FRANCISCO, PATRICIA B.

JD 1-2

LEGAL RESEARCH

ASSIGNMENT #1

LEGAL COLLECTION MANAGEMENT FOR EFFECTIVE LEGAL RESEARCH

IN THE PHILIPPINES
Paper presented by Dir. Milagros Santos Ong

People from all walks of life, are continuously in need of legal information and
nowadays, different sources of information are readily accessible to the public.
This is brought by the availability of different resources and one of the best
sources of legal information is the Supreme Court E-Library Database. The
updating and completion of the SC E-Library was made possible after all the
efforts have been completed to retrieve all the laws, decisions and rules and
regulations and put it in one location.

The paper presented by Dir. Milagros Santos Ong discussed the importance of
legal collection and the evolution of legal collection management for effective
legal research. According to Dir. Santos Ong, legal collection of the legislature
is

required

for

law

making

function

and

the

decision

making

and

administration of justice functions of the Court.

The Philippine Legal System has a rich history, considering the number and
variety of statues passed. Completing the collection of presented to be a huge
and difficult task. The availability and accessibility to the complete compilation

of all the statutes and Jurisprudence was a problem due to the lack of
complete compilation of sources or printed and published statutes and lack of
updated index and search tools. The Supreme Court E-library, which contains
the digitized resource of all the Supreme Court decisions from 1901 1960 was
out of print. The Philippine Reports, which was potentially one of the main
source of the Supreme Court decisions from 1901 also encountered delays in
the publication.

To resolve the issue on the delay in the publication of the Philippine Reports,
the publication was taken over by the Supreme Court from the National
Printing Office. Central Book Supply also started to publish the complete
compilation of Supreme Court decisions with the title Supreme Court Reports
Annotated (SCRA).

To ensure that the Supreme Court E-Library is updated, various Memorandum

of Agreements and connecting with the different US National Archives enabled
the Supreme Court to obtain the decisions that were destroyed after the World
War II and treaties entered into by the Philippines from 1946 2010. These
were provided to the Supreme Court to be digitized and published in the ELibrary. To complete the contents of the E-Library database, the Presidential
and Executive Issuances were taken from the printed Official Gazette and were
digitized. This has made the Supreme Court E-Library the complete, primarily
legal information of the Philippines.

With the current technology, the primary source of legal information is not only
accessible and available, but it is now readily provided to everyone who needs
it. The scrupulous design and implementation of the Legal Collection

management in the Philippines through the traditional book collection or

virtual library ensures its effectivity and reputation to be complete.

Backwards Into Future

By Richard A. Leiter
Legal Information ALERT (www.alertpub.com)

Shepard's Citations, under the LexisNexis Group, is a citator used in United

States legal research that provides a list of all the authorities citing a particular
case, statute, or other legal authority. Since they are known to be one of the
most important components of the American Legal Bibliography, theyve
engaged in a marketing strategy to further promote the use of the latest
technology, which they believed would be more profitable. However, the
approach was proving to be a setback to their goal of maintaining customer
patronage.

Shepards Citation, after being acquired by the Times Mirror in the 1980s has
gone through several republishing. Immediately after the acquisition, Shepards
Citation was reprinted in standard sizes and formats and customers were
charged with the full amount, which made it more expensive. With the new and
easier to read format, Shepards Citation was easily sold. However, in the

1990s, with what looks like their approach to move their customers to the
virtual format, theyve republished four times and the only possible way to
make sure that the copies are updated is to purchase the new volumes.

Eventually, Westlaw was prompted to develop Keycite, which is an alternative to

Shepards Citation. KeyCite is the citation research service from West.
Using KeyCite,

you

can

quickly

determine

whether

case,

statute,

administrative decision, or federal regulation is good law and find cases and
other sources that cite it.

Both Westlaw and LexisNexis have aggressively marketing the online versions of
Shepards Citation and Keycite, respectively. However, due to the expensive cost
of the printed Shepards Citation and the direct and free public accessibility to
Keycity, the goal of LexisNexis to migrate their readers from the printed to the
online resource backfired at them. This only proves that Legal Resource should
not only be readily accessible, but must be manageable as well, in terms of
cost. The radical approach of Shepards Citation to move all their subscribers
to the future is proving to be a bad move. New technologies should be
maximized but the marketability and cost effectiveness of the material must be
considered as well.