More info on FDsys

The GovernmentBookTalk blog has a post with concise information about FDsys- including that "those in the know" know to pronounce it "F D sis". GPO exited the internet yesterday, March 16. The blogpost informs us that FDsys boasts key enhancements to GPO Access that allow users from librarians to scholars, researchers, lawyers and the public to:

• Easily search across multiple Government publications; 
• Perform advanced searches against robust metadata about each publication; 
• Construct complex search queries; 
• Refine and narrow searches; 
• Retrieve individual Government documents and publications in seconds directly from each search result; 
• View more information about a publication and access multiple file formats for each search result; 
• Access metadata in standard XML formats; 
• Download content and metadata packaged together as a single ZIP file; 
• Browse FDsys alphabetically by collection, by Congressional committee, by date, and by Government author; and 
• Utilize extensive help tools and tutorials.

citing tweets?

Digital Inspiration has a post titled "The Proper Way to Cite Tweets in Your Paper". The author notes that "tweets, though still limited to 140 characters, regularly inspire news stories in traditional media, researchers cite tweets in their academic papers and authors have written complete books using curated tweets " He goes on to provide two widely used academic citation styles - the APA (American Psychological Assocation) and MLA (Modern Language Association) - for citations to Twitter. Bluebook style is not mentioned.

There's an excellent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today called "Digital Magic Preservation for a New Era".  It's by an English professor who talks about the problem of keeping our writings accessible even if they are preserved in formats that are obsolete or becoming obsolete, like floppy disks and CDs.  

Goodbye GPO Access

News from the Federal Depository Library Program:  On March 16, 2012 (not coincidentally, James Madison's birthday), after 16 years of keeping America informed, GPO Access will shut down for good. URL redirects will be enabled to send users to the FDsys equivalent of GPO Access resources.

Vuitton claims Penn Law IP symposium poster infringes their trademark

An post on the Business Law Post blog has an interesting story. The University of Pennsylvania Law School's Penn Intellectual Property Group is planning a March 20 symposium on Fashion Law. The students hosting the symposium designed a poster that parodies the well-known Louis Vuitton handbag design, with copyright and trademark symbols inserted into the design. This triggered a cease-and-desist letter from Louis Vuitton to the law school's dean. However, Penn's general counsel disagreed in a response that discusses willful infringement and parody.

PA ethics for cloud computing

The Pennsylvania Bar Association's Committee on Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility has published an ethics opinion (20 page pdf) on the use of cloud computing by attorneys. It discusses the risks and benefits of using cloud computing for storage of potentially sensitive information, with access both from computers and portable devices such as smart phones. The committee provides a long list of specific precautions and questions to ask in the development of an office’s data storage practices and discusses the risks and precautions necessary in the use of web-based email services. The PA opinion joins a growing body of ethics opinions and reports about the use of cloud computing in law firms, warning that care must be taken in choosing vendors as protective provisions granted to data can vary substantially.

US - Canadian joint law degree program

The University of Houston Law Center and the University of Calgary Faculty of Law have announced a new program, beginning in fall 2012, that will allow students to obtain U.S. and Canadian law degrees in four years. In the International Energy Lawyers Program, law students at the universities of Calgary and the University of Houston Law Center will earn both Canadian and American law degrees in four years, rather than six years if the two degrees were done separately. Students will spend two years at each law school and take courses that will enable them to be admitted to bars in the United States and Canada. The program will focus on on preparing students to practice natural resources, energy and environmental law.

PA Code still available in print, but index is online-only

A recent discussion on the law librarian listserv has alerted PA legal researchers that the master index to the print Pennsylvania Code is dead. Yes, that's right, the PA Code itself is still published in print, but without an index. As several librarians have pointed out, the death of the index "makes the print set pretty much unusable". Apparently, one is supposed to use the online index when referring to the print PA Code. One librarian at a multi-office firm says that she investigated this with with Fry Communications, the publisher of the official Code, and learned that Fry was instructed by the PA Legislative Bureau (i.e. the Commonwealth of PA), that the Index would no longer be produced and that subscribers should be told to pitch their current Master Index and Finding Aids contents. 

