The most widely read magazine for Canadian lawyers
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/50810
TECH SUPPORT keyword and boolean searching and en- sure the best matches come to the top of a search list. IUS also adds automated tagging or clustering of documents. "The theory is it can do away with the labourious task of manually add- ing taxonomies or descriptions to your documents. It'll put all memos on prod- uct liability in a folder, for example," says Tjaden. This raises the question of whether some of the central tasks of knowledge management — "harvesting" documents from the document manage- ment system and tagging them — will even be necessary in the future. If smart search can reliably fi nd exactly the right documents without tagging, why bother going through labour-intensive process- es? Tjaden isn't ready to talk himself or others out of a job, but he agrees technol- ogy will play a larger role in future. Librarians, he says, look at every item and catalogue it by topic according to the Library of Congress classifi cation system. That's not possible with electronic docu- ment repositories. "We have four million documents on the system. There's no way you can apply the same level of detail to [that many items]. The reality is there are too many documents for human beings to process. So the hope has to be that smart searches get smarter and will pull relevant COOL 'CORDERS W e present another two-fer gadget watch this issue: two products from Olympus, maker of the digital voice recorders used by lawyers everywhere. Neither model is brand new, but each has interesting features to recommend it. Olympus calls the DS-5000 ($600 or less) a "pro- fessional dictation" product to differentiate it from the company's line of more general-purpose digital recorders. It's not available at retail — you buy it from specialty firms that sell directly to law firms. The LS-10 (about $400) is a different kettle of fish. DS-5000 It can serve as a voice recorder, but also offers near-professional quality music recording in a device not much bigger than the DS-5000. Why would you want to spend this much on a digital recorder? The DS-5000 is dead simple to use, with a slider control on the side in good thumb position, and it includes three programmable buttons. It's a portable recorder but can also function as a microphone when attached to your PC for direct recording to a hard drive — something earlier Olympus recorders, like the DS-2 that I use, cannot do. This recorder comes with a rechargeable lithium-ion battery and a recharging/ docking cradle — again, unlike earlier models that use AAA cells and offer no recharging cradle. The DS-5000 comes with 512 MB of memory — enough to hold over 38 hours of best quality recording using Olympus' proprietary digital recording format. And you can buy much larger-capacity SD (secure digital) and microSD cards. Best quality recordings sound excellent — your assistant won't miss a word, even if you mumble. This product also off ers a bunch of automatic functions: retrieval of typed documents, distribution of recordings via e-mail, etc. In other words, it's the complete package. The LS-10? Well, if you harbour aspirations to trade in the law for music, you could use this baby to record your demo tracks. Just tell your offi ce or procurement manager you need it for dictation. — GB exco_LT_Survey_Dec11_06.indd 1 22 FEBRU AR Y 2009 www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com 11/29/06 1:41:01 PM Gadget Watch