Reflections on Conversation with Anurag Acharya, Google Scholar

Reaction to Google Scholar Legal Opinions and Journals (SLOJ) has been largely defined by our experience with extant legal databases. All online legal research tools that we're familiar with at present are databases filled with documents that we search using boolean operators or simple, character-by-character, word-for-word text searching. The main differences between, say, Westlaw and the ordinary "find" command when you search your documents or use Spotlight on your computer, is that Westlaw indexes the documents in ways that we take for granted. Things like proximity connecters, segment searches, etc., are all part of the indexing process and gives us extraordinary power to use the computer to conduct detailed and very precise searches of its database. Other vendors that we're familiar with use similar processes.

Google, on the other hand, as a search engine, is unlike any other in our experience. There is really no full text searching going on. Google's search philosophy is very adequately discussed in James Surowiecki's, "The Wisdom of Crowds." Google does not really search cases or articles for the terms used in your query. Rather, it uses the terms in your query in a variety of ways. It will recognize which are names of parties, which are legal principles, or author's names, article titles, etc. It then uses it's vast network of data which links cases and articles together and returns results based upon frequency of linking and cross-referencing. This is a gross over-simplification, but it suffices to illustrate that the search results are not the objective kind of results that Westlaw, Lexis and others produce. Searching in Google is quite subjective by comparison. Not, of course, in the sense that it is anticipating or evaluating the meaning of the query and returning results accordingly, but in the sense that based on your query, the results returned are based on a document's popularity. The more times a document is cited, the more important the search engine assumes it is.

This approach to searching for law is completely different from other search engines and poses very distinct problems for legal researchers who are tempted to use it as a substitute for "Wexisberg". (Thanks to Greg Lambert for this new portmanteau of Westlaw, Lexis and Bloomberg.) When understood, Google will produce stunning results. The fact is, it does exactly what it says it does. Many criticisms of it as a legal research tool are based upon comparisons of it to Wexisberg, which is something like comparing apples and oranges.

This is not to say that Google SLOJ doesn't need to improve. There are many things that Google can do to make it more palpable to lawyers and legal academics. Clearly defining the content of the databases being searched for one thing. At this point, it all seems very mysterious.

Chat Room Transcript from 4 December 2009 BlogTalkRadio Show

I will be writing later about our conversation with Anurag Acharya, Chief Engineer of Google Scholar. Greg Lambert, Roger Skalbeck, Marcia Dority Baker and I had a wonderful 90-minute conversation with Mr. Acharya, and I think that I speak for us all when I say that the conversation was not only enlightening, but we were all very impressed with Mr. Acharya's charm, his sense of humor and the great delight he has in his work. Like I said, more on that later. For the time being, please feel free to peruse the transcript of the chat room. And, as always, remember that you can download the show on iTunes or from the show's website: http://blogtalkradio.com/thelawlibrarian.

A couple of notes about the show, for anyone interested: we had a record of 301 live listeners and 105 people in the chat room! Over the weekend, there have already been nearly 140 downloads of the show. Thanks everyone who participated. We've a lot of exciting shows planned for 2010. We'll be taking the holidays off, but plan to return on January 15. At that time, we'll begin our new schedule of recording/airing twice a month on the first and third Fridays of the month.

Until then, please, everyone, please have a safe and happy holiday season. And for all the crew at The Law Librarian on BTR, we'd love to hear from you your ideas and thoughts about how we may improve.

Interview with Carl Malamud; Thoughts on "Free Law," Kerfuffles and Law.Gov

On Friday afternoon, 6 November 2009, we interviewed Carl Malamud, founder of Public.Resource.org. A transcript of the chat room can be found here. You can download the interview from The Law Librarian's BlogTalkRadio web page or find it on iTunes.

Law.Gov was the focus of the interview, and it seems that much of the hoopla (and kerfuffle) about Law.Gov and the "free law" movement is all misguided worry on the part of commercial publishers. The worry on the part of researchers is justified, but, after listening to Malamud's explanation of the Law.Gov movement, not cause for pessimism.

Lexis and Westlaw are the two largest commercial sources of very high priced primary legal material (VHPPLM), as opposed to "free (primary) law," (FPL). The worry on the part of VHPPLM providers is that the free law, or the Open Access movement, will result in loss of market share and lost revenue. The logic of this is really extraordinary. VHPPLM providers get the primary material for free, refine and repackage it with very good (no, excellent) indexing and finding, and then sell it to professionals at a premium.