Consumer Advocacy Caucus on vendor business practices

The blog of the newly formed Consumer Advocacy Caucus of the AALL is asking  law librarians for thoughts on significant anti-consumer problems with legal information vendors in law libraries. Once they identify a problem they expect to survey AALL members to discern the nature and scope of how the problem is affecting law libraries. As an example, they say "according to Principle 3.2(a) of AALL’s Guide to Fair Business Practices for Legal Publishers, “[p]ublishers should not bind their customers to a non-disclose clause as a non-negotiable requirement of doing business.” But many information service providers appear to have routinely violated this principle, severely compromising our ability to make informed purchasing decisions on behalf of our employers. Does this problem deserve our attention for a survey and first recommendation, or does some other problem concern you even more?"

Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act

AALL reports that the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA) has been introduced in California (SB 1075), Colorado (HB 1209) and Tennessee (SB 2894 and HB 3656). AALL members in those states are working closely with AALL's Government Relations Office, state legislators, the Uniform Law Commission and allies to ensure passage. The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act would make specified legislative materials, bills, codes, and statutes available to the public in electronic form and provides  for the official designation, authentication, and preservation of certain legal material in electronic records by an official publisher.

Vote for your favorite legal movie line

Bloomberg Law has put together a collection of video clips titled the "10 funniest, most moving, or most inspiring legal movie lines." After you watch the clips, you can vote for the one that you think is the best of the best.

New version of Word Perfect

Law Technology News reports that an upgraded version of Corel's WordPerfect is available this spring. The article is subtitled "Does It Matter?" and goes on to discuss the history of WordPerfect and its decline, saying that "the only fiercely loyal users are older attorneys at very small firms."

WestlawNext Enhancements

WestlawNext recently prepared a document titled "Westlaw Next Enhancements: 2011 Year in Review", with a month-by-month listing of the additions and improvements to WestlawNext. The list is too lengthy to reproduce here, but it is pretty impressive and seems to indicate a commitment to enhancing Next with additional features and improvements.  One of the new  features is that you can use Next on an iPad to move documents you are using offline so that you can review and annotate your research even when you don’t have an internet connection.

Love Fonts

It's probably too late to send a Valentine in the mail but you can still design and make a beeeautiful card for someone you love using these 99 Valentine fonts from Designorati. Note that these fonts are for PCs, but he includes a link to a site where you can convert them to Mac.

Legislative Data and Transparency Conference

The Committee on House Administration held a Legislative Data and Transparency Conference in Washington D.C. on February 2, 2012 and their website now has video of the conference. There is more information about what went on during the conference, as well as links to blogposts and ppt presentations, available on Rob Richards' Legal Informatics Blog.

ABA supports Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act

The ABA Journal reports that the ABA House of Delegates has approved Resolution 102B  in support of the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act, governing the authentication and preservation of laws, court decisions and other legal materials published online. According to the article, the resolution was approved by a voice vote, though a significant number of delegates voted against the resolution. The accompanying Report on the Uniform Law states that "TUELMA addresses the critical need to manage electronic legal information in a manner that guarantees the trustworthiness of and continuing access to important state legal material. The goals of the authentication and preservation standards contained in the act are to enable end-users to verify the trustworthiness of the legal material they are using and to provide a framework for states to preserve legal material in perpetuity in a manner that allows for permanent access."

Do students own copyright in the notes they take in class?

MindShift is a blog that covers current topics in technology and education, and it recently featured an interesting post titled "Do Students Have Copryight to Their Own Notes?".  The post looks at how universities, especially in California, are restricting how students can share notes, and how these policies raise questions about whether teachers or students have copyrights to the notes taken in class. 

