THOMAS beta and “findability”

For both technological and broader advocate “usability” reasons, it may be of interest to take a look at Peggy Garvin’s recent article, The Government Domain: Testing the THOMAS Beta at LLRX. The THOMAS site has, since its inception, been a virtual leviathan and among the most widely used federal government sites within the legal services community. It is notable and of practical consequence that THOMAS has made available a beta version of significant changes on the horizon with how it alters user access to its vast sources of legislative and other legal information. Garvin highlights a number of those changes, including a change in the underlying search software, a move towards more unified, single search functions (further evidence of how the Google global search paradigm increasingly impacts approaches toward search usability), an apparent move away from separate or categorized keynumber-specific searches (e.g, searching by a specific bill number), and changes in the presentation of search results and search navigation. As the age of findability matures, there is likely to be more and more articles of this kind as findability becomes a more widely understood but challenging element of good web design and web application development. Ambient Findability is part of the current canon on these sort of issues.