CALI News

News from the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction, aka CALI:. Starting this school year, CALI lessons will have a very new look. The educational content remains the same, but the new-look versions include a number of new features  including  iPad and iPhone compatibility, auto scoresave, and easy copy & paste.
You can  register for an upcoming live webcast about the new CALI lesson on July 12, 3PM Eastern, 2PM Central. The webcast will cover what's changing in CALI Lessons, the expected time line for implementation, and provide time for answering questions. Faculty can preview of the new viewer on each lesson description page. Click the lesson title - not the play button - from the listings, and then click on the link that says "Try the new lesson viewer (alpha)".

LexisAdvance & WestlawNext, two views

Two interesting discussions of the two big new legal research products have been published online and provide a lot of food for thought for law librarians and legal researchers.  Ron Wheeler, from Univ. of San Francisco School of  Law & Director of the law library has a paper on SSRN titled "Does Westlaw Next Really Change Everything: the Implications of WestlawNext on Legal Research".  And Dan Baker of the University of Houston O'Quinn Law Library has published Part 1 and Part 2 of his First Thoughts on Lexis Advance for Law Schools on the library's blog.  

EBSCO, H.W. Wilson merge

Publishers and database vendors EBSCO and H.W. Wilson have announced that the two companies have merged as Ipswich, MA-based EBSCO acquiring the staff and product lines of H.W. Wilson Co. According to the announcement,   the “vast majority of Wilson databases will continue to be maintained, and there are many planned enhancements. Some Wilson databases will be merged together with closely related EBSCO databases to create more robust versions.”

Chart of forthcoming changes and enhancements due to merger provided by EBSCO.

ABA moves to improve law school employment data accuracy

The National Law Journal reports that the ABA's section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has approved changes to the annual law school questionnaire that require more detailed information on the employment status and salaries of law school graduates. Law schools will be required to report in much greater detail on the types of jobs in which their graduates have found employment.  They will also have to provide information on graduates who are unemployed or whose employment status is unknown. 

Project will digitize older Technical Reports

The Technical Report Archive & Image Library (TRAIL) is an initiative led by the University of Arizona in collaboration with the Center for Research Libraries  to identify, digitize, archive, and provide access to federal technical reports issued before 1975. These technical reports communicate research progress in technology and science and deliver information for technical development to industry and research institutions contributing to the continued growth of science and technology. While availability to more recent (1994–current) technical report literature has greatly improved with Internet access, legacy technical report documents remain elusive, and this initiative aims to close that gap. Some of the report series digitized include divisions of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission; U.S. National Bureau of Standards, the U.S. Bureau of Mines and more.

NTIS Technical Reports

The June 2011 NTIS Technical Reports Newsletter (from the US Dept. of Commerce National Technical Information Service) is now available online. This  issue has been designated as a Special SLA Edition to correspond with NTIS’ participation at the Special Libraries Association (SLA) Annual Conference, and the issue highlights the topic The Virtual World. It features enhanced graphics and design, and includes selected information from the NTIS Subject Categories:

• Communication (45)
• Computers, Control & Information Theory (62)
• Library & Information Sciences (88)

If you are attending this year’s SLA Conference, the NTIS will be previewing the National Technical Reports Library (NTRL) Repository Beta Version 2.0.

Libguides for (ProQuest) Congressional databases

The editorial team at ProQuest, the company that recently bought the Congressional databases from Lexis, has created a collection of useful bibliographies that provide links to documents in the Congressional databases on current topics. The bibliographies are on the following topics; when you click on the link, click on the blue tabs at the top of the page that say "Committee Prints and CRS Reports", "Hearings", and/or "Congressional Record" for live links into the Barco databases. You need to be on campus or accessing via the Pitt remote server to use these.

