HeinOnline: new alert service

HeinOnline has announced that they have added a new alert feature "with the help of machine learning and natural language processing tools." You can now receive email alerts when articles are added to the database that are similar to those written by a specific author. Instructions for using this feature are included in the announcement on the HeinOnline blog.

Public Domain talk by Peter Hirtle

The American Library Association's Office for Information Technology Policy is hosting a free online "CopytTalk" with Peter Hirtle giving an overview of the public domain: what it is, how works rise into it, what is copyright renewal, and some of the common mistakes he has made when trying to determine the public domain status of a work.
Peter Hirtle is the author of the frequently cited resource, “Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States." He is an Affiliate Fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Until his retirement from Cornell in 2015, he served as Senior Policy Advisor to the Cornell University Library with a special mandate to address intellectual property issues.
The one-hour webinar will be held on Thursday, Dec. 7, at 2pm Eastern time. You don't need to register; just go to the OITP copytalk Adobe Connect site and sign in as a guest at the appointed time.

Blockchain

Debbie Ginsburg, who is the Educational Technology Librarian at Chicago-Kent College of Law (and a very gifted law librarian) recently wrote a post titled "Law and the Blockchain" on the Blockchains for the Information Profession blog. Debbie's post discusses what blockchain is and how it is starting to be used in the US legal landscape. The blog, which is a project of the School of Information at San José State University, has introductory information about blockchain technology and is gathering ideas for ways in which this technology can be used in libraries.
And speaking of Blockchain, Pittsburgh-based K&L Gates has announced that it has become "one of the first major law firms to implement own private Blockchain."

HeinOnline's Reports of U.S. Presidential Commissions and Other Advisory Bodies now available

The Barco Law Library now subscribes to HeinOnline's Reports of U.S. Presidential Commissions and Other Advisory Bodies, available from the HeinOnline's main collections page. According to the description, "This work is the most current and comprehensive listing of publications created by presidential advisory bodies, and will be useful to researchers interested in U.S. history, political science, and law. Presidents have created such advisory groups (also called committees, commissions, boards, blue ribbon panels, or task forces) to advise them on particular problems or issues such Pearl Harbor, civil rights, the status of women, the assassination of JFK, the 1967 riots, Iran Contra, HIV/AIDS, the Challenger Space Shuttle accident, and 9/11. The bibliographic listings of more than 6,000 reports and other documents from the administrations of Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama are indexed by commission/advisory body name, report title, report subject and presidential administration. Links to the full text of the reports are provided whenever possible. The companion database contains not only the bibliographic listing of reports but also many reports themselves as well as related United States congressional hearings, scholarly articles, and a bibliography."
The user-friendly search interface for the collections means Users can browse or search the collection by President, Commission Name, Commission Subject or Report Title. There is an alphabetical listing of all the reports by title and other useful discovery aids. There are also links to scholarly law review articles written about these reports which are also in HeinOnline; for example the article, "President's Commission on the Status of Women Established [Notes] by Marguerite Rawalt from the Women Lawyers Journal (1962) is linked from the "Scholarly Articles" page.