Use of Mobile Technologies by Law Students in the Law Library: an Exploratory Study

Current Issues

INTRODUCTION

Mobile technologies have become well established in society. Research shows that the dependency on these technologies is so great, that impacts are felt within a variety of social orders and cultures. From the youth of today using mobile devices at the dinner table²to farmers in the third-world engaging in banking services previously impossible,³these technologies have caused disruption at an unprecedented, global level, and both positive and negative effects of this disturbance have been recorded in the literature.⁴⁵With the capabilities of mobile devices continually developing as technology advances, alongside the infrastructures that support them, the seeking, exchanging and creating of information has become a key area driving the success of mobile technology use.⁶⁷Students, are key players in this arena, and their use of mobile devices is changing how learning and teaching takes place.

Law students are primarily engaged in the study of a largely text-based profession and they are often required to navigate through hundreds of multi-volume works, some dating back several decades. The digitalisation of this material has reduced the physical challenges of management, access and navigation that came with non-electronic resources and allowed the content to be made available via mobile platforms, fuelling the use of mobile technologies in this contextual use.⁸However, these developments bring new challenges to the information seeking experience of law students, who enjoy a rich variety of electronic resources accessible through many technological platforms, whilst also having the traditionally voluminous collections of paper-based materials at their disposal.

Consequently, information seeking and the way it is performed is also changing.⁹¹⁰¹¹Existing research has focused on isolated projects and tasks, but does not provide a well-rounded picture of information seeking,¹²and whereas prior work exists in respect of the general student population,¹³our work considers the specific cohort of law students. To understand how law students used mobile information resources, we sought the opinions of both academic law librarians and law students through a series of interviews and questionnaires. Our main research focus was informed by a pilot study,¹which collected insight from three academic law librarians.

Key comments from the pilot study included:

- . Law students' research skills were...