Pittsburgh Data and Map resource

Pittsburgh's  Department of City Planning has created a new website called PGHSNAP, providing city neighborhood data and interactive maps.  According to the website, they've done this "because we believe that public information should not only be easily accessible, but easily understood". All of the 90 datasets presented in PGHSNAP are already available to the public, but are housed in many different locations, with varying degrees of difficulty in accessing them. Many are organized at differing levels of analysis, and aren't available by Pittsburgh neighborhood. PGHSNAP has taken those datasets and organized them by neighborhood and put them into an easy to understand format.  The interactive map is particularly useful, allowing you to zoom in and out on areas of Pittsburgh and providing layers that can be added to the map, including "Public Amenity",  "Planning and Development", "Political", and "Environmental" layers.

hat tip: Nate Traurig

PA Supreme Court redistricting opinion online

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Friday struck down the recent legislative redrawing of state House and Senate district maps.   In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Ron Castille said the proposal developed by the state Legislative Reapportionment Commission, which drew the new districts, overstepped the law by unnecessarily dividing counties and municipalities across the state. In the official decision handed down Friday afternoon, the justices explained the 4-3 decision against the newly proposed state House and Senate maps last week and detailed what changes should be made for the maps to meet constitutional muster.
The majority opinion, 2 concurring opinions and 1 dissenting opinion are all available on the PA Supreme Court website.

hat tip: Joel Fischman

Free CALI webinar, Topics in Digital Law Practice

CALI is offering a free nine-week, online web-based course on Topics in Digital Law Practice to help address these issues beginning on Friday, Feb. 10, 2012 at 2pm ET. The course is designed to provide an overview of the changes that are occurring in the practice of law today, especially with respect to technology. It will introduce law students for real-world situations that they will encounter in the job market and point law professors to new avenues to cover in their courses. The course will run for one hour a week for nine weeks and will feature a different guest speaker each week. Each class will be delivered via webcast and will have a 30 minute lecture presentation followed by a question & answer period and an online, interactive homework assignment for all course students to complete. There will be no formal assessment like a final exam. The detailed schedule, with topics and speakers,  is available on the CALI website  Attendees need to register for the course . This offer is open to faculty, students, and librarians.

Email providers work together to stop phishing

Information Week reports that the big free Email-service providers Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and AOL Inc., along with financial service companies Bank of America and Paypal, are backing a new effort intended to dramatically reduce "phishing" emails which attempt to trick recipients into thinking they come from a legitimate source. To achieve that, the firms have created DMARC.org, a working group of 15 companies that plans to promote a standard set of technologies that they say will lead to more secure email, making email more trustworthy and phishing more difficult.
Besides email providers and financial-service firms, initial participants include social-networking companies such as Facebook Inc. and LinkedIn Corp. and messaging-security providers such as Agari Data Inc. DMARC chairman Brett McDowell says it won't cost a lot for companies to start using the standards, but it will require them to identify every server that sends email and ensure that the technologies are in use. The same holds true for third-party firms such as marketing agencies that send email on behalf of a company.

law school lunch theft "epidemic"

Above the Law reports that there has been a rash of student lunch thefts at the UCLA School of Law. The law school's administration sent an email to all the students reminding them that "there is no locking mechanism on the student refrigerator. As such, you always assume the risk of using the student refrigerator". Shortly after this report, another lunch theft email, this time at Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, KS, was reported.

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries

The Association of Research Libraries has just published the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries, which was developed in partnership with American University's Center for Social Media and Washington College of Law. The Code identifies eight situations where there is consensus about acceptable practices in the fair use of copyrighted materials. Librarians affirm that fair use is appropriate in each of these contexts, providing helpful guidance about the scope of best practice in each. The Code states that “This is a code of best practices in fair use devised specifically by and for the academic and research library community. It enhances the ability of librarians to rely on fair use by documenting the considered views of the library community about best practices in fair use, drawn from the actual practices and experience of the library community itself." Pitt Law professor Mike Madison was a member of the legal advisory board that helped develop the Code.

