materials online - they could go straight to the relevant section of the book or article. Footnotes would become "live" references to the sources to which they refer.
Whilst at this stage we are relieved of the problem which we referred to earlier - that of being sent unwanted information - someone could still have the problem of having to sift through vast quantities of information and they could also have to find out how to build links to the useful information which they find.
Really what we need is someone to:
• sort through the information to separate that which has lasting value from that which is of passing interest, and order the information into useful topic headings;
• help to establish links to that information which is found to be useful;
• encourage people to make their information available in this manner so that it can be accessed from the office or home, rather than running off to the bookshops, inter-library loans, or having to send forms off for it.
Because so many people find it to be a frustrating and time wasting experience to try and access relevant and useful information across the network, the Government, together with the Australian National University, have invested significant sums of money to try to turn the promise of the INTERNET into a reality. The idea is that each discipline area could develop its own central clearing house which would act as an information sorter and provider. In turn, the clearing houses would be supported by a coordinating centre which would provide them with support which is not discipline specific.
The Committe for the Advancement of University Teaching (CAUT), which is a committee of the Department of Education, Employment and Training, announced that the Coordinating Centre and the Law Clearing House would be established at the ANU. CAUT funding has been around $350,000, with ANU funding of around $0.5m. The ANU has now established the Centre for Networked Information and Publishing (CNIP) which will provide the infrastructure for these initiatives. We think that it is important that the word “publishing” has been included in the title. We will have more to say on this shortly.
In this section we table a few issues for discussion about the possible roles which UniServe-LAW could seek to fulfil. We also invite contributions to that discussion from all potential providers and users of information which such a Clearing House might provide. We would also like to hear from those who have developed clearing houses in other disciplines and in other countries so that we may learn from their experiences.
The Centre, which was established by the ANU in 1994, provides (amongst its other duties) general programming and administrative support to both UniServe and UniServe-LAW. It maintains a DEC Alpha server with 126mb RAM and 20 gigabytes of hard drive specially arranged (in a RAID 5 array) to provide a good level of security, and speedy access to the information. It is necessary to take the server off-line for approximately one hour per week to enable updating of software and other maintenance.
The National Coordinating Centre is to assist all of the Australian disciplinary clearing houses. At present they are set up in science, engineering, social science, medicine and the humanities, but more will follow fairly soon. Its role is to publish information which is of general interest in the area of teaching and learning, and which relates to the work of all the clearing houses. General information on electronic publishing would be an obvious example. It will also advise on how to find useful internet training materials, how to access the internet, how to set up documents on the internet, how to obtain software to assist in those, and other teaching and learning tasks. If necessary, it will develop its own software. It is currently developing a forms interface to enable users to create their own forms. It is thought that this might well assist academics in obtaining feedback about their own courses or initiatives, especially as it is hoped that the data obtained in this way will be capable of being processed automatically. The Coordinating Centre might also be a useful source of advice for those contemplating the setting up of their own clearing houses in other areas, or perhaps engaged in similar tasks within each university.
Its role is to make available administrative, research and teaching materials in new and interesting ways so as to improve academic and student performance. In this way we hope to facilitate access to the most up to date information, and to ensure, as far as possible, that it is both set up and delivered without charge to either the information providers, or to the users of that information.
UniServe-LAW will attempt to deal with the sense of frustration experienced by internet users, which we spoke of earlier, by pointing to useful sources of legal information being held elsewhere, as well as by setting up its own information which is not available from other sources.
UniServe-LAW has undertaken its own research to ascertain the most efficient means of setting up information in both local hypertext and network hypertext formats. In essence, both forms depend on instructions being hidden in the text, so that the computer knows what to do when appropriate words are clicked. The standard format for network links is to set the document up in “html” - "hypertext markup language".
UniServe-LAW is now in a position to be able to take information in most word-processed formats and to automatically convert it into either of these two outputs. It is preferable if the information which we are provided with has been properly laid out with the use of style sheets, but if this is not possible, we can still process the information satisfactorily. This means that we can take files from information providers, and set it up for them, using our server, on the World Wide Web. They can then look at it and make any suggestions for change. In assisting faculties and research centres in this way, we do not intend to take any proprietory interest in their material. If any department wishes to have the material set up on their own local server as well, we would be quite happy to copy back the marked up version to them. We might also be able to send them back a copy of the material marked up with the local version of the hypertext so that they can use this more sophisticated version of the materials for their own local use. Otherwise the material, although set up on the UniServe server will appear exactly the same as if it were being delivered from the department’s own server.
We hope that we will develop a relationship with our information providers such that we can make helpful suggestions about how they might most usefully use style-sheets and benefit from software and other resources available so as to make the process more efficient.
There is a strong individualistic element in many academics and they are often reluctant to part with their materials or ideas until they are formally published. In many ways this is understandable. Publication is the means by which we lay claim to the ideas - very important for self esteem, public recognition, promotion and royalties. If others come across those ideas prior to publication, they can then publish them just as easily as we can, and thus claim the fame for them. Some people clearly think that the idea of a “clearing house” fails to recognise this rational self interest of researchers. It is important to appreciate that this is not the case. Publication with UniServe-LAW is a publication, just as much as any book or article. Indeed, it is in many respects considerably better than hard copy publication - and we will look at the reasons for this shortly. Placing the material on the UniServe-LAW server constitutes that act of publication. It is true that universities may not be sure where they stand at present in terms of recognising electronic publications for promotions. We believe that in a very short time, academics will compete to have their materials placed on “prestigious” servers, just as they now compete to have their materials on the lists of “prestigious” publishing houses.
