USDA website redesign

The United States Dept. of Agriculture recently announced a complete redesign of thei website. According to the announcement, the  redesign features "stronger visual storytelling components, a more modern user-experience with easy to find services and resources, and to top it off, a completely mobile-friendly design. Through careful planning, thoughtful design, and a primary focus on user experience and usability, we’ve taken the best of government and industry expertise and put it into creating our new website."

GODORT prisoner locator update

GODORT, the ALA section of government documents librarians, maintains the State Agency Databases Project and, as a subsection, the Prisoner Locator Tools page on the State Agencies website. They recently updated the url for that site, which links to inmate locators in a number of US states; they also provide a link to the prisoner locator for Federal prisons.

Unpaywall helps find free online papers/articles

A new Chrome extension called "Unpaywall", though still being tweaked, is available - the official release is April 4th. It searches Open Access sites for accessible materials that are known to be behind paywalls. The organization behind Unpaywall is Impactstory, "a nonprofit working to supercharge science by making it more open, reusable, and web-native." According to the site, Unpaywall is able to get articles behind paywalls for free about half the time, though they claim that this is improving regularly.

hat tip: Karen Shephard

Alternative law school ranking system

The Volokh Conspiracy blog has a post titled "This law school ranking system is much better than U.S. News," by David Bernstein. The related paper, A De Gustibus Approach to Ranking Law Schools by Christopher J. Ryan and Brian L. Frye, is available on SSRN. From the abstract:

This article assumes that the purpose of ranking law schools is to help students decide which school to attend. Accordingly, it describes an approach to ranking law schools based entirely on the revealed preferences of students. Law schools admit applicants based almost entirely on their LSAT score and undergraduate GPA, and compete to matriculate students with the highest possible scores. Our de gustibus approach to ranking law schools assumes that the “best” law schools are the most successful at matriculating those students. This article concludes with a “best law schools ranking” based exclusively on the LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs of matriculating students.

hat tip: Karen Shephard

Pitt diversity book club March 30

The University of Pittsburgh Diversity Book Club is having a panel discussion next Thursday, March 30, from 4-6 pm in the William Pitt Union Lower Lounge.  In honor of Women's History Month, the topic will be the book Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay. Goodreads review of the book says:

"In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman of color while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years and commenting on the state of feminism today. The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture. Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better."

webinar Saving government data: A conversation with the future

On Wednesday, March 29, 2017 from 12:00 – 1:00 p.m. (Eastern) there's a Help! I'm an Accidental Government Information Librarian Webinar about the DataRefuge project and other projects like it that work in conjunction with the End of Term Web Archive to capture and make available federal web content during administrative transitions. The discussion will explore the fragility of digital information, and expand on ideas about what data is. We’ll talk about current projects and efforts, and explore the future of this work. Finally, we’ll address the concept of sustainability, and propose a paradigm of empowered experimentation that aligns with our values and roles within libraries. The webinar is free; RSVP here.

Report on European case law availabilty

A project called BO-ECLI - Building On the European Case Law Identifier - has published "Online Publication of Court Decisions in the EU: Report of the Policy Group of the Project 'Building on the European Case Law Identifier' (178 page pdf)." BO-ECLI is a project involving sixteen partners from ten Member States (Italy, Greece, Croatia, Estonia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, the Czech Republic, Spain, Romania) that aims to broaden the use of ECLI and to further improve the accessibility of case law. BO-ECLI is co-funded by the Justice Programme of the European Union.  

The report is a comparative study regarding the on-line publication of court decisions within all 28 Member States of the European Union, as well as at three European Courts. The Executive Summary states that "It focusses on three main themes – policy and practices with regard to on-line publication, data protection and Open Data – and two accessory topics: citation practice and the implementation of the European Case Law Identifier... After an introductory section, the five themes (publication, data protection, Open Data, legal citation and ECLI) are discussed in separate sections. Section 7 contains reports for all 28 EU Member States as well as for three European courts: the Court of Justice of the European Union, the European Court of Human Rights and the Boards of Appeal of the European Patent Organization. Section 8 contains the conclusions and a set of 25 recommendations. "

hat tip: LII (Legal Information Institute)

Online resource for veterans appealing denial of benefits

The ABA Journal reports that there is a new resource for veterans who want to appeal denial of benefits hosted by the Veterans Consortium ProBono Program. Through the site, available as an application form, veterans can either appeal their cases on their own or request a free attorney to help with the appeal. The site focuses on helping veterans appeal adverse decisions from the Board of Veterans’ Appeals to the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. There are informational materials and explanatory videos explaining the appeals process.
The Veterans Consortium Pro Bono Program site also has a resource library with materials on a variety of topics pertinent to veterans.

Federal courts: An Inside Look at the Jury Experience

The Office of the United States Courts has posted a 1-hour video to their website titled "An Inside Look at the Jury Experience." The video is of a discussion panel composed of two U.S. district judges, a clerk of court, and a law professor and author on the jury process. Panelists included Judge George O’Toole, District of Massachusetts; Judge Reggie Walton, District Court for the District of Columbia; Robin Tabora, Clerk of Court, District of Connecticut; and Andrew Ferguson, law professor at the University of the District of Columbia. The video of the question-and-answer session also includes several brief educational videos about federal juries.

ACRL: From Shelf to Online Repository

The Association of College and Research Libraries is hosting an online presentation Thurs. 3/16/17 at 2 pm called "From Shelf to Online Repository: Creating a Collaborative Teaching and Research Collection." The presentation will feature a case study from archivists, academics and publishing editors on their involvement in producing Race Relations in America, sourced from the Amistad Research Center. Guest speakers will provide an insight into selection, views on digital preservation, motives for digitisation and value to academics in teaching and research. From the description:

"Curating, digitizing and building a digital collection of primary sources is a truly collaborative process between archive, scholar and publisher. Highlighting the power of digital research, this webinar will discuss different perspectives on processes involved, from development and selection, to digitization and usage."

Registration is free; register here.

Volokh Conspiracy blog cites Prof. Dickinson

Prof. Ilya Somin, who blogs at the Washington Post's Volokh Conspiracy, recently posted an entry titled "Potential pitfalls of building Trump’s Great Wall of eminent domain," in which he discussed Prof. Gerald Dickinson's recent WaPo article about the difficulty of procuring the land needed for a U.S./Mexico border wall. Prof. Dickinson went into detail about the difficulty of using eminent domain to acquire all the necessary land, and the history of protracted legal battles when the government "takes" land using emininent domain.