This is perfectly fair (if over-priced), because the market will get what it can for its services.

The problem with the equation is that the people who deserve the FPL, the people who actually, by right of citizenship, own it, end up in a position that makes it difficult for them to even get access to it. Ordinary citizens must have complete and reliable access to FPL. It is argued by many that unfettered access to it is even critical to our democracy. As our government depository program dries up and disseminates more and more government information via the internet or formats that require mediating technology or services, access to information becomes less available to the general population.

In fact, over the last century governments have, in some cases, abdicated their responsibility to freely disseminate their laws and legal materials to commercial publishers, making VHPPLM the sole source of access to the law. For example, until the late 1970's, when Lexis came on the scene, the opinions federal district and circuit courts were only published by West Publishing. Many states have ceased publication of their own case law in favor of West's Regional Reporters, and, in some cases ceased publication of their statutes in favor of commercial publication of their codes. This left access to the law beyond the reach of most citizens and, even, many public libraries.

If an informed citizenry is critical to a functioning government, what can be done to make sure that the laws are accessible to everyone who wants to read them? Who looks out for the public, who simply wants, indeed by rights needs free access to government information? Well, Open Access advocates do, as do people and movements that work to build free databases that strive to provide reliable access to primary materials. LII is an example of a service that's been around for a long time and that provides as much access to free information as possible. The problem for aggregators like LII is that the information that they provide is only as good as the sources available to them. And governments are just not very good sources of their own information.

Law.Gov is a movement that is determined to work to raise the quality of government information. They are determined to establish standards for state and local courts, legislatures and agencies to follow in the production and distribution of their own legal materials.

If Law.Gov succeeds in its mission, it will mean that governments and courts will produce better information, in formats that are reliable, accurate and distributed freely to all who need it. And all who need it include both private citizens and providers of VHPPLM. As such, this is good for news for providers of VHPPLM, as well as ordinary consumers of primary legal materials.

As Malamud said in response to a question from the chat room that asked whether he sees Law.Gov as a competitor to Lexis and Westlaw, (paraphrasing) "No, absolutely not! We are simply looking to formulate a system that will assist governments and courts to provide free, reliable access to government information." Lexis and Westlaw, will be the beneficiaries of the movement, as will the public. (Gee, they are members of the public, aren't they?) Nothing in the movement should discourage them from developing their critically important secondary materials.

Law.Gov is entering a phase of self-study and over the next year will be examining how governments and courts can work to systematically and freely publish and distribute government and legal materials. Visit http://public.resource.org/law.gov to learn more about Law.Gov. At the website you can find out about how to donate to the project and support its work, and about a nationwide series of workshops that will be held next year to discuss how its work will be accomplished.

Law Firm Librarians Speak Out About the Real World

Last Thursday's BlogTalkRadio show was very informative. Particularly because we had a lively group of law firm librarians who were quite willing to share their ideas about the skills that law students/recent graduates lack. The firm librarians were Liza MacMorris, of Wilson, Sonsini, Mary Staats, of Farella Braun & Martel, Kathy Skinner, of Morrison Foerster, Sara Paul, of Paul Hastings, Camille Reynolds, of Nossaman, and Peg LaFrance of Orrick. (Many, many thanks to them all.) The message was loud and clear:

First, we need to be very focused on teaching students the value of secondary materials. To a person, they were very concerned that students understand that beginning research with an appropriate secondary source can save them not only a great amount of time in conducting their research, but it can save their clients lots of money, too, because it will mean more precise and more efficient online searching later in the research project. The group was also adamant in this regard that it doesn't really matter whether they are beginning their research with a secondary tool that is in print, online or otherwise. The consensus seemed to be that many firms were still keeping the key treatises and practice materials.

Second, we were admonished to spend more time instructing our students about cost-effective online research techniques. Things like strategic use of research trails, tabs, etc. The message here is clear, CALR in law firms is costly! And any techniques that can be used to reduce the costs is something to be strived for. Since we academics have no reason, let alone day to day incentive to utilize such things, we need to make an extra effort to do so. Here's a situation where calling upon our Wexis representatives to conduct specialized training in these issues. I know that I will be attending them, too.