In the meantime, it is also important to recognise that the whole point of publishing is to share ideas, and perhaps influence others. UniServe-LAW wishes to assist with both these aspects of the academic endeavour. Whilst it can fulfil most of the other criteria rather better than hard copy publication, what it cannot do is provide financial reward for the materials which it publishes. It has to be said that those involved in the development of CNIP, and UniServe and UniServe-LAW, whilst respecting these instincts in others, have had all such natural instincts removed entirely from them. As the names imply, their objective now is to "serve" others. We operate under the following principle:
When you're happy - we're happy. What is good for you is good for us.
It is important to remember that our objective is to be of service to all universities and related institutions, and to ensure that the level of skills and availability of resources is developed to the maximum extent possible. Whilst competition may well be a very healthy instinct in appropriate contexts, it is of limited applicability in the provision of basic services. It is inefficient for each department or faculty or university to struggle over the same basic issues, especially if they all come up with different and incompatible answers. It makes sense to collaborate over some issues, so that our competitive instincts might be more finely honed for those contexts in which they are more appropriate. Departments may well benefit from the use of word processors and information systems, but do not need nor have the resources to develop their own. If we had developed information systems in the same way in which Australia has "developed" its railway infrastructure, all information flows would stop at state boundaries.
Determining where we stand on the sharing, competitive spectrum in relation to various issues will be crucial in determining the extent to which the Australian institutions as a whole are able to compete on the international stage. So, the idea is that we can collaborate at one level in order to become more competitive at another. We also feel that collaboration on the issues with which we are concerned will have a positive impact on faculty budgets as we will explain shortly.
We recognise that at this stage, many people are wary of the potential loss to them of setting up their intellectual property on the internet. We can of course wax lyrical about the role of academics, and their honesty and integrity etc, but the reality is that one of the first and most important issues raised when discussing this prospect with people within the academic environment is, "why should we? We have everything to lose and nothing to gain". It is important to recognise this concern and deal carefully with the reasons for it.
Without doubt the major concern is that of plagiarism. If academics have invested considerable time in the development of teaching materials, they feel that by exposing them to others on the internet, those others will simply take them and use them without ackowledgement. Students, it is said, could also copy materials placed on the net and include them in their essays without acknowledgement. Others will then have as good materials as the author, and will unfairly get the recognition for developing them. All loss - no gain - no way - is the common refrain. The reply to this is in two parts:
1. The very public nature of the internet, is in fact one of its safeguards. I could, of course, photocopy chapters of a book and pass them off as my own, although if inclined to dishonesty of this sort, it might be more rational to use an obscure journal article. But apart from being illegal and immoral (just as it would be with internet materials) - it would also be foolish. The material published on the internet will have very high visibility. Students will be major users of internet materials, and will quickly recognise their lecture notes, if they appear on the internet under another name. So too, lecturers would recognise such material if it appeared in a student essay without attribution.
2. Well, it could be argued, if this form of publication really takes off, then perhaps there would be too much material around for me to be able to make these comparisons - just as it is very difficult to cover the range of books and articles in hard copy at present. This is where internet or electronic publishing has distinct advantages. With the computer based materials, we have the ability to do full text searching. This means that once I type in any words or combinations of words and expressions, I can immediately find out any similar occurences in the entire data base. Finding plagiarism in hard copy is a matter of coincidence and good or bad luck, depending on how you look at it. With electronic materials it is a matter of a second or two and is very reliable.
All we expect is that the original author will get proper recognition for their hard work by appropriate acknowledgement of their authorship. In fact, this argument can now be turned around. If a failure to acknowledge authorship can more easily be detected with machine readable materials, then it is less likely to occur. This means that even without extending the readership, as is bound to happen with electronic materials, increased citations may well occur. Far from enabling dishonesty to succeed, networked materials are more likely to keep people honest.
It has to be said, of course, that there is nothing wrong in using materials developed or written by others - we do it all the time. Indeed, the whole point of publishing is to enable others to refer to, and use and be influenced by our ideas. The CAUT initiative is to facilitate precisely this activity. When a person first starts teaching in a new area, they had to spend much of the first year or two generating the basic set of lecture notes. If those materials had been available in the electronic format which they wished to use, they would have been very happy to put pointers to them from their notes, and spend more of their time in developing particular issues of special interest to themselves or their students - or to do their own particular gloss on those materials. The additional work they do in this way, might itself be worth putting up to complement the other material which is already available.
Of course it is true that a lazy lecturer might just make use of the notes of others without adding anything of their own - but as we have explained, it would be very foolish to use internet materials without acknowledging their source - the students, or one's colleagues could trace the source in an instant.
The other possibility is that the lazy lecturer could use the materials after having re-worked them. But this would make it difficult to relate the reworked materials to their original source, and thus would make it difficult to take advantage of updates of the original source materials. The more rational strategy would be to actually use the orignal source and to supplement it wiith one's own gloss or commentary on it, linked directly to those sources - and others. The job of the lecturer would now be more to make interesting selections and connections from and between the wide range of source materials available - and then to add some of their own.
It could be argued that it is much easier to use materials already in existence than to write them oneself. If so, faculties could appoint staff at more junior levels and still present good lecture notes and materials by pulling them off the net. If this is done with appropriate acknowledgements, then it is not different from using a text book to teach with. Authors of text books are rightly held in higher regard than those who merely use them. If a faculty consists of users but not authors, then they might well be able to teach a law degree, but will not be recognised as a faculty where appropriate research and development of materials takes place. Again, the idea that academics will do themselves out of a job by publishing their materials in this way fails to recognise the fact that publishing books (and electronic materials) in this medium will enhance reputations - not diminish them, because of the increased exposure which they can receive in this way. If the material deals with issues which are in a process of change, then it may also increase the demands for the next version. Given the speed at which change takes place, such authors will continue to be in high demand. In fact, because electronic materials can be updated as often as is desired, rather than waiting until the next run of books can be put through, it will be advisable for users to check appropriate sources on a regular basis.
