Format

Format in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Format in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Format may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. Texts come in many shapes and styles, influenced by the medium on or in which a message is encoded, by the meaning and purpose of the message, and by the intended recipients of the message. Shape and style contribute to something we usually call format. It covers a wide spectrum of attributes, such as literary genre (poetry, narrative, drama, essay, speech, fiction, etc.), type of presentation (chart, diagram, picture, cartoon, list, etc.), and type of publication (such as book versus pamphlet versus broadside or poster on paper media, slide versus motion picture in film media). D. W. Langridge (1992, p. 28) suggests six types of attributes related to the method of selection, arrangement or display of message content under the heading of format: 1. order, how material is arranged, e.g., alphanumerically, chronologically, or in some classified order according to mutual relations of message content or features; 2. literary forms or genres (poetry, drama, essay, narrative fiction, short story); 3. reductions (abstracts, excerpts, quotations, summaries); 4. collections (encyclopedias, compendia, handbooks, readers); 5. keys to other documents (indexes, bibliographies, catalogs); and 6. rules (standards, codes, recipes). The distinction between format and medium is sometimes fuzzy. For example, the meaning of book usually includes its medium (paper) as well as its shape (leaves bound together along one edge). When the content of a book is moved to electronic media, is it still a book? Probably the meaning of book will continue to shift as the media on or in which book-like messages are conveyed change over time. After all, our word book came from the Anglo-Saxon word for beech tree, because ancient runes were once written on beech bark! The connection in German is quite close: Buche for beech tree and Buch for book.

Record Format in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Record Format in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Record Format may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. The record format defines the way that data is tagged or labeled and stored in electronic computer-readable media. Such electronic records are not generally displayed directly to end users, unless specifically requested. Rather they are used to generate the various displays that are especially designed for the end user (such as those described in chapter 16 on surrogate displays). The general principle to follow in setting up a record format is that every element of data that will be important for the implementation of any database display or search option should be separately identified. Each of these elements will have a separate field (or subfield) in the record, and each of these fields will have a name or caption, which is abbreviated or represented by some type of tag, label or notation.