First US county gets Super wi-fi

Wilmington, North Carolina and New Hanover County have deployed the first "Super Wi-Fi" network in the US. The innovation will let the public have wireless internet access outside in county parks.  According to an article in the Wilmington StarNews Online, a new type of "white spaces" technology allows the wireless service to go through trees and thick foliage outside, something nearly impossible with the type of Wi-Fi service familiar to most. White spaces will help eliminate bandwidth constraint and will allow wireless services to reach rural areas and other places that the standard wireless signal can't access, said Alan Stillwell, deputy chief of the Federal Communications Commission's Office of Engineering and Technology. For more information, the Gizmodo Blog has a nice clear explanation of how Super Wi-Fi works. 

Wikipedia anti-SOPA protest

Wikipedia has announced that tomorrow, Wednesday, January 18, 2012, it will black out the English language Wikipedia for 24 hours as a protest against proposed legislation in the United States—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate—that Wikipedia says would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia.  The blackout will begin at  05:00 UTC (midnight in the Eastern time zone).  Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, says:

"This is an extraordinary action for our community to take - and while we regret having to prevent the world from having access to Wikipedia for even a second, we simply cannot ignore the fact that SOPA and PIPA endanger free speech both in the United States and abroad, and set a frightening precedent of Internet censorship for the world." 

Guggenheim eBooks

The Guggenheim Museum has digitized a number of out-of-print publications and is offering them free on their website - a treasury of art books. Selections from key museum titles dating back to the founding of the Guggenheim in 1937 are now freely accessible. Over 60 catalogues of Guggenheim shows were scanned in their entirety with the help of the Internet Archive project. Included in the collection are classic titles such as Alexander Calder: A Retrospective Exhibition, or the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Non-Objective Paintings (1937), one of the museum’s first publications. The website also offers the Syllabus as a finding aid, which highlights key themes, topics, and trends found in the Guggenheim archives. The Syllabus also offers suggestions for additional readings as well as links for further exploration. This is a fine example of  how creative digitization by thoughtful educators can make knowledge and learning more widely accessible to the public. 

Dewey B Strategic Asks: Is Lexis the Next Acquisition for Bloomberg?

Dewey B Strategic: Is Lexis the Next Acquisition for Bloomberg? is a thought-provoking blog post by law librarian Jean O'Grady about a report that discusses problems with Reed Elsevier's management of  LexisNexis and implies that Bloomberg Law might be in the wings waiting to possibly buy LN or some of the LN content.  

And then again, maybe Google's new search isn't so great?

Slate Magazine has an opinion piece by technology columnist Farhad Najoo that is pretty much all negative about the new Google+ search. The piece is subtitled "Google’s disastrous decision to muck up its search results with stuff from your social network", and begins "Google just broke its search engine.

Google Search + Your World

Google has just launched an update to their search engine called 'Search plus Your World,' intended to incorporate users' social network with Google search. Searches on Google will automatically provide personalized search results based on Google+ friends, sharing, pictures and likes. These personalized matches will appear along your normal search results. For example, if you are searching for images of babies, Google will now personalize your search results and give high preference to baby photos from your Google+ circles

New CALI lesson feature

Just in time for the new semester, CALI (Computer Assisted Legal Instruction) has announced a new lesson feature called CALI Lesson Resume. Many students have requested this feature; until now, when a student left a lesson before completion the score wasn't saved. With this new feature, when a student leaves a CALI lesson, the student can now return to the spot they left off with the scoring details saved. It's automatic: it doesn't matter if the student left the lesson by closing the browser, shutting down the computer, or losing internet connectivity. The only time resume is not available is when the student opts to "finalize" the lesson.

