Custom Search
The Search Portal fo the Encyclopedia of Law is designed to provide a simple, more user-friendly approach to searching for novice users while maintaining powerful options for users who require them. The interface provides access to more than 200 Legal Portals of the Encyclopdia of Law.
The Encyclopedia of Law may be serving as a guide to legal researchers to help them be more effective in their work by enabling and expediting discovery, aiding the management and organization of quality information and providing tools to assist in its subsequent dissemination.
Controlled Vocabulary
Keywords are very effective when searching for information about specific people, places, or things that have unique names. When searching for information about concepts that can be expressed in multiple ways it is more effective to use classified Web directories. A directory controls for synonyms and homonyms and provides context for the index terms by placing them in a hierarchical structure. It has often been suggested in the indexing literature that the two ways of indexing documents complement each other and should be used in combination (for example Svenonius, Fidel and Rowley).
A major disadvantage of a keyword search is that it does not take into account the meaning of the words used as search terms, so if a term has more than one meaning, irrelevant records may be retrieved.
When you do a subject search or a descriptor search in a portal of the Encyclopedia of Law, only the subject headings or descriptors may be searched for words that match your search terms. In the Legal Thesaurus of the Encyclopedia of Law, law terms are assigned subject headings as access points to assist users in locating the content. These subject headings might be subdivided with more information or include a parenthetical note to clarify the meaning (example: Divorce (Family Law)). Using subject headings ensures that all law terms about the same topic have consistent subject headings and so they can all be accessed with one search term.
The Legal Thesaurus display may be:
- Alphabetical Index
- Hierarchy
- Rotated Index
MultiSearch
See more about Multisearch here.