Third, several of the librarians said that new lawyers and summer clerks need to better understand how to use the librarian. Many come in firms unsure what they can ask librarians, and, then fail to do so. Not only are firm librarians willing and able to assist with help on research products, but often they can help locate experts within the firm. For example, if someone is given the task of researching an issue, sometimes a firm librarian can tell the researcher that another attorney in the firm is either an expert in that topic, or has recently conducted similar research. That person may be the best place to start. The bottom line is, new attorneys and summer clerks shouldn't be shy about asking the firm librarian for help and advice.

Finally, there's been a number of requests for a transcript of the chat room discussion that consisted of nearly 80 participants.
Click here for a copy of that transcript.

In the meantime, I think that the discussion will benefit any librarian who teaches legal research. It can be listened to at the show's website, here, or it can be downloaded from iTunes here. Of course, you can click on the box to the right and listen to it right here, right now.

There's also a discussion begun at the show's Facebook page: http://tinyurl.com/nouem4/. Please feel free to join in.

Following the Yellow Brick Road to the Ephemeral City....

The Ephemeral City and Modern (Digital) Libraries

As we move toward an all born-digital information future feel like I’m wandering a yellow brick road that leads inevitably to the Ephemeral City. A city governed by illusion and impermanence. We need to be careful, lest we all end up with libraries filled with copies of 1984 to our suppliers’ Amazon.....

I’m not sure of the exact reasons, but it seems that law, especially legal academia creates more than it’s fair share of ephemera. Much of it developed by the sources of the law itself: courts, agencies and legislatures. Slip laws, slip opinions, advance sheets, letter rulings from nearly every agency, position papers, reports, speeches, lectures, etc., all material that can/may/should/could have very important effect legally or historically.

Over the years, libraries have handled ephmera many different ways: tossed them, added them to a vertical file, bound the items that seemed important, saved them in princeton boxes and waited for enough to accumulate for binding by year, volume or some other cycle. It also depended on whether the material was regularly published or was subject to editing and re-compiling prior to an official compilation/printing/publishing cycle. This is material that is important, but was not published in a format typical of important material: durable bindings, paper, organizational finding aids, etc. It was relatively easy for librarians to collect ephemera, (it often came unsolicited in the mail, from faculty who had attended conferences, or came as part of a larger subscription arrangement such as from the FDLP, or a looseleaf subscription, etc.) but not easy to catalog, organize and preserve.

I’m very concerned that all material that is “born digital” is, by definition, ephemeral. The recent Amazon/1984 fiasco demonstrated to us that nothing digital is permanent - even if you “bought it” from a reputable dealer. Another example: I was recently referred to Lawrence Lessig’s presentation, “Free Culture,” presented at the 2002 Open Source Conference, as being one of the best presentations, ever. I followed the links to watch the presentation. It’s not available online any more! Not even at Lessig’s own, lessig.org website. I’ve no doubt that this may be a temporary situation and that the presentation can be put back online as easily as it was taken away. The point is, the digital content can be changed - no matter what - with the click of a mouse. No mater what. No matter what! (I’m repeating myself on purpose to challenge those objections in your head.) No matter what....

When I raise the issue of digital information’s archival value, publishers look at me with a look of understanding and empathy, then say, “There are ways to make it permanent. That’s not a problem any more.” I’m sorry, it’s still is a problem. People with links to Lessig’s Free Culture presentation thought that the link they used was permanent. People who bought 1984 from Amazon thought their copy was permanent. Duh. As far as I can tell at this point, the only way to make the material absolutely permanent is to commit it to some format that IS permanent. Etch it in stone, if you like. But a hard disk, e-book reader - even a very expensive one is simply not permanent. No way. No how.

And it’s something that we have to start worrying about or we’re going to be responsible for a catastrophe of remarkable scope. Ask Carl Malamud about going back and “digitizing” Betamax tapes of federal hearings and programs. How easy was it to find betamax players to use to get the material off the tapes? How long will it take before the data on our present servers needs to moved to the next generation of servers. Will we (or whoever the custodians are) move all the data? Or only the data that’s used most often? Most recently? Perhaps only the “good” stuff. The “important” stuff.” Who decides?

If all legal information is “born digital,” a la The Durham Statement, various digital commons, etc., it is my opinion that all of it becomes ephemeral, and this means fluid, quick moving and able to adapt and recombine like a virus. When the law (primary, secondary and everything in between) is published ephemerally like this, how can it possibly be stored, organized and preserved for posterity, scholarship or practice with the level of consistency and authority that users of legal information have taken for granted in the past?