AALL on the Stop Online Piracy Act

The American Association of Law Libraries Government Relations Program has published an advocacy information statement on SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.  The statement was authored by Barco Law Library Director George Pike, who chairs the AALL Copyright Committee.  From the statement:

"AALL urges members of the House of Representatives to vote “No” on SOPA because:
- SOPA is overly broad. If used as intended, SOPA provides mechanisms for attacking websites that engagein infringing activities. However, the broad language opens too many websites to liability. For example, a library website that streams or posts content that is knowingly or unknowingly protected by copyright -- even if the post is arguably covered by fair use, or is reposted from another site -- could be subject to the sanctions by SOPA. Many websites that are neither rogue nor trying to enable infringement could be sanctioned.
- SOPA threatens free speech and fair use rights. The expansion of content-owner notice and take-down powers could be used to target fair uses and chill willingness of users to fairly utilize copyrighted works.
- SOPA inhibits free expression. SOPA discourages the use of copyrighted or potentially copyrighted works (e.g. orphan works) for any purpose, even legitimate, non-harmful ones. For example, the criminal penalties raise the specter of YouTube videos of individuals “covering” copyrighted songs being subject to criminal sanction even if their use of material is non-harmful and non-commercial."

Bibliophilia

This lovely video, the Joy of Books, comes to us from Type, a bookstore in Toronto.

hat tip: Pat Roncevich

Duncan School of Law files suit against ABA for non-accreditation

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the Duncan School of Law of Lincoln Memorial University, located in Knoxville TN, has filed suit against the ABA in federal court after learning that the ABA's accrediting arm had denied Duncan's bid for provisional accreditation. Instead of appealing the decision by the ABA, the law school  filed a  complaint on Dec. 22, 2011, in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. The school claims that an appeal would be futile because of the “complete and utter disregard” by the Council of the ABA of all the facts presented by the law school. This week the ABA filed an opposing brief with the court this week, detailing why Duncan had not fulfilled the requirements for provisional accreditation.
The school  claims that the ABA colluded with other law schools to restrain competition amongst other schools by denying accreditation for the school.  The Duncan School of Law was featured in a recent New York Times article about how the ABA's accreditation standards contribute to the high cost of a legal education.

LexisNexis Academic free online seminars

LexisNexis is hosting a series of free webinars on the LN Academic database in January and February. There is a webinar specifically addressing legal research on LN Academic offered on three different days:
Thursday, Janaury 26, 2012 2:00p.m.-3:00 p.m. (Eastern Time)
Thursday, February 16, 2012 1:00p.m.-2:00 p.m. (Eastern Time)
Thursday, March 1, 2012 1:00p.m.-2:00 p.m. (Eastern Time)
You can read more about the webinars and register for individual webinars on their Online Seminar Registration page.

Holiday gift for bibliophiles..

The CB I Hate Perfume website (from a guy who hates perfume, at least brand name perfumes) offers a scent called "In the Library" capturing "the scent of books and of the libraries where they live." As CB says,    "There are few things more wonderful than the smell of a much-loved book."
Available as perfume, home spray, and "water perfume". 

ebrary E-books Can Now Be Downloaded

The Pitt University Library System has announced that Ebrary has made their e-book collection downloadable for Pitt users. ULS has turned this feature "on" for all titles for which we have multiple user access. This includes all of the titles in our Academic Complete subscription as well as those individual titles that we have purchased with a multiple user license.
There are two download options. You can convert a book chapter (or page range) to pdf format OR you can download the full book using Adobe Digital Editions software (free download).  The books can be read with this software or transferred to compatible devices (Kindles are not compatible.) You then have access to the ebook for 14 days.  Note that there are some titles for which the full download option is not available; note also that you have to create an ebrary account to download material.

Bar Reciprocity dot com provides one-stop shopping for Bar information

There is a new website called www.BarReciprocity.com that was created to help users navigate the convoluted process of attorney bar admission.  The site  collects and organizes  information about bar exams, bar admissions,  and reciprocity  for the entire United States. It has an interactive map to help navigate the information for individual states.  The site  includes information on special licenses for special attorney categories such as Military Attorneys, law professors, and students; it also provides the pro hac vice rules and procedures (allowing attorneys to practice law in a particular proceeding in a jurisdiction where the attorney is not admitted) for all the states.

Dept. of Justice investigates ebook pricing

Business Week reports that the United States Dept. of Justice has confirmed that it is investigating the pricing of electronic books  to look at whether there was improper collusion by Apple and publishers to prevent discounting.  This comes after the EU announced on Tuesday that it is investigating possible anticompetitive practices between Apple and five major publishers, including France's Hachette Livre, German-owned Macmillan, U.K. publisher Penguin, and U.S.-based Harper Collins and Simon & Schuster.

