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The Law Library

By Nina Cunningham
September 27, 2012

During the last 20 years, enormous changes have occurred in the information industry. This has affected not only libraries, including private law libraries, but also law librarians and IT staff. As in most things, law firms were slower to adapt and, once adapting, individually chose differing paths. Most firms wait for others to be first. When activities are as sensitive to regulation and procedure as law practice, it takes time for a firm to develop the boldness to be first.

But as boldness developed, online research vendors took advantage of the environment. In the early 1990s, the rise the Internet was still somewhat unbelievable. It also was unstructured. Early experimentation made an enormous variety of information freely accessible ' and also free of charge. This included specialized search tools for listservs or blogs (www.DejaVu.com) and a free search engine to find individuals and busineses (www.FOUR11.com). (The Computer Encyclopaedia refers to www.FOUR11.com as “[a]n e-mail address search site that was acquired by Yahoo! See Web white pages [www.answers.com/topic/411-1].”)

The appearance of Yahoo was an exciting moment for early users of the Internet, among whom were law librarians. (For those who may not understand the current market value of Yahoo, this history will be interesting. Yahoo was an early search engine that acquired many of the other early and excellent search engines, such as AltaVista and Dejavu. If you are interested in this fascinating history, see www.dejavu.org.)

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