In today’s information economy, when someone wants to see, for example, the first (English) edition of Burlamaqui’s Principles of Natural Law, it’s piece of cake. Once you locate a copy, or a reprint, there it is. The person can hold it, scan it and quickly satisfy him/herself that the copy is authentic. Unless it’s a counterfeit, just holding the book satisfies the user.

What is the equivalent for an article or a book that your find online? Whether it’s in a BePress Digital Commons, a blog, Intelliconnect, Lexis or Westlaw, we’ve not yet developed a technology that can communicate a document’s veracity and authority beyond a doubt.

In my book, it’s all becoming ephemeral....

What's More I'm Need of Preservation, Primary or Secodary Legal Materials?

I'm inclined to think that secondary materials are in greater danger of disappearing from the Public's access than are primary materials - if only because they are being distributed in ways that keep them out of reach: restrictive licensing agreements; great cost in obtaining access; and, pragmatic obstacles, such as lack of bandwidth or lack of adequate equipment. Since secondary materials are the true keys to unlocking the meaning of primary law, might not the consequences be dire?


-- Richard Leiter

Getting to the REAL Issues Regarding U Presses Going Digital

On March 25, Inside Higher Education ran an editorial by Scott McLemee titled, "A Change is Gonna Come." McLemee is obviously a bright guy and correctly parses the issues surrounding digital scholarship. He also presents a very balanced discussion of the pros and cons. I encourage everyone in the academy and in libraries to read the piece carefully.

I think that there IS a danger of University Presses becoming blogs. And my fears aren't related to my "luddite" orientation as a library and book-hugger. I am worried about scholars and researchers' ability to conduct research effectively and consistently with reliable authority.

The million dollar question is, Will future (near and far) readers of scholarly works be able to find the materials cited in them?

But the "nearer" term question is will monographs and articles published digitally be vetted as thoroughly as those published in traditional formats? McLemee points out that there is no logical reason that this can't be so. Obviously, modern scholarly journals and books can be subjected to at least as much editorial scrutiny as print versions of the same, and I think that the skeptics, instead of being "luddites" are simply looking for assurances that they will be subject to the same level of scrutiny. So far, those assurances haven't been forthcoming.

There is another issue that McLemee doesn't raise that gives me, as a librarian, the most pause about diving into this revolution with both feet: that is preservation. What guarantees are in place, or that can be put in place that will assure users that the material will remain the same as it was when published? One feature of print materials is that once it is printed and distributed, it is very difficult to change without issuing new editions of the work. (It's annoying enough when publishers make corrections from printing to printing....) When a work is published digitally today, how will a reader in ten years know that it is the same work? (I'm not even raising the question of whether the future reader will even be able to find and read the work born digital today.) I've heard all the arguments that print's no better. It can burn up, get soaked, be mislaid, etc. But so what? We do our best with whatever format we're working with. Digital formats can't give us any better assurances that it will remain more accessible or consistent than print. It's just in a "cooler", "hipper" format. And we have much less experience with digital than we have with print. We know how to care for print, and we know that it we take care of it properly it will last for hundred and hundred of years.

Skeptics aren't luddites, or obstacles to progress at all. We're cautious. We're careful. And I think that there's a chance that early adopters and technophiles will some day thank us.

Lexis and West are Losing Money? Oh My!

Weird. I just looked up Reed Elsevier’s and Thomson Reuters’ stock quotes for the recent past. In the case of Thomson, Yahoo! Finance’s charts only go back a couple of years, and in the case of Reed Elsivier they go back much further. If stock is any indication of anything at all, it’s the company’s profitability. And over the long haul, both companies are not doing well at all. The charts show a general decline. In the case of Reed Elsevier, it's about at the same place it was ten or fifteen years ago. Surprising? I think so. How in the world can companies with such great, vital products be loosing money?

Lack of foresight. They failed to create the next generation of information product when they had the means. They’ve stayed loyal to what they know: sell what you’ve got, and keep it that way! Instead of innovating and using the tools at their disposal and distributing their product with the greatest of ease, they have priced themselves and their products out of existence.

As Carl Malmud and others advocate for thorough and free distribution of all public information, and as technology and technologists rise to meet the challenge with elegance and facility, the Big Two (three, if you count Volters Kluwer) are marketing themselves out of existence despite a veritable intellectual gold mine in hand, the main things that make their products special: secondary titles, digests and indexes and compilations of all sorts.