In the existing state of publishing, academics are as often as not rewarded for quantity as much as quality. We can look at a great list of publications on a curriculum vitae, but never have the chance to go and look at them. No doubt, with publications spread about journals all over the world, and each article having to be of a certain length, the individual publishing record is not only fragmented, but undoubtedly longer than it might otherwise be. With networked publishing and the ability to update already published work, the individual can provide instant access to the whole of their publishing record, and the focus could well return to the significance of the contribution as a whole.
Traditionally, academics have not made large sums of money from publishing their work. There have been the exceptions, of course, but by and large we do not get paid for publishing academic articles, and are paid relatively small proportions of the money which is made from book sales. It should be made clear that the aim of UniServe-LAW is to make materials available without charge. It follows, therefore, that if we are not generating income from sales, we will not be paying people to publish. Some people will find this a sufficient reason not to make their materials available in this way. Although we hasten to point out that there will undoubtedly be links from the free-access clearing house to the chargeable databases. Others will see the clearing house as a very desirable way to disseminate their ideas and engage in debate and discussion with others, and will value the fact that the materials will be accessed without charge. But even those who wish to publish for money, will appreciate the role which a free-access clearing house might play. The existing law publishers, for example, who clearly wish to publish for payment, might find it to be very useful to have their catalogues, and details of new books available in the free access clearing house, or have pointers to their own home pages from there. They, or their authors might well wish to include tables of contents or abstracts of books, and possibly sample chapters.
This aspect of the role of UniServe-LAW can be expected to be a continuing role. To those who would say that it will only be free for a while, and then it will start charging, the answer must be that even those who are involved in charging areas, will have a continued interest in supporting the free access area.
We want to make it clear that the information providers are at all times in control of the information which is provided. Whilst we seek to assist law schools and research centres by providing ideas and advice, we do not seek to control the design, or content of those materials. Indeed, we hope that different places will seek to be innovative with regard to both design and content, and develop disinctive characters for their sites. Whilst we see our role as being to encourage these initiatives, we would like the information providers to take as much control over the materials as they feel comfortable with. In the early stages, it might be enough for people to send us discs and to leave the setting up of the materials to us. But as people become more aware of the possibilities, they might wish to request that we do it one way as opposed to another. Then, as they develop their own web sites, either within their departments or within their universities, they might wish to have their own material on them and we would be very happy to copy the information back to their web site.
The day might well come when the information provider would like to set up their own materials without having it done by UniServe-LAW. When this happens, we might seek an agreement to "mirror" the local site on the clearing house. This means that on a daily or weekly basis the amended files on the clearing house site are updated on the local site. If the files are actually set up by the local web site then mirroring involves copying their updates to the clearing house site. Either way, for free access and public access information, it can only be beneficial to have it in two separate locations. Should one be unavailable for any reason, the other can provide an alternative. By spreading the load as demand increases, it also avoids any potential bottlenecks. Given the size and speed of the machines which are being used as our network servers, some might find that they can achieve faster delivery of material in this way.
As we have already suggested, the enterprise in which Univserve-LAW is engaged, may well prove to be complementary to that of the commercial publishers. The academic community benefits by being kept well informed of new publications in their area of interest, and this is likely to be of direct benefit to the publishers. Whilst we do not intend to charge information providers or users of the system, it might well be sensible to charge commercial interests who wish to set up materials through the clearing house. This is not different in principle to the way in which publishers may sponsor conferences with a view to achieving better publicity.
The commercial publishers have already begun to make their materials available in machine readable forms, although much of this work presently involves CD ROM distribution. Regrettably, some of the materials being made available in CD ROM format, are more expensive than their hard copy versions. Given the considerable reduction in production costs in this form of production, this approach seems hard to justify. As a marketing strategy, it is bound to be couter productive, and discourage many people from taking advantage of this new medium. In many ways, this form of distribution is a closer analogue to the distribution of books than to networked delivery, and whilst CDs can of course be accessed through networked systems, they do not allow for hypertext links directly into the materials. If commercial publishers were to make their materials available through servers linked into the network, then the more sophisticated interlinking directly into the source materials becomes possible. But would commercial publishers find this an attractive option?
A decision on a new book or a new edition of a book has to have regard to its profitiability. Given the capital investment necessary, and the risks involved, it is perhaps surprising that so many books get published. Whether a new edition is issued can have as much to do with the fact that the publisher overproduced on the previous run, as opposed to the academic or student need for a new one. Profitability depends on the return from book sales being greater than the cost of getting the books to market - which is much more difficult if the reader base is more widespread. A few readers here, and a few in the US and Europe would not do - because of the transmission costs involved. This is closer to the “pushy” style of communication which we referred to earlier. The commissioning editor decides upon the content of the book maybe a year or more before it is to be used - the marketing editor will decide where / how to make them available. Each of these decisions involves an element of risk, and - being human - they may as often as not prove to be wrong. How many times are we delayed from accessing or using a book on a course because sufficient numbers of them are not in the right places at the right times?
At the present moment, the universities are like a microcosm of Australia as a whole. They generate valuable and scarce resources (manuscripts) which they export (to commercial publishers). They then reimport them at enormous expense and often have little control over the end product which is served up to them. In the new environment, the universities actually have greater skills in electronic publishing than many of the commercial publishers, who have scarcely begun to look at the issue. It they were to take their manuscripts, and publish them through the network which they have already established, they would, by marketing their own materials, generate an income almost too big to contemplate. In the process, they would add considerable value to the materials by interlinking them with each other. The return to individual academics could be considerably greater, and the costs to students significantly less. Research centres could generate significant funding by charging for access to their research materials. They could either do this directly or in collaboration with a network publisher.
