Introducing Intute: Law

Intute was launched in July 2006 as the new face of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN). For SOSIG Law, the UK’s dedicated Internet gateway for law, this meant a relaunch as Intute: Law with a new look and additional functionality.

Here Heather Memess, Intute Law Project Officer, and Steve Whittle, Information Systems Manager (both based in the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies Library) tell us more about the service and how it can be used in teaching and learning.

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Intute: Law is a free online service continuing the work of the SOSIG Law Gateway. The name ‘Intute’ is an amalgam of ‘Internet’ and ‘tutorial’, and is intended to convey the experiences of guided learning and online resource discovery. The Intute: Law service is designed to complement other popular law search tools and search engines, with a catalogue of quality evaluated site profiles that seeks to provide ‘advance’ information on the most relevant Internet sites for a topic.

Intute records include short profiles of key sites, highlighting the most useful aspects and enabling researchers to identify quickly the most relevant sources of information. A range of different resource types is represented on the service, including primary materials (legislation, case law, treaties), secondary sources (journals, books), government websites, organisations, databases, academic sites, law firm sites, bibliographic materials and resource guides.

Using Intute: Law

The service offers options to support different stages of research – users can browse to gather materials or they can search to pinpoint specific items. Users can focus on individual subjects and subsections – the Law section includes subsections covering General Law, UK Law, European Union Law, Other Jurisdictions, International Law and Law by Subject area.

Users can search across the whole Intute catalogue from the Intute home page – a search on the full catalogue aids interdisciplinary work, enabling researchers to find law materials in other contexts, such as business, medicine or politics.

Searching can be done via a simple keyword search box or by using the advanced search form, which enables users to construct queries specifying fields to be searched, subject area and resource type. If a search of the main Intute catalogue doesn’t bring up enough results, your can expand your search to the content of the websutes in the catalogue using Intute’s search engine, which is powered by Google Custom Search.

A list of the latest resources added to Intute: Law is also available.

Personalisation and alerting

MyIntute is a free personalisation tool enabling users to create their own set of records from resources searched or browsed on the Intute service. Records can be tagged and saved before being e-mailed or exported to another website – as part of a personal Internet resource bibliography or reading list for example, or as a reliable set of links for an academic webpage. You can also save your MyIntute searches and receive e-mail alerts whenever new records have been added which match your search terms.

Intute also offers a number of integration options allowing users to integrate its services into their own website. For example, Intute-Include is an application developed to install the Intute search box on a website or intranet, so users can search and retrieve results from Intute without leaving their own Web environment.

Internet training

Intute: Law is designed to help raise awareness of information literacy, Internet research and legal research skills. A range of training materials is on offer, designed to help locate the Internet in the legal research process and encourage critical thinking about the ways the Internet can aid that work.

Two Intute: Law workbooks can be downloaded from the IALS Library Intute Law Gateway, aimed at helping in the teaching of legal information skills and Internet awareness. The workbooks contain examples and exercises to help explore the range of legal materials available on the Internet, with suggestions on how to make full use of Intute: Law for law teaching, study and research.

A new edition of the ‘Best of the Web for Law’ booklet has been published as Internet resources for law, aimed at introducing users to the Intute: Law service and providing examples of some of the key Internet resources included in the catalogue.

Internet for Law and Internet Detective

Internet for Law is a free ‘teach yourself’ Web tutorial designed to develop skills in using the Internet for legal research. The tutorial is regularly revised and updated, and offers a series of quizzes, exercises and link saving features. Internet Detective is a complementary tutorial focusing on teaching critical evaluation of information found on the Internet.

The tutorials, part of Intute’s Virtual Training Suite, can support research methods and study skills courses, and are easy to link to from course VLEs or online reading lists. They take around an hour to complete and include interactive quizzes and exercises to lighten the learning experience.

Using the Internet effectively for academic research requires a high level of skill and knowledge. We may assume that today’s students are Internet savvy by the time they reach university, but, even if this is true, they won’t be familiar with using the Internet for academic research.

• Do your students know where to find the key websites for law?
• Do they know how to search the Internet for academic information?
• Are they able to evaluate websites critically before they cite them?
• Do they know the correct formats for referencing the Internet resources they quote?
• Does anyone in your department take the time to teach them these skills?

Internet for Lawyers has four main sections:

• Tour – a guide to key Internet resources
  Focuses on the academic information landscape aiming to create a mental map of key scholarly sources.
• Discover – an introduction to Internet search skills
  Guidance on how to find scholarly information online, including choosing the right search tool and the importance of developing a search strategy.
• Judge – how to evaluate Web-based resources
  Discusses how critical thinking can improve the quality of online research and provides guidance on how to judge which Internet resources are appropriate for university work.
• Success – examples of students using the Internet for research
  Both successfully and unsuccessfully, so students can learn from the mistakes of others, as well as by example.

There are varied approaches to the provision of Internet training for students across UK universities, such as integrated into student induction or library information skills training, or blended into research methods courses or the subject curriculum. The tutorials are likely to be most effective when blended with a taught course with locally set assignments that assess what the students have learned.

Last Modified: 4 June 2010