The free public information movement will surely supplant the Big Two/Three’s ability to publish primary materials. But they can’t supplant their ability to publish the secondary materials that help us make sense of it all.

If the Big Two/Three go out of business because of poor business practices, bad judgement and lack of vision, God help us. I’m serious. If scholarship fails, (which is what secondary materials are, after all) then culture fails. When culture fails, so do civilizations.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think that our legal system is mighty important for maintaining order, and even if I think that it can stand with a tweak or two here of there; it’s worth saving and maintaining.

Somehow, the news that Lexis and West (and CCH) were loosing money sent a chill up my spine....

Welcome Back to the Real World

It occurs to me that the future is finally here. At last week's AALS meeting, there was nary a word about "the future of libraries"! All library programs, meetings and discussions were actually about managing libraries, studying legal information and striving to improve services and collections. It was inspiring. I just hope that we librarians have gotten over our infatuation with speculating about how technology will impact us (which is nonsense, because no amount of speculation will change it's impact - it's a train going forward and we simply need to adopt it, adapt it and use it, as we've always done).

It's time to get back to business and work on developing theories and practices that help us cope with shrinking resources. The expectation is that we will continue to improve collection growth and development with less money. This means we have to be clever and knowledgeable about what it is we are collecting. I think that in many ways, we've wasted a lot of time in the last twenty years trying to predict a future, instead of studying the present.

As a result we've fallen behind the curve and are not well-equipped to deal with the future that none of us predicted: Publishers who no longer consider us partners in providing legal information to lawyers, students and the public, but who see us as consumers. Legal publishers are not trying to please users of legal information by providing quality access to material, they are trying to please share-holders. That means that the only thing worth producing is what will generate the greatest profit. This has fundamentally shifted the paradigm. Books, databases, reporters, online services, etc., are now all widgets.

The encouraging thing is that no matter what legal publishers do, legal information will still exist. What we law librarians now need to focus on is to find ways to continue to provide it to our patrons - without the help of publishers, if they choose to price those materials out of our libraries.

AALL "Blawg" Gets It Right - Mostly

While anyone can look back through writings of various technology naysayers and cautionary pundits of the past (including yours truly) and find warnings about how the rapid (and thoughtless, apparently) wholesale adoption of technology for publication of legal information, it's turning out to be much more complicated than that.

Simply taking snapshots of Agency websites won't capture the important information that we're loosing. In fact, it captures more useless stuff than valuable. After all, who needs to know how, say, the Immigration Office coded their homepage? The important stuff is what's at the other end of the links, the data. Knowing that a link to a report was present in an agency page isn't as important as the report itself. If that only exists as an html or other form of e-document and it's wiped out, who cares about the link?

As I've said a zillion times before, all important government information should be in e-format only as a secondary, back-up format. The primary format of everything that's important should be in print.

All e-formats, by their natures are ephemeral. Until that conundrum is solved, "preservation of electronic material" is an oxymoron.

Breaking Through to the Other Side

For years now, much of library conversations have been about books vs. online sources. I've always rejected the notion that we need to make choices between the two formats. There's no war going on, and I think that the "death of the book" pundits always understate the value of print, at the expense of some fundamental values that libraries possess, vis a vis collecting, sorting and storing information for researchers and scholars.

Well, it occurred to me this morning that the whole debate is nonsense. Fights over format are purely economic and commercial. What our job is, as librarians, is to understand and organize the bibliography of law - regardless of format. Whoopty-doo, some firm or developer is developing a really cool website or search engine. Does that mean that books are dead or dying? Who cares?! It merely means that we have yet another neat tool for research, and the law has found yet another neat place to dwell.

And so it goes.

"EDUCATING LAWYERS" (PARTIAL REVIEW)

I'm just starting to read a fascinating book, "Educating Lawyers," by Sullivan, Colby, Wenger, Bond and Shulman. It's a book about legal education (obviously) published in conjunction with The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. I'm going to be commenting on it from time time as I read through it looking for information on how legal research factors into the authors' view of legal education as a skill.