It will not be long before the universities realise that they should mount a direct challenge to the commercial publishers; given that they generate the raw material in the form of manuscripts from within the university environment. At the same time, they (academics and students) provide the main market for the finished product - the books which they buy at great expense. Now, for the first time they actually have the delivery system for electronic publication - the INTERNET. It would now make good sense for the universities to publish their own materials. We could reduce the cost to students, and give them much more control over what they have by way of hard copy. We could also give academics better returns than they get at present.
The impending threat to existing commercial publishers may well come sooner than they think. After all, we do not need to take the whole of their existing market. Many of the lines which they produce are only marginally profitable. If electronic publishing simply reduces the sales of books by a small amount, many existing titles would go from marginally profitable, to loss-making. The impact on the publishers would be disastrous, and put at risk the remainder of their titles. University publishing would not only generate substantial income for the universities, but give them greater security and choice with regard to access to materials.
1. Costs shift from distribution to access Unlike hard copy publishing, once the capital costs of the infrastructure have been set up, (the server, and access to the network) the additional costs of distribution are minimal. The elimination of this cost / risk factor means that a number of alternative strategies can develop which were not previously possible. The focus of the publishers can now shift away from making the right decision long in advance, to ensuring that they have the most useful information currently online. This means that certain materials would now become available in networked publication, which might not have been previously available.
1.1 volatile materials
In preparing manuscripts for publication, there is often a temptation to exclude that information which only has a short shelf life. Quickly changing information might well be of value to others, but it might cause a book to be seen as dated, or require publishers to produce shorter print runs, and thus more frequent editions than is convenient or profitable for them or their authors. So information which is likely to change quickly may either be excluded or expressed in more general terms, so as to retain the currency of the book for its anticipated life.
2. Low turnover materials - quantity - detail So too with detailed statistical information, or specific information which may be of great importance to small groups. This is often excluded because it would mean that the book would not have sufficiently broad appeal to make it cost effective to produce.
With these new forms of publication, It now becomes feasible to distribute intellectually valuable materials which might not have the sort of high turnovers which are required for profitability. In a sense, the book and the article, all require a certain quantity of information to be available, before a publishable unit has been created. With electronic publication this is not an issue. If information is deemed to be useful or interesting, it can be published on the network. Just a paragraph or a page can sometimes be of greater use to people struggling with a problem, than 20 or 30 pages on the same issue. Also, the information can be published at whatever level of detail is deemed appropriate to the people working in the field. It does not have to be diluted or generalised to obtain a sufficiently large share of readers. In effect, this means that network publishers are not put off by greater quantities of information being available. What has been impossible to distribute in hard copy, because of its quantity and cost, can easily be made available online. Very useful for those that need it - no inconvenience for those that do not.
3. The future of books and articles? In the electronic environment, we would no longer have to hold back the updates of books and articles until we have accumulated sufficient numbers of them to go to a new edition or a new version. In fact, it might well be the case that the category of the book and the article will prove to be of little continuing use here. We will come to think more of the database. Any new cases or developments can be integrated into the database as soon as they occur. In effect the universities will be able to publish the results of their research directly to those who wish to receive them, without having to be mediated through the commercialisation of their research by the publishers. This will not mean of course that these publications will be without commercial value, or that the universities will be unaware of that or be unable to exploit it. On the contrary, the universities are probably more capable of publishing in this medium than most of the current book publishers.
4. What about the hard copy? It has to be accepted that for the forseeable future, and maybe forever, people will, at some stage, wish to read information in a durable and mobile medium. At present this is a paper medium, which many people would rightly be unwilling to give up. In the new environment there would be major differences in the way in which this product is created. Essentially, information would be distributed electronically, and printed locally. With high quality printers attached to the network, it is possible to print 300 pages in a few minutes. Personalised covers can be attached, and the whole thing bound. On current pricings this would cost the user around $12, and they would have a product which is very comparable with the presently available books. The main difference is that its content would have been determined by the user, and not some publisher a year or two before. It is true to say that there are not too many of these high quality, high speed printers around. In the next few years there will be many more, and it seems that they may well be franchised in the way in which the colour printer shops are at present. Walk in off the street, pull down the information you want off the network. Have it printed and bound on the spot, and then go on your way, book in hand. With the university bookshops saying that they will have to move more in the direction of popular fiction, they may not appreciate that in a year or two this might be all that they will have to distribute.
5. Logging accesses to materials Another important advantage of computer based materials is that the system can be set up to provide useful information about the users of the materials. UniServe-LAW can provide statistics to the providers of information to let them see the breakdown of users by country, and domain within that country. This can help the information provider by guiding them in the focussing of their further public relations activitites. They may find it helpful to provide further information in the areas where they know they have users of their information. Equally, they might wish to stimulate activity in areas where at present there is very little. Purchasing a book gives us little information about its subsequent use. Logging accesses to files will not tell us if the information is actually used or read, of course, but it will tell us how often the file is opened which we may infer is related to the question of use or interest.