Al Qaeda http://proquest.libguides.com/al_qaeda
Egyptian Revolution http://proquest.libguides.com/egyptian_revolution
Gas Prices http://proquest.libguides.com/gas_prices
Haitian Earthquake (updated) http://proquest.libguides.com/haitian_earthquake
Health Care Reform http://proquest.libguides.com/health_care_reform
Immigration and Naturalization http://proquest.libguides.com/immigration_and_naturalization
Libyan Unrest http://proquest.libguides.com/libyan_unrest
Natural Disasters http://proquest.libguides.com/natural_disasters
North Korea (updated) http://proquest.libguides.com/north_korea
Nuclear Crisis in Japan http://proquest.libguides.com/nuclear_crisis_in_japan
Osama bin Laden http://proquest.libguides.com/osama_bin_laden
Same Sex Marriage (updated) http://proquest.libguides.com/same_sex_marriage
U.S. Natural Disasters http://proquest.libguides.com/natural_disasters

Newspaper Map

The Newspaper Map website is a visual map where you can identify newspapers from all over the world, translatable to and from many languages with one click. In many cases you will also find links to the newspapers sites on social media like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. You can search for specific cities or newspapers, filter by language, or look for historical newspapers that are available online.

A Mullet view of law school?

The Chronicle of Higher Education this afternoon has a brief article titled "Overcoming a "Mullet" View of Faculty". The author defines a "mullet" view : a university president told him that when new faculty attended their first faculty meeting, the "serious" ones sat in front, with the malcontents and disengaged at the back.  Hence the mullet: professional in front, party behind. The author said professors tend to view the way students choose classroom seats in the same way: A’s in the front, C’s in the back.  Is this true in law schools too? 

Electronic course packs

The Wired Campus blog reports on a couple of University of Chicago graduate students who have launched an online version of coursepacks called Sibylus "the syllabus, reimagined". The students realized that the photocopied materials they were buying from the bookstore in coursepacks are available online to students via the databases licensed by the university; or even on free websites.The students—who are both studying business and law—started a pilot program this spring in several classes at Chicago’s business school . The online coursepacks aren't free, but they are cheaper than the photocopied versions sold  by the bookstore. 

Public Libraries

The New York Review of Books blog has a post titled "A Country Without Libraries".  It is a pretty wonderful essay on the value of public libraries, and the disheartening news of how many public libraries are being closed or having their hours curtailed.
Here's some of the essay:
Over the years I thoroughly explored many libraries, big and small, discovering numerous writers and individual books I never knew existed, a number of them completely unknown, forgotten, and still very much worth reading. No class I attended at the university could ever match that. Even libraries in overseas army bases and in small, impoverished factory towns in New England had their treasures, like long-out of print works of avant-garde literature and hard-boiled detective stories of near-genius. Wherever I found a library, I immediately felt at home."

The main branch of the Scranton public library, where this blogger spent many happy hours. 

Judgmental website: UK case law made usable

Judgmental is a new UK website that aims to make UK case law "available, searchable and usable". The case law is browsable by jurisdiction and court, and then by date. The entire set of data can be searched by Google.
As for the spelling of the website's name, the website says "Why doesn't it have an 'e" in it?
"Judgment" is the usual spelling for an act of legal adjudication, and is similarly used in the Bible, eg Day of Judgment. "Judgement" is used in the wider sense, for instance when referring to someone as having "sound judgement".  Who knew?

This year's outstanding govt. information resources announced

Each year, the Notable Documents Panel of the American Library Association Government Documents Round Table (GODORT)  recognizes outstanding government information resources issued by state and local governments, national governments, and intergovernmental organizations, such as the World Bank and the UN.  This year's report from the panel is titled "Digital Diamonds and Budget Cuts," has been published in Library Journal.  The report points out that the strides made by GPO during that past year are "tempered by the prospect of massive federal budget cuts that will likely slow down progress."  Among GPO's successes this year are the successful migration of millions of documents from GPO Access to FDSys, which has implemented archival standards for long-term preservation of important documents.
The subject matter of this year’s Notable Documents list reflects an essential characteristic of these releases: their diversity. Nearly half of these titles focus on animal and plant life, climate change, and the environment. Half of the remaining titles deal with social topics, such as crime, human rights violations, economic development, the global economic crisis, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. City planning, construction, history, food and gardening, geospatial data, and engineering are among other themes addressed. The number of works available only in print, only online, and in both analog and digital media is roughly equal.
The list of this year's Notable Documents available online includes:

• The Crime of Family Abduction: A Child's and Parent's Perspective (57 page pdf) distributed by the national Criminal Justice Reference Service
• Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Role in the Secondary Mortgage Market (55 page pdf) published by the Congressional Budget Office
• The State of the Hudson website published by the New York State Dept. of Environmental Conservation (online only). 
• Gender and Governance in Rural Services: Insights from India, Ghana, and Ethiopia (332 page pdf) published by the World Bank & International Food Policy Research Inst. 
• Latin America and the Caribbean: Atlas of Our Changing Environment website published by the UN Environment Programme, includes satellite images, thematic maps and statistics as well as environmental profiels of 65 countries. 

