Introduction
With the growing sophistication of digital technology and publishing, legal research proves to be a complex task for law librarians and legal researchers. Acquiring the skills to conduct in-depth legal research is developed over time and can be enhanced and improved upon through practice, repetition, awareness and training. Every legal researcher and law librarian will take their own individual approach to learning the skills that are needed to navigate the rising number of online legal research databases. As an online legal publisher, it becomes of utmost importance to provide researchers with adequate training resources that illustrate how best to use a database to retrieve quality results. In HeinOnline, we take a diversified approach to training, offering training resources to suit different learning styles. What follows is a description of the training resources that we offer for using the various libraries in HeinOnline and the channels that we use to distribute them.
Training and Support Wiki
When we first began creating training materials to assist users with the HeinOnline database, we presented the resources on a single web page. As the number of resources continued to grow and our use of web 2.0 applications was increasing, it was important that we found a way to organise them in a fashion that would be easy for our users to locate and navigate the variety of resources that we offer. Thus, we created the HeinOnline Training and Support Wiki, which is our central repository for all help and training needs related to using the HeinOnline database. Ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki, defines a wiki as “The simplest online database that could possibly work.”Footnote 1
We chose to use the wiki platform to organise and display our training materials for a number of reasons. Among those are ease of use, ability to make changes quickly and to interconnect the resources within the wiki, all of which would give us ultimate control on how the training resources are organised. The main page of the Training and Support Wiki displays the primary type of training resources available, including frequently asked questions, training guides, training videos, library specific help pages, webinars, and links to our other web 2.0 applications. The Frequently Asked Questions page is sub-divided, offering both general and library-specific FAQs. They are developed based on customer questions and feedback received on a day-to-day basis. If our support representatives frequently receive the same question, then it is likely that other users may be asking themselves that question as well. They become FAQs and are added to the Training and Support Wiki.
The Training Guides page on the wiki includes more than fifteen downloadable PDF training guides that researchers can save, print, email, distribute, or even link to on their own websites. Researchers will find user guides that contain comprehensive information about navigating, searching, and printing in HeinOnline. These guides are helpful for those looking for details on a specific function, or for those who are planning to train a group of people or teach a legal research class and need a basic outline. The Quick Reference Guides outline the basic features of a specific library and how to access them. They also include various search examples and illustrations. Feature-specific help guides include explanations for various specialised features found throughout HeinOnline such as Hein's ScholarCheck. Lastly, researchers will find a PowerPoint presentation that they can utilise to demonstrate HeinOnline at their organisation or institution.
The third type of resource offered is training videos. HeinOnline Training Videos are available in flash and Windows Media formats. Videos that are less than ten minutes in length, which is the maximum time permitted per video on YouTube, display a link to view the video directly on YouTube. The videos are categorised according to the content that is being covered and include topics from general research functions like printing or searching to library specific functions such as how to find an article in the Law Journal Library.
For researchers looking for help using a specific library within HeinOnline, we created Library Specific Help Pages. Each of these pages contains how-to information, downloadable training guides, video tutorials, frequently asked questions, and various search examples about an individual library. The training guides, video tutorials and frequently asked questions can also be accessed from the resource options on the wiki's main page. The ability to link these resources internally and make them discoverable from a variety of entrance points is what makes the wiki an effective knowledge management tool. In her article Wikipedia and the Future of Legal Education, Beth Noveck speaks of this interconnectivity and discoverability as she talks about Wikipedia. “A defining characteristic of wikis is their high degree of interconnection. Unlike Google, which presents a hit list of search results without context, Wikipedia includes hyperlinks to other materials and reintroduces the serendipity of browsing and discovering new resources.”Footnote 2
The second reason we decided to use a wiki was the option to utilise the open source platform used by Wikipedia. By using the most popular and widely known wiki application, we hoped our users would already be familiar with the layout and functionality. The final primary reason for choosing the wiki platform is the ease of use and awareness that a wiki provides for our users, as it allows them to search across all the resources available using one simple search box and it enables users to subscribe to an RSS feed for the primary resource pages, such as the training guides or training videos page. If a researcher wants to know when training guides are updated or a new guide is added, they can subscribe to the RSS feed for that page and whenever a change is made to it, the notification will appear within their RSS reader or other application used for aggregating feeds.
HeinOnline Blog
The mission of the blog has been to provide researchers with additional training resources to assist them with their research. A variety of information is posted on the blog, including how-to information, searching tips, general tips and tricks for using the database, alerts of new training guides, announcements of new features or enhancements to the database and upcoming live webinars. Every blog post is tagged with the library name and research function that it covers. Our blog enables readers to comment on a blog post, whether they have an opinion, suggestion, question, or other comment. In turn, all readers can view the comments and responses. As is the case with the Training and Support Wiki, the blog is fully searchable, making it easy to find posts related to a specific HeinOnline library, research function such as searching, or any other topic. We integrated the content on the blog with the Training and Support Wiki to enable users to easily access useful blog posts from inside the wiki.
