China Data Online

The ULS informs us that the database China Data Online is now available to us and can be found on their database website. It comes from the China Data Center at the University of Michigan - a national center designed to advance the study and understanding of China. This resource provides statistical data on China: national, regional, and local; economic, social, and historical. Census data is included.

GPO's National Technical Information Service

LIBRARIANS ONLY, PLEASE: We've signed up for the free pilot program with the GPO -NTIS. To check it out, email me for the login information, and go to the to the URL: http://www.ntis.gov/fdlp.

Websites about Congress

Peggy Garvin writes on LLRX about 2 websites about Congress, take a look. I use one of them, GovTrack, all the time; it has the same info as Thomas but is organized in a more meaningful way. The other website, Open Congress , is very new; I've looked at it but haven't used it extensively yet.

Black Women Writers database

Another announcement from Dennis Smith at ULS about a new database:
"Black Women Writers from Alexander Street Press is now available online.
This resource contains the full-text of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by women from North America, Africa, and the Caribbean as well as essays by scholars and feminists about the history of feminism and genre studies in these regions. There are currently 13,000 pages of text in this resource. It will eventually contain approximately 100,000 pages.”
It’s a work in progress; you can easily browse the database at http://alexanderstreet2.com/blwwlive/ to see if any of your faculty liaisons might use it.

Patry on Copyright in Westlaw

Patry on Copyright is now available on Westlaw - the database name is Patrycopy, and you can search or browse the treatise that West calls the " most comprehensive copyright law resource ever written."
The print version (available in our collection) is seven-volumes and 5,500-pages. Patry discusses all areas of copyright law and provides legislative history on the key statutes. He offers circuit-by-circuit analysis in several areas, including remedies and the design of useful articles. He provides extensive treatment of remedial, jurisdictional, choice of law, and international issues.
PATRYCOPY can be searched in the usual way. You can also use the Table of Contents service to browse the whole publication.
Search example:
To retrieve sections that discuss Ninth Circuit approaches to similarity issues, you could restrict your Terms and Connectors search to the title (ti) and prelim (pr) fields, e.g., ti,pr(9th /2 circuit & similar!).
Search example:
To retrieve sections that discuss the fair use defense for library photocopying, click the Natural Language tab at the PATRYCOPY Search page and type a Natural Language description of the issue in the Search text box, e.g., when does library photocopying constitute fair use.
William Patry also has a blog to keep his treatise updated at http://www.patrytreatise.blogspot.com/, and he has another blog about copyright athttp://williampatry.blogspot.com/.
SL

Track Federal Regulations

Tim Stanley at Justia has launched another free resource: Regulation Tracker, which tracks Federal Register Regulations, Proposed Rules and Notices. The database can currently be searched back to 2005 by date, agency, keyword. You can also browse by government agency. The site is currently in beta mode.

Microfiche scanner update

This week we will be getting another microfiche reader/scanner. We are trading in the 2 old microfiche readers (which have scarcely been used since we got our first microfiche scanner) and getting a new scanner which will be hooked up to one of the Lab 1 computers that we took out. The long table that currently holds the fax machine and paper cutter will be moved into the microfiche room to hold the new machines.

hollow wiki

Well here's something strange. I was reading something on Sabrina Pacifici's LLRx this morning, specifically I was looking at a page titled "Law Pro Links" and I clicked on a link she provided to " WikiLex is an on-line public, community maintained legal resource specifically geared for the United States legal market". The link took me to WikiLex, so it does exist, but there is zero content, except for a home page that lists a dozen or so legal topics. The legal topics have links, but there is no actual content on any of the pages. I guess we (anyone who clicks?) are supposed to provide our own content.

Federal District Court civil case filings

Tim Stanley at Justia has blogged about tweaks to their free Website featuring civil case filings in US District Courts. The website provides links into Pacer for the full docket and filing information and links to online News, Finance, Web and Blog resources. The website allows you to search and track new case filings by State, Court, Lawsuit Type (eg Patent Law) or Party name. They update daily and provide an RSS feed. Currently the information goes back to Jan. 1 2006, but if there is demand they will add older information.

New ULS databases

Dennis Smith, who does Collection Development for ULS, announced yesterday that two new databases have been added, and can be found in the A to Z list. Neither is of any obvious interest to legal researchers, but you never know.

1. The Synthesis Digital Library of Engineering and Computer Science:
The basic component of the Synthesis library is a 50 to 100 page electronic book, or "lecture", that synthesizes an important research or development topic, authored by a prominent contributor to the field. Records for individual titles are not currently available in PITTCat, but should be at some point in the future.

2. The British Periodicals Database traces the development and growth of the periodical press in Britain from its origins in the seventeenth century through to the Victorian 'age of periodicals' and beyond. On completion this unique digital archive will consist of almost 500 periodical runs published from the 1680s to the 1930s. A wide array of different types of periodicals are represented, from magisterial quarterlies and scholarly and professional organs through to coterie art periodicals, penny weeklies and illustrated family magazines.

Civil Law Dictionary Wiki

Vicenç Feliú, Esq., a librarian at Louisiana State University, has started a wiki project called the Civil Law Dictionary Wiki, to 'splain Civil Law terminology to all us Common Law folks (Louisiana is our only civil law state). He's also blogging about the wiki in his Civil Law Blog.

tgif

A couple of things:
The White House website has been redesigned. I haven't really explored it, if anybody does and finds anything remarkable please let me know!
A professor at Loyola Law School in LA named Theodore Seto has recently published a paper on SSRN in which he analyzes how US News does its law school rankings. The article is entitled Understanding the U.S. News Law School Rankings.