6. Benefits of caching - reduced costs Due to changes which AARNET is introducing, users will be charged for information which is drawn in from overseas. These charges are now being put into place and may make it more cost effective to access materials through UniServe-LAW. When overseas material is accessed through us, we provide an automatic caching facility. This means that the material is automatically copied to the cache (backup store) on arrival. When we receive a request for material from overseas, we check to see if it is on the cache. If it is, then we send a brief request to the source to check the current date and time stamp for this material. If it is the same as the copy on our cache, then the material is delivered directly from the cache, thus avoiding any costs for further importation charges of this material
1. To authors Information placed with UniServe-LAW will be immediately accessible both nationally and internationally, so providing the opportunity for wider circulation than with standard hard copy journals and books - a greater capacity for talent to be recognised. Being "known", or having one's ideas recognised is often more important to an academic than the small sums of money gained through traditional publishing. However, this does not mean that academics will have to give up hope of financial returns for their publishing efforts. On the contrary - we already have chargeable databases on the INTERNET, and no reason in principle why academics should not get in on the act. We have every expectation that the success of UniServe-LAW will hasten the demand for chargeable academic databases. There is much talk these days about “the problems of copyright” and the complex mechanisms which may be required to enforce the charging provisions. But if the changes we envisage come about, many of these problems will be circumvented. The publisher makes one annual charge to the educational institution for authorised access to the database for its staff and students. The need to monitor the copying of individual books and articles will disappear overnight, and with it the vast industry and expense which this process involves. If the changes we envisage come to pass, it is likely that contributors may well be reimbursed on the basis of their overall value to the system, rather than being reimbursed on a book by book basis as at present. A system which we might note seems to work tolerably well with sports stars and many others.
2. To research centres At present, some research centres such as the Centre for Legal Education in Sydney, generate income through the sale of publications such as their directory of articles on education. They had a not unreasonable fear that they may lose this income if they were to place those materials on the UniServe-LAW server. Looked at in isolation, this is possibly true. However, the compensating advantage is that they may at the same time be able to generate greater awareness of their wider research activities, and so generate interest in their other activities, or in many of their other publications. This could well lead to increased sales or even increased research income.
Given that there is at present a great deal of ignorance and uncertainty about the whole nature of electronic publishing, it seems to us that people are less likely to provide materials whilst feeling the sort of insecurities which we have already discussed. Whilst we feel that many of the fears will, in the long run, prove to be unfounded, we appreciate that they will remain whilst people are unfamiliar with what the process involves. If we are then to move quickly towards a full electronic publishing environment, it seems to us that it should take place in two stages. We should deal first with what may be regarded as “non-contentious” materials. By this we mean the sort of materials which people are happy to distribute as freely as possible. Most faculties and research centres are keen to circulate staff profiles, details about the courses which they offer, information with regard to their publications and how they may be obtained, even if they are not willing to set up the actual publications themselves. This non-contentious material may be broadly described as factual information - the what where and how stuff. We believe that if we focus on this type of material in the early stages, this will provide sufficient reason for many people to begin using the database and to familarise themselves with what it contains.
The issue of the more problematic materials - books, articles and teaching materials - can then be taken up after this preliminary round of familiarisation has taken place. In the meantime, there will be some brave souls who will be willing to give it a go, and we will have some of these materials on which we can work to provide the basis for the demonstration database - to show how the interlinking can work both internally and between these materials and other databases.
1. We invite readers to send copies of machine readable versions of your publications which contain course details, research profiles, or information which you consider to be most significant. Send one disc copy together with one printed copy to the executive officer of UniServe-LAW together with a letter requesting that this material be set up for WWW access.
2. We also suggest that Law Schools appoint a person in the faculty, department or research centre to take responsibility for online publications, and to be the principal point of contact with UniServe-LAW.
Develop staff awareness of this form of publication especially for teaching materials. Give some thought to the way in which you would like your “online” profile to be developed. Let UniServe-LAW know what you think of these proposals, and of other people and organisations which you think we should be in touch with and of materials which you think should be made available.
At present the Management group comprises:
Dr Bob Moles, Academic Director, UniServe-LAW
Professor Eugene Clark, University of Canberra and editor Journal of Law and Information Science
David Grainger, Director, SCALE, Attorney General’s Dept, Robert Garran Offices, Barton, ACT
Dr Malcolm Pettigrove, Centre for Educational Development and Academic Methods, ANU
Marlene LeBrun, Senior Lecturer in Law, Griffith University
Richard Johnstone, Senior Lecturer in Law, Melbourne University Law School
Plans are to have a representative from each State and Territory and expressions of interest are welcome.
At its most fundamental level, UniServe-LAW will serve as a clearing house to provide basic information about Australian and New Zealand Law Schools, Research Centres, other legally relevant bodies (law societies, reform and interest groups) which have information of use to the teaching and practice of law in Australia and New Zealand.
Presently, this information is shared in paper form only and its dissemination has grown increasingly expensive and sporadic.. For those institutions without sufficient technical assistance, UniServe-LAW can offer the capacity to help set up a home page on the World Wide Web and convert materials into html format.
Each information provider will determine the range of information which they would like to make available for public access, but would presumably wish to include the sort of information which is already publicly available in other ways (but without the costs and difficulties involved with the distribution of this information as paper copy). This might include: addresses, telephone, fax nos and email addresses of those holding office such as the Dean, or Head, and those involved with student admissions, research, technical support etc including provision for “click access” to those people. By “click acccess” we mean that by clicking on a person’s name, a return email box can be presented to the user. After typing in the appropriate message, it is automatically sent to the person concerned.
Other information which may be included may relate to courses offered, eligibility criteria and modes of delivery, specialist programs, and range of support available. Staff lists with contact details together with details of current teaching and research interests, and incorporating abstracts of books and articles and, where possible, full text of materials. Also welcome is information about research centres and other specialist activities, as well as publications, and newsletters, including alumni publications, details of conferences, seminars and visiting speakers.
Presently, much of this information is shared in paper form only and its dissemination has grown increasingly expensive and sporadic. If and when academics receive their copy, they have to decide what to do with it. Only the most efficient of us are sufficiently well organised to ensure that all of this is filed appropriately when received, and even if we are careful to do this, we cannot be sure that we have the full range of information available. So if we want to know which conferences or seminars are coming up on a particular topic, or at a particular time, or in a particular place, we cannot be sure that we have all of the appropriate information available to enable us to make the best choice.
