How to Present Web-Based Legal Information: Towards Library Web 2.0

The World Wide Web has rapidly evolved from a technological into a social medium. Web 2.0 has become a metaphor for the distributed and decentralized collaboration networks on a global scale. With the recent trends of new media development, the sources available have reached a critical mass resulting in an unprecedented information overload. The urgent challenge to all information professionals, in this case law librarians, is no longer availability and direct provision of resources, but rather the filtering and highlighting. As an example of the utilization of Web 2.0 values, the Cornell Law Library (CLL) recently re-launched its website. The site highlights the wealth of resources and services available at this premier research library while, at all times, taking into consideration the information needs and information-seeking behaviors of our users and the worldwide legal research community. Library jargon was removed wherever possible to make the navigational language natural to non-librarians, which led to the creation of a new standard in interface design and information architecture for the site