Developing an interactive multimedia guide to enhance legal research skills

Claire Tylee, University of the West of England

Presentation at UKCLE seminar on teaching and learning for legal skills trainers, 16 February 2005

Claire’s session described the development of an interactive, Web-based guide to enhance legal research skills tuition. The guide was developed by the law librarians at the University of the West of England (UWE) with both campus-based and distance learners in mind.

Claire currently works part time at UWE as Law Librarian, while also working as Management Librarian (jobshare) at the University of Bath. Her professional interests include the use of multimedia to enhance teaching and learning activity and the growth of institutional repositories and open access journals.

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The project to develop an online interactive guide for our law students formally started in January 2003 with the appointment of a project officer for 2.5 days per week. An immediate constraint was a lack of budget, except for very limited expenditure on hardware and software. Most other kit had to be borrowed or loaned from elsewhere in the university. The project officer also had other draws on her time and was not exclusively able to work on the guide due to staff shortages and sickness. In addition, we were only allocated six months for the development of the resource.

The law faculty librarians (1 FTE) at UWE have always been heavily involved with information skills teaching and basic legal research skills instruction to undergraduates and postgraduates. In the 2002-03 academic year they were responsible for 130 hours of information skills teaching. The further expansion of student numbers and in particular the demands of postgraduate professional studies programmes necessitated a more sustainable approach to the delivery of information skills teaching to our law students.

Other factors:

• complex nature of legal research
• staffing constraints and a lack of an enquiry point on the law floor
• need to improve help and assistance to part time and distance learning students
• need for a more flexible approach to the delivery of information skills teaching
• small group library teaching was becoming unviable due to increasing numbers, but experience had shown that large group sessions needed to be supported by other methods which would not rely exclusively on an appropriately qualified law librarian being present.

Designing the guide

The basic structure for the guide was dictated by a print resource book produced to support the Legal Practice Course (LPC) and Bar Vocational Course (BVC) programmes. Examples of similar guides can be accessed from UWE’s Law Library guides page.

This Word format document was converted to a website using Dreamweaver 4. The project officer spent a lot of time dividing content into possible webpages with hyperlinks within the site. She also gave consideration to disabled user access of the site, in particular screen colour, and investigated use of the pages with assistive PCs.

The plain text of the original print document is enhanced within the guide by the addition of:

• interactive floor plans
• audio enabled database demonstrations with added text and animation
• video
• quiz questions
• photographs

Technical considerations

A new 80 GB 2.5 GHz multimedia PC with microphone was purchased midway through the project with Dreamweaver 4 and Adobe Premiere 6.5 software installed. This was necessary for working with video. The project officer received formal training on Adobe Premiere only. Consequently, there was as a steep learning curve to ‘master’ any software and hardware used, with a heavy reliance on software vendor guides and making use of free trial downloads of software. A camcorder, tripod and microphone were borrowed from another faculty within the university for a short time only. All video shooting had to be completed during July and August when this equipment was available. The guide is password protected.

• interactive floor plans – tThese were drawn using Adobe Illustrator 10. Hotspots created for each floor plan link to resources within the guide as shown by their physical location.
• audio enabled database demonstrations – animated PowerPoint slides consisting of screen dumps demonstrating the step by step use of a resource, such as the database WestlawUK, were created with an added textbox and audio for each slide. The audio enabled demonstrations needed to be compressed as they had huge file sizes. We used Impatica software to do this for off-site delivery and MS Producer software suitable for on-site delivery over an intranet. We will also be considering using Viewlet Builder software in the near future to compress and deliver these files both on and off site without the need for a streaming server.

• video – we obtained many short copyright cleared video clips from the University of Sheffield via Education Media Online and added these at appropriate points in the guide. These are compressed and delivered using a streaming server for off-site delivery. We have also produced a series of in-house video clips using a digital camcorder to demonstrate the use of the law library print resources, which are in the process of being edited using Adobe Premiere 6.5 software.

• quiz questions – a series of multiple choice question quizzes were incorporated into the guide using Hot Potatoes software. The user obtains instant feedback.

• photographs – all photographs were digital and taken by the Project Officer using a digital camera owned by the library

UWE Library Services has a presence on our chosen VLE, which is accessible to all students and staff and provides resources on information literacy. There are direct links to sections of the interactive guide from within the VLE, which allows all students easy access to the guide regardless of the courses they are enrolled upon.

The future

The interactive guide is a work in progress. For the next academic year we hope to integrate the guide into the first year undergraduate library skills teaching by linking quiz questions to early seminar preparation in their core modules. We have the facility of a 50 seat PC lab in our library. We hope to be able to have large groups of undergraduates timetabled to work through parts of the guide. The aim is to have the sessions facilitated by academic colleagues as well as the law faculty librarians. On the postgraduate professional studies side we plan to use the guide to partially teach some databases, although this will be within a formal session timetabled in the library for the BVC students. For LPC students it will stand outside of their contact time, but they will be directed to it when completing workshop questions in legal research. The guide also operates as an effective support for enquiry desk colleagues and a training tool for staff both within the library and faculty.

Last Modified: 30 June 2010