The interim law librarian: Part 3 - secondary sources

Primary sources (that is, case law and legislation) are partly discussed in another post.    

Secondary sources are commentaries on those primary sources, so, books and journal articles are secondary sources, as are websites and news sources.   

A book might be a textbook for students, or a more detailed book about a narrower area of law, for practitioners.    Or it might be something encyclopaedic like Halsbury's Statutes of England.

Primary sources are authoritative.    Secondary sources are useful and may lead you to primary sources, which you would then track down.

You might use secondary sources in an assignment or if writing another secondary source, as you discuss primary sources.   You would not, I think, use them in court, although you might use them to locate cases and legislation to use.  

In a similar way, in health, you would not include books as "evidence" in evidence based practice, if you could find research studies in articles.   

We have several collections of ebooks, with different behaviours when it comes to automatically getting new editions, and different interactions with our discovery system (one does not interact, so the books are not in the "Library catalogue").   

Some journals are in those collections with the ebooks, although some are published by publishers that this health librarian is more familiar with and appear in their collections.

I wonder what there is in these books and journals about medical and health law, that is not discoverable in the health librarian's favourite sources.

I also wonder if our health students ever need to use legal sources, particularly the primary ones.

Both of those things need their own blogpost, and first, some research!