Readers can sign up for email alerts to our blog. Rather than having to visit it to find out what is new, an email is automatically sent to the user's inbox every time we post something. For those who prefer RSS feeds, it is also easy to subscribe using a number of different feed readers. We use the blog as another means for disseminating training information to our growing end user base.
Watch HeinOnline on YouTube
As the number of library modules in HeinOnline continued to grow, we began creating video tutorials demonstrating each one. The response we received to the videos was very positive, which led us to believe that some of our users preferred learning by watching rather than reading. As a result, we created more video tutorials focusing on specific features of a library; how to use a specific search function and tips on how to navigate the database. These videos ranged in length, but most were less than ten minutes long. With the growing popularity of YouTube, it seemed an ideal medium to disseminate our video tutorials and thus the HeinOnline YouTube channel was born. YouTube allowed us to present our video tutorials in a web-based format that would in turn allow librarians and researchers to embed or share the videos on their own websites, blogs, Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, and other social media channels, helping to further broadcast the training resources to even more end users. The YouTube channel allows a researcher to browse various playlists each containing video tutorials relevant to a specific research function or library in HeinOnline. Researchers can subscribe to our channel and view new videos on the Subscriptions page within their YouTube account or receive a weekly email notification outlining new additions.
Live Webinar Series
The next evolution of video tutorials was the launch of our monthly live webinar series. The series began with a basic “getting started in HeinOnline” demonstration. Following the basic introduction to the database, we began focusing on each library. The live webinars are hosted on a monthly basis, with each session offering an in-depth look at an individual library module. Exploring the resources in the library, navigating the content, accessing documents by citation, using custom research tools, reviewing specific search examples and other tips and tricks are covered in each session. By offering training via a live platform, we give our researchers the opportunity to watch and listen to the presenter demonstrate the library and ask questions throughout the presentation. Every webinar is recorded and archived on the webinars page on the Training and Support Wiki to enable users to view the on-demand videos any time.
Live Chat With HeinOnline Support
While offering an abundance of self-guided training resources, we also offer a live chat service for our users, which is available during our standard business hours and is supported by the HeinOnline Support Group. The live chat service can be used to assist researchers with specific features of a library, search functions, or other research-related questions relevant to using the database. The Live Chat takes place in a secure web-based chat room and enables our support representatives to share links to search results, content, or other related resources to aid users in the research process.
Use of other social media channels
To expand our reach beyond these channels, we utilise other social media applications, such as Twitter and Facebook, to further disseminate training information. Many users are already writing on their friend's wall, tagging friends in a photo or responding to event invitations using Facebook, arguably the most visited social media site of the last year. Therefore, we wanted to integrate our resources into a channel that users were already visiting to make it easier for them to discover and learn of new resources and so we created the HeinOnline page on Facebook. We use Facebook to notify our fans of upcoming webinars, as well as new features and enhancements. We also integrated the blog with our Facebook page, thereby alerting our fans of any new blog posts. In addition to Facebook, we began using Twitter, another growing social media application. Using 140 characters or less, Twitter is a great medium for informing users of new training guides, videos, blog posts, features, and other information that can assist them in using HeinOnline.
Conclusion
Built on dynamic platforms, online databases can and do change frequently by adding new content, new features, or modifying existing research tools. This makes it difficult for law librarians and legal researchers to keep their legal research strategies up to date, as they continually need to know what is new and what has changed. This shift from print sources to online legal research databases thus expands the role of the law librarian. Library users expect that a law librarian knows the resources and can help them find specific material. In his article Raising the Institutional Profile of Academic Law Librarians: Law Librarian-Taught Legal Research Courses, Larry Reeves, Associate Director at George Mason University Law Library, says
“Law Librarians are more relevant now than ever. The digital information revolution has created a paradigm shift from the library as a collection of books to the library as a point of service.”Footnote 3
To help legal researchers and law librarians in this new role, we will continue developing resources and offering live training sessions to help them fine-tune their legal research skills in HeinOnline. We will use the web 2.0 applications including the blog, YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Twitter feed, to distribute the resources to as many legal researchers as possible. We will also continue to build upon the Training and Support Wiki and link resources from the 2.0 applications into this platform. We hope that law librarians and researchers will use the training resources available to develop their own legal research skills, which they in turn can pass on to their students, faculty, colleagues, and peers.