If you want to offer a new course on a particular topic, it might be useful to have a look at the catalogues and handbooks of other law schools in Australia and New Zealand as well as get pointers to overseas offerings, to see how this issue has been tackled in other places. Indeed you may well benefit by being able to look at the actual teaching materials themselves. If you would find this information to be useful to you as an academic, then it would not be hard to imagine that it would also be useful to students when thinking about which institution to study at. You would also be able to check staff profiles to find out how to get into touch with other academics who are presently offering the same course in other law schools. UniServe-LAW can also provide text searching facilities to enable searches to connect you with discussion lists, special research centres, and other sources which are available on the Web.
For those institutions without sufficient technical assistance, UniServe-LAW can offer to set up a home page on the World Wide Web and convert materials into the appropriate formats.
Just to take one example, let's assume that you are about to offer a course in Alternative Dispute Resolution. Through UniServe-LAW you would be able to access the catalogues/handbooks of every law school in Australia as well as get pointers to overseas offerings. You would also be able to check staff profiles to find out how to get into touch with other academics who are presently offering the same course in other law schools. As the clearing house database becomes more sophisticated, one would further envisage a key word search connecting you with discussion lists, special research centres, and other ADR sources which available on the Web.
This example also illustrates the important point that unlike a traditional book format, such databases are interactive and highly flexible; communication flows both ways. Through email correspondence, potential students can access information about courses, ask questions, etc.
Not only could UniServe-LAW point to other available sources, it can also help to establish links with other groups involved with law and legal education. Law schools and those offering pre-admission legal training need to look to new avenues of support and to form partnerships with other universities and with industry. A law clearing house could help to forge these important links.
UniServe-LAW has already established collaborative arrangements with a number of groups. We are willing to extend these collaborative arrangements to other groups or interests, so long as the interests and goals of UniServe-LAW, our information providers and the users of our information are not compromised.
We hope to be working in close collaboration with:
• ALTA - The Australasian Law Teachers Association
• ALII - the Australasian Legal Information Institute - which will be developing a database of primary legal materials.
• The Centre for Legal Education which provides support to the committee of law school deans, and engages in research into educational issues.
• The Attorney General’s Dept, SCALE database contains the full text of cases and legislation.
• Softlaw Corp Pty Ltd are the developers of the hypertexting and conversion software used by UniServe-LAW.
To take one specific example of how UniServe-LAW could work with such organisations, consider ALTA. Presently, most Australian law academics are members of ALTA. Members of ALTA are further divided into various subject interests groups such as Consumer Law, Legal Education, Intellectual Property and so on. Unfortunately, because of monetary and time restrictions as well as competing specialist conferences, many of the ALTA interest groups tend to be comparatively inactive outside of the annual conference.
One possible scenario for UniServe-LAW is to use the technical facilities of a clearing house to enhance ALTA interest group activities. UniServe-LAW, for example, could establish a home page for ALTA with separate home pages for interest group convenors. Through this vehicle a common email address could be utilised through which members in the interests group regularly and easily communicate with each other.
The convenors could also act as referees ensuring that quality legal educational materials (course outlines, teaching materials, discussion papers, articles about teaching, etc) become available to the whole group and the wider legal education community. The same technology can be utilised to have regular meetings, on-line conferences and on-going projects which would do much to extend legal education beyond the boundaries of a single institution.
An ALTA organisation operating through UniServe-LAW could also more readily establish contacts and links with colleagues in the UK, USA, Canada and other countries. The possibilities are truly limited only by our imaginations and the willingness to be involved of organisations such as ALTA and our academic colleagues generally .
A major focus of an educational clearing house in law must be on the provision of teaching materials and the promotion and enhancement of quality legal education. Accordingly, UniServe-LAW could provide a vehicle to stimulate discussion and refinement of thinking about lawyers' skills and values, could develop modes of instruction, course materials, problems, and methods of assessment to assist law schools to teach skills and values more effectively. It could serve as a clearing house of model curricula, instructional materials and teacher training. It could also serve the need for continuing legal education. In such ways, the law clearing house would help develop an educational continuum for all lawyers which could support their professional development throughout their careers in law. UniServe-LAW could also bring together in one place many of the services which support legal education.
It follows from what we have said that we seek to include actual teaching materials where possible. Given that we now have the capacity to structure them in interesting local “hypertext” formats which we may be able to return to you on disc for your local use, as well as to set them up on the world wide web, we feel that you would be able to spend more time doing what you are good at - producing those materials. We can spend more time doing what we are good at - presenting them electronically. We would like to be seen as a central repository for information concerning computer based teaching materials. Where the materials themselves cannot be included, then we would like to include as much detail as we can about them, and to be able to show a sample or preview of the materials which are available. Whilst we will not normally charge for information available through the clearing house, we can include charging details for information which is available from other sources. We can incorporate order forms, access details and charging information.
Legal education remains an area which is both under theorised and under researched. Thus, another important aspect of UniServe-LAW will be the promotion of research about legal education. This will involve putting into place refereeing and accreditation/validation procedures to ensure that the material provided is of uniformly high quality.
Because the Internet transcends national boundaries and spans the globe, one of the most exciting aspects about an electronic clearing house is the increased opportunities for international and comparative legal research. For example, given the increasing international focus of legal education and legal practice, research must be undertaken to diagnose the major functions exercised by transnational lawyers and how law schools and pre and post admission legal educators can best inculcate such skills.[4] Unfortunately, to date, little research of this kind has been undertaken.
In a world which is becoming more inter-dependent, generic, cross-cultural skills will be at a premium. This means that legal educators at all levels will need to resist pressures to become too jurisdictionally bound. It also means that legal educators must determine how existing skills programs can facilitate the development of such generic skills while at the same time satisfying local admission requirements. In order properly to develop such programs, the linkages between law school educators, those involved in pre-admission legal education and the legal profession itself will become increasingly important. A law clearing house could play a central role in helping to create and nurture such linkages.