LLMs face increased scrutiny

The National Law Journal has a story (note: you must register for a free 90day trial to NLJ to access the online article)  today titled "Increased scrutiny for LL.M.s: New hurdles, options for foreign-trained attorneys". LL.M. programs offer the master of laws degree for foreign lawyers who want to be eligible to take the bar exam in the US.  The article notes two shifts affecting LL.M. students: first, the New York Court of Appeals has adopted stricter requirements for the curricular content of LL.M. programs.  Secondly, the ABA's Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has proposed specific curriculum requirements for LL.M. programs geared toward foreign-trained lawyers. Individual states adopting the proposed model would then allow LL.M. program graduates to take their bar exams. 

Netflix is the top bandwidth use in North America

Techradar  reports that the Netflix video streaming service is not the biggest user of bandwidth in North America, accounting for 22% of total internet use. These figures come from the recent Global Internet Phenomena Report (18 page pdf) by Sandvine Broadband Network Solutions. At peak periods, Netflix accounted for 29.7% of bandwidth use.  If you add in other forms of "real-time entertainment" - sites providing on-demand streaming - they account for almost half of bandwidth use. The report includes data on bandwidth use in Europe and Latin America, as well as an analysis of how the Royal Wedding on April 29, 2011, affected internet use worldwide.

West Virginia closes regional law libraries

The Intelligencer/Wheeling News-Register reports that regional W. Va. law libraries are being closed "because of a lack of use".  In the article, the administrative director of the W. Va. Supreme Court of appeals said they have been considering the closure for several years, and a a study conducted in the Huntington law library found that in a 3 month period nobody used the library. He also said that judges in the 1st Judicial Circuit have first pick of the books, and a community college is interested in using the books for its paralegal training program. 

Turnitin study on student plagiarism using the internet

Turnitin, the online plagiarism resource used by Pitt,  recently conducted a study that examined which Internet sites students use in their written work. They looked at 40 million student papers submitted to Turnitin over a ten-month period. Some of their findings:
• One third of "matched content" (content that has been copied) is from social networks, content sharing or question-and-answer sites where users contribute and share content.
• 15 % of content matches come from cheat sites.
• One fourth of matched content is from legitimate educational web sites, almost double the number that comes from paper mills or cheat sites.
• Wikipedia is the most popular site for matched content (7%).  The other most popular sites, in order, are answers.yahoo.com, answers.com, slideshare.net, oppapers.com, scribd.com, coursehero.com, and medlibrary.org.
• Institutions with widespread adoption of Turnitin see a reduction in unoriginal content of 30-35 % in the first year. By the fourth year, many institutions see levels of "unoriginality" fall by up to 70 %.
You can request a free download the White Paper, "Plagiarism and the Web: Myths and Realities," from the Turnitin website.

AP Stylebooks addresses digital terminology

The new edition of the AP Stylebook, a style and usage guide used by journalists (it calls itself "the journalists' Bible), clarifies the spelling of some digital terminology and has also added commonly used acronyms.  For example, "email" is now spelled without a hyphen or capitalization, and both "cellphone" and "smartphone" are one word. The acronym "ROFL" (rolling on the floor laughing) has been added. 

New à la carte libraries from Hein coming in June

HeinOnline is introducing two new à la carte libraries on June 1, 2011. The first is the History of International Law Collection, which will contain more than 500 titles and 550,000 pages dating back to 1690 on subjects such as War & Peace, the Nuremberg Trials, Law of the Sea and International Arbitration. It will include classic books and serials such as the International Law Studies Series [U.S. Naval War College], International Conciliation, and Studies in Transnational Legal Policy.The second is the Hague Academy of Collected Courses which will include the complete archive of collected courses dating back to their inception in 1923, twelve periodic indexes, plus the official publications from the Workshops organized by the Academy.

NTIS offers new service for getting federal technical reports

The National