In addition to the training and technical support issues
presently being discussed, (as I've expressed to some you individually)
my problem with many of the CD-ROM software packages (Folio Views and
LawDesk in particular) is the usual one: they use the paragraph, or the
hard return, as the unit of the search, which would only make sense if
people were skilled in and practiced the art of the paragraph, a lost
art in my opinion (too many people put in hard returns when their eyes
get tired). Most judicial opinions today DO NOT reflect the art of the
paragraph, which is a unit of semantic valence, that is, if it's a
paragraph, it's because the sentences therein form a meaningful unit.
Hard returns are now mindlessly used "for ease of reading," meaning that
the paragraph has lost its grammatical and semantic value. Thus, a
search for two or more terms which are meaningfully related and
therefore in some degree of proximity to each other, BUT NOT IN THE SAME
"PARAGRAPH," cannot be successfully executed in search engines such as
those found in Folio Views and LawDesk (too name a few).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 14 2007 - 20:49:25 PST