Research centres might wish to set up their own pointers to interesting internet materials available elsewhere. By including information about specialist research skills which are available, we may be able to assist with the obtaining of consultancies and other requests for research support.
UniServe-LAW can add value to material by internally hypertexting the submitted materials and providing additional links to other external sources - lecture materials can be linked to the full text of cases from SCALE if / when these become available. Improved access to resources whilst saving on expenditure on publications. We can include colour pictures, sound and video and we have special skills in dealing with images. We can include updated versions of previously published materials - online publications can become “living” documents. Users can provide immediate feedback to authors. The clearing house is FREE, instantly updateable, and immediately available to an international audience of millions, including potential students, staff members, publishers, government departments, the private sector and the public.Savings can be made on material for internal and external distribution, as well as postage and other handling charges.
UniServe-Law can provide access to the catalogues of Australian law publishers, and to tables of contents pages from Australian law journals. If you, or your department has an involvement in producing a journal, then send this information on to us. If you wish to include brief or extended abstracts of the articles, then please do so. This would enable academics to ensure that they have access to the latest editions as they become available. It also would enable publishers to provide more and better information about the publications which they offer. For example, tables of contents, sample chapters and hypertext links could do much to improve the flow and quality of information to potential users. This service may be provided on a chargeable basis or in return for publicity for UniServe-LAW. Multi-media providers could also provide online demonstrations of the latest technologies to enhance teaching and the administrative functions of law schools. If the Clearing House could make appropriate arrangements with journal publishers, we may be able to provide copies of articles to individuals in machine readable or hard copy formats on a chargeable basis.
The clearing house will seek to ensure that the information which it provides clearly indicates whether it has been subject to refereeing or validation procedures. Whilst there may be good reasons for facilitating access to non-refereed materials as well, it is also important to indicate which of its materials have been subject to the more formal process of peer review. For this reason we will seek to ensure that at least half the members of the clearing house management group will be specialists in educational development issues, and will have a special responsibility to coordinate this aspect of our work.
In our discussion of ALTA above, we mentioned that a major function of an educational clearing house must be the provision of teaching materials. While it is envisioned that some of these materials will be available free of charge, it is also possible, even likely, that the UniServe-LAW will use a hypertext format which will show you a sample of the materials available (provide a shopfront). The viewer is then provided with additional information and email address and other information about how to subscribe to that service.
Not only could a clearing house promote greater linkages between legal educators in undergraduate, pre-admission and post admission legal education, but it could also be utilised to enhance the linkages between primary, secondary and tertiary legal education. Institutional cooperation is required at all educational levels--primary, secondary, tertiary and continuing education-- to account for and reflect the reality that legal education is a lifelong process. Universities could use the services of UniServe-LAW to be able to build upon and in turn help support the work of secondary and primary schools in educating Australian citizens to live in the 'global village' of the Twenty-First Century. Legal educators at pre and post admission levels could be helped via UniServe-LAW to promote cooperation with law schools in building upon the skills and curriculum content of undergraduate legal education. Finally, legal firms and the profession generally could utilise the clearing house to offer continuing legal education which provide the life-long learning and re-learning necessary for a rapidly changing and increasingly global reality.[5]
Perhaps one of the most exciting prospects of an electronic clearing house is the possibility of student-centred activities in which students themselves can actively participate, assembling, manipulating and creating their own materials which can then be shared across institutions.[6] Also, just as Law Teachers Association activities can be facilitated and enhanced by the clearing house, so too can student activities be supported.
Another important role for an electronic legal clearing house is the advancement of research skills necessary to negotiate electronic commercial, informational and educational highways. UniServe-LAW could act as a consultant to law schools and academics who need help with new technology. It could also put people into contact with others who have prior experience in the designated area or who would like to participate in a joint project.
UniServe-LAW will also be able to assist with research or ordering of information or establish pointers and links to information available elsewhere, both in Australia and overseas.
An important implication for the legal profession and legal education, and one which also encourages an international perspective, is the push by the United States, Australia and other countries to include service negotiations as part of GATT negotiations.[7] Barriers to legal practice are likely to be reduced or come down, giving foreign lawyers access to and the right to compete in the market for legal services. These and related developments will lead to further internationalisation of the legal profession and the consequent demand on law schools to equip their students to strive and thrive in such an environment. Already these development are having a significant impact on the Australian legal system and legal practice. As business, people and data cross national borders and look to foreign markets, Australian law firms and increasingly Australian law schools have had to modify their practice to accommodate such demands. Indeed, many Australian firms and a few law schools themselves have established offices or linkages with counterparts in other countries, especially in the Asian region.
As the internationalisation trend continues, Australian lawyers and law academics are going to have increasing contacts with their counterparts in the Asian region than has been previously the case.[8] The availability, through a clearing house, of more internationally focused and comparative material, for example might help law students to address the following questions: 1) how should Australian law evolve to account for the new realities of globalisation; 2) what comparisons can be made between Australian law and that of other legal systems and what have we to learn from one another?; and 3) to what extent are global developments driving us towards harmonisation and a convergence of legal systems, and in some cases, perhaps an international system of governance?
Not only could UniServe-LAW promote the development of legal education at all levels, but the international linkages provided by the Internet could also promote a more international outlook in legal education and reflect international trends. Thus, an electronic clearing house in law and the linkages it can provide could help to enhance the teaching of course offerings such as international trade law, international finance, international dispute resolution, comparative law, international marketing law, Asian law, international taxation, international environment law, international human rights, intellectual property law, law and technology.
