WashLaw Recognized As Premier Source of Legal Information
The most exhaustive study of legal websites ever conducted has confirmed WashLaw's status as the premier source of legal information on the Internet.
As the number of internet sites grows, users need objective means to decide where to begin internet research. The recent article, Robert C. Vreeland, "Law Libraries in Hyperspace: A Citation Analysis of Worldwide Web Sites," 92 Law Library Journal 9 (2000) (420 KB PDF; requires Adobe Acrobat Reader), proposes use of citation analysis to measure and evaluate law library websites. Citation analysis has been used to assess the influence and visibility of legal publications such as law reviews and libraries have used it in making collection development decisions. Such analysis is even more relevant, Vreeland argues, in the context of the Internet because of the essential role hyperlinks play in providing the interconnection that makes the Web a web.
Vreeland analyzed law library sites based upon two objective criteria, luminosity and visibility. Luminosity is a measure of how many other URLs a site points to. The premise is that better sites have more links. Visibility measures the number of other sites that have pointers to the site being evaluated, since this reflects a collective endorsement of the targeted site.
The WashLaw site maintained by the Washburn Law Library was found by far to be both the most luminous and the most visible site.
According to Vreeland, Washburn "appears to be following a ‘two-power standard’ like that of the Royal Navy during the 19th Century--its collection of links is larger than the second and third largest collections combined. In part this is accomplished by creating ‘deep links’ to remote sites in order to provide direct access to specific resources." In Vreeland’s analysis of visibility, Washburn also exceeded the combined totals of the second and third ranked schools, Emory and Georgetown, in number of external links to the site.