TRAC webinar on "ICE Charging Practices in the Immigration Courts"

TRAC is offering a webinar on Weds. Dec. 7 at 2:00 p.m. on "Monitoring ICE charging practices in the Immigration Court". The webinar will include a short (approximately 15-20 minute) overview and demonstration of TRAC's newly released web monitoring tools for immigration courts, followed by a question and answer session. If you would like to join the webinar, please email TRAC.

TRAC report on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) is a non-partisan research organization associated with Syracuse University. TRAC from has prepared a report on deportation proceedings in US immigration courts, with accompanying data tools which allow tracking by charge, nationality, and specific location. TRAC's findings, based upon very recent case-by-case data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from Immigration Court files, appear to contrast with the White House's announcement that under the President's direction DHS during the past year has prioritized the removal of people who have been convicted of crimes in the United States. The data shows that in ICE-initiated Immigration Court deportation proceedings during July-September 2011, only 7,378 individuals or 13.8 percent of the total were charged with having engaged in criminal activities. The proportion of alleged "criminals" of those targeted is down significantly from the already low level of 16.5 percent during FY 2010, and has been declining steadily throughout the past year.

Want to know what plane is flying overhead?

CNET has a story about a feature that can be used with the iPhone 4S Siri app (Siri is a voice-activated assistant app built into the phone's operating system that allows users to interact with the iPhone 4S by voice). According to the article, if you tell your iPhone "Ask Wolfram what flights are overhead" it will retrieve the information and tell you the overhead airline(s), flight numbers, and altitude.
Wolfram is the database that does dynamic computations on a wide range of web-based objective data.

hat tip Ryan Vandegrift

British Library announces historical newspapers site

The British Library has announced the launch of the British Newspaper Archive, offering access to 4 million pages from 200 18th & 19th Century newspapers from the UK and Ireland. The project is a collaboration between the British Library and Dundee-based IT firm Brightsolid. Over the next 10 years the project will digitize an additional 40 million pages spanning 3 centuries. The archive includes articles reporting on the Great Exhibition of 1851 plus stories on infamous murder trials and men, women and children being transported to the other side of the world for minor crimes. It also includes eyewitness accounts of social transformation – newspaper reports, commentary and letters to the editor on topics ranging from the railway mania of the mid-19th century to the extraordinary expansion of the temperance movement; as well as advertisements and illustrations. According to the press release, "Alongside first-hand accounts of historic events such as the wedding of Victoria and Albert and the Charge of the Light Brigade, these newspapers also provide countless vivid details of how our ancestors lived and died, how they went up and down in the world and how they fed, clothed and entertained themselves."

Canadian government data free

Embassy Magazine reports that all of Statistics Canada’s standard online products, including the census, socioeconomic and geographic data, will be offered to the public for free starting February 2012. While Statistics Canada has been working towards opening up more of its data for several years, it still currently charges for some online data, including some data sets inside its its “key socioeconomic databas”, the Canadian Socioeconomic Information Management System. Researchers, economists and other individuals buy these products, and several firms are also licensed by the agency to act as redistributors. Some of those firms charge for reselling the data, and some roll it into other value-added products they sell. Organizations currently buying the data from Statistics Canada will be “encouraged” to redistribute information under the government’s new open data licence agreement.

Lawschools & Lawyering: front page news in the New York Times

Yesterday's Sunday New York Times had a lengthy  front page story titled "What they don't teach law students: lawyering."  The article discussed a lack of "practical training" in law schools, saying "Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, with classes that are often overstuffed with antiquated distinctions, like the variety of property law in post-feudal England. Professors are rewarded for chin-stroking scholarship, like law review articles with titles like “A Future Foretold: Neo-Aristotelian Praise of Postmodern Legal Theory.”"  and "nearly half of faculty members (at top tier law schools) had never practiced law for a single day."