Through the creation of links and bringing together people and other resources, a law clearing house could play a pivotal role in helping law schools and the profession engage in such strategic planning and inter-institutional cooperation so that they will be better able to adjust to the pressures of internationalisation. Legal education institutions must also better utilise existing resources. One often neglected human resource is the significant number of overseas students who attend Australian Universities as well as lawyers from other countries who are working temporarily in Australian legal firms, industries or governments. In the Faculty of Business at RMIT, for example, a 'peer-pairing' program has successfully paired an Australian MBA student with one from overseas.[9] Follow-up evaluations show that both students profit from the inter-cultural experience.[10] Australian law schools should also tap the resources of its own law firms, many of which have established networks, especially in the Asia Pacific region. Again, a law clearing house could be instrumental in creating and fostering these important human networks.
Modern technology appears certain to extend greatly the walls of the traditional classroom. Satellite technology already exists to enable lectures to be transmitted around the world. The use of electronic mail and the Internet also have the potential to revolutionise legal teaching. Just to take one example, most students now have access to electronic mail and the Internet. Thus, it would be easy for a group of students studying contract law in Australia to team up with counterparts studying contract law in the US, UK, Canada, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Using the Vienna Convention, students could engage in a contract drafting exercise and perhaps follow it through with one involving a dispute to be resolved by international arbitration.
Not only can the walls of traditional classrooms be extended to encompass a much wider audience, but an electronic clearing house could also promote greater use of self-directed learning. Given the fact that law curriculums at all levels are already overcrowded, a clearing house could offer a range of self-paced, self-directed learning which can be done outside of class time, during summer holidays, etc. For example, this might be one way in which some international developments be accommodated.
Related to the topic of internationalisation is the need to bring multi-disciplinary perspectives to law where, in the past, the discourse has been too ethnocentric and discipline specific. In this regard it is important to note that the law clearing house is but one of several discipline specific clearing houses. At the same time, the law clearing house will be linked, through a central clearing house. Such links could also help to promote more inter-disciplinary research and teaching of law.
As mentioned in the title, the major purpose of this article has been to fly a few "idea-kites" regarding the future role and development of UniServe-LAW, Australia's first electronic clearing house devoted to law and legal education.
The establishment of such a clearing house is especially timely given that the dawning of internationalisation has meant that time has come for legal educators and the profession to focus upon the interrelationships and linkages between institutions and among the various stages of a legal practitioner's education--law school, pre admission legal education and continuing legal education. These phases should be seen as a continuum which at every level must respond to the challenges of internationalisation. While individual academics and institutions must each make their own response to the issues raised in this article, there also much hope and optimism that through the forging of partnerships and a spirit of cooperation, Australian legal educators will unite in the common cause of quality legal education.
To these ends the authors invite comments from all potential users of such a clearing house for its success or failure will depend upon the extent to which we meet the community of legal educators, lawyers and others whom we aim to serve. Most of all we welcome ideas, suggestions and offers of participation and partnership in this exciting new educational venture.
• Centre for Networked Information and Publishing
Mark Corbould - CNIP, ANU, ACT 0200
Tel: 06 279 4730
email mark.courbould@anu.edu.au
• UniServe
Co-directors: Profs Mike Greenhalgh, Chris Bryant,
CNIP, ANU, ACT 0200
Tel:
• UniServe-LAW
Director: Dr Bob Moles,
Executive officer, Cathy Clegg
UniServe-LAW, CNIP, ANU, ACT 0200
Tel: 06 279 8117 Fax: 279 8120
http://online.anu.edu.au - subject headings - law
email: bob.moles@anu.edu.au cathy.clegg@anu.edu.au
[1] Senior Lecturer in Law, The Australian National University: Bob.Moles@anu.edu.au
[2] Professor of Law, University of Canberra: eec@management.canberra.edu.au
[3] The SCALE database contains the full text of cases and legislation and is owned and operated by the Federal Attorney General's Department. It is extending the materials covered from Federal materials to include State and Territory materials. Their current policy is that whilst they charge for access to their database by practitioners, they do not charge for access by law schools and members of the public. The public can access the database through terminals in AGPS bookshops. By including this illustration, we only mean to indicate the range of possibilities. We do not mean to imply that AGs have actually agreed to this as yet. Our understanding is that this matter has not yet been considered by their Board of Management.
[4] See generally, Bernardini, P., The Global Marketplace: Legal Service Needs of Multi-national Corporations, NJ, Prentice Hall, 1990.
[5] For a discussion of similar developments in the US, see the McCrate Report, American Bar Association, Legal Education and Professional Development: An Educational Continuum: Report of the Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Narrowing the Gap, American Bar Association, Washington, DC, 1992 (Robert MacCrate, Esq, Chairman).
[6] See generally, Diana Laurillard, Rethinking University Teaching, London, Routledge, 1993.
[7] See Monica Langford, Internationalisation of Legal Practise, paper presented at the Commonwealth Legal Education Association Conference on Emerging Educational Challenges for Law in Commonwealth Asia and Australasia: The Implications for Legal Education, University of Hong Kong, April 10-12-, 1992.
[8] This is already happening. Major Australian law firms have substantial presence in the Asian region.
[9] Bigelow, H., Kimber D, Willis, Q. and Ainsworth, M., Internationalising the Curriculum: An RMIT Innovation' paper presented to the IDP National Conference on International Education: Images of Quality: Perceptions and Best Practice in International Education' Canberra, October, 1993.
[10] Ibid. See generally, McBlane, RA and Westwood, MJ, The Design and Implementation of a Peer System, in International Student Advisers' Handbook, Canadian Bureau for International Education, Ottawa, Canada, 1988; Quintrell, N., Poor-Pairing Programmes for Overseas Students: What Are we Learning? unpublished report, Flinders University of South Australia, 1991.
AustLII:
Copyright Policy
|
Disclaimers
|
Privacy Policy
|
Feedback
URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/JlLawInfoSci/1995/7.html