I’m trying to figure out just how much metadata lawyers want in their electronic treatises. A lot of folks blather on about meta, meta, meta, but at some point it’s TMI particularly if your writing is already really tight, which ours is. Don’t get me wrong, good metadata allows for efficient discovery. And in the context of legal books, there’s the obvious stuff like cases, statutes, rules, and maybe secondary sources (and the breakdowns associated with that info). But what else does a lawyer want? Terms of art? Common words? Definable terms? Thematic phrases (e.g., in the context of privileges something like “confidential communication”)? If the meta can facilitate search (whether faceted or otherwise) and speed up the process for finding “the answer” (BIG IF: assuming it’s there), then what is it a lawyer wants? The question is important because I’d love to stop tagging at some point.
I have my personal preferences, and honestly, right now current treatise meta stops at a very superficial level. Most publishers are simply “linking cases” and rules, and dumping text into search. That’s about it. It seems to me that advancements in search only gets us so far. Meta is needed to get us the extra mile. A good example is the West Key Number system. But even then it stops short of finding the best connections among content.
So what do you want? And if you don’t know what metadata is, I guess the only thing I can say is please comment below so I won’t refer any cases to you.
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