Law Library 2.0: New Roles for Law Librarians in the Information Overload Era

WWW 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 the ubiquitous Infosphere. The recent transformation of legal information has had more drastic consequences than in many other cases. The Cornell Law Library recognizes the new role of law librarians as advocates of free access and open source and, in parallel, as guides through the information overload and coaches of critical thinking of IT