Two immediate reactions jump out: First, there is no entry in the index for legal research. But there are several for legal writing. Why is this? Are writing instructors more vocal than librarians, who clearly have the ultimate responsibility, not to mention the expertise, for training law students in the techniques and theories of legal research? If this is so, this clearly indicates that librarians have dropped an important ball. Or is it that research is much more intangible than writing skills which produces something tangible, such as a document, and is therefore overlooked? In this case, librarians have dropped the ball in approaching the topic of legal research as a substantive course of study. I think that it's the latter.

Research is a skill that depends on intimate knowledge of how legal information works (where it comes from and where it goes and how), much more than a study of how to use different tools of legal bibliography.

Second, there is a very curious and surprising sentence in the Introduction, on page 6, in the third line of that page, "Students taught from Langdell's case books were being introduced by their professors to legal research, much as a laboratory or seminar professor in the arts and sciences of those days would have led students to grasp the principles organizing the particular domain..... Through this new procedure, Langdell updated a central tradition of classical jurisprudence: American law was now to be analyzed by academic specialists and criticized in the light of general ideas and principles." This is a very insightful observation. But it presumes the existence and respect of secondary sources and a complex system of organizing case law. As students are introduced to legal principles through the study of cases, treatises and cross-referencing systems aid the student and lawyer to get to the materials needed to answer specific research questions.

But here is where the book gets interesting. The first full paragraph contains this gem: "In the first place, up-to-date legal scholarship was to turn the jumble of court decisions into synthetic overviews or treatises that could organize and explain various areas of the law. Then the school would train future lawyers the way scientists are trained, teaching them to do legal research amid actual cases in the library...." This is a very key observation. Just as Kent, Bacon and even the writers of the classic encyclopedias and the restatements saw their role as attempts to simplify and synthesize the rules of law that were buried amid a morass of ambiguous and sometimes contradictory case law, all treatises and secondary materials' primary importance is in their ability synthesis and clearly state what are the rules of law. (Royalties and ego stroking notwithstanding.)

This is a key element of what legal research instructors must get across to our students: we must educate them to understand that treatises aren't merely old-fashioned legacies of the past; they are valuable tools that help skilled researchers get to the heart of the matter.

In light of the rise of online services and their ability to bring researchers into direct access to primary materials, this is a very interesting observation indeed. If you cut out the middle man, ie, the treatise writer/scholar who produces secondary material, efficiency in researching will not only decline (to the online services great benefit, because researchers will spend more time online trying to make heads or tails out of case law), but it may lead to the sort of crisis in our legal system such as Kent warned about in his commentaries, volume one, page 441-442 (1826): "The evils resulting from an indigestible heap of laws, and legal authorities, are great and manifest. They destroy the certainty of the law, and promote litigation, delay and subtilty [sic]."

Online services' great virtue is that they bring researchers face to face with primary sources. Online services greatest curse is that it brings researchers face to face with primary sources, without mediation. This is a very dangerous thing, indeed.

Where Were the Lawyers When....?

People are up in arms about the big air tanker contract going to Airbus (a foreign company). Where were the protesters when foreign nationals took over the publication of US laws? Good grief, West, Lexis, CCH, Aspen, Matthew-Bender, RIA, Lawyer's Co-Op are all now owned by Canadian, British or Dutch companies. That's got to amount to nearly 90% of all commercial legal materials. And now they're squeezing us for every penny we own, and most of that revenue is flowing outside the US. Isn't that something to be protested?

There were protestations, to be sure. But compared to the uproar about the air tankers, narry a peep!

Time for New Classification System?

The character of legal information is changing in the fact that the breadth of what qualifies as legal information is changing. Just as librarians have struggled in the past with incorporating new formats into existing collections and classification schemes, we need now to be creative in figuring out how to capture, preserve and classify new mercurial formats such as podcasts, blogs and twitters.... The adjective "mercurial" only describes a fraction of the challenge....

Internet and Legislative History

Legislative history is, essentially, whatever sources you can find that help reveal the intent of the legislative body in it's conduct, usually passing legislation. But the principle also applies to actions of the executive branch, and, therefore, includes hearings, speeches, correspondence, reports (commissioned or otherwise), and whatever else a resourceful researcher can uncover or discover.

Today, blogs, webpages and email will qualify as sources of legislative history. And there's a lot of it. I think that this turns the whole idea of understanding teaching of legal research on it's head: it's not about the sources or knowing what they are, it's understanding how information gets from one place to another. Where do legislative ideas come from? Where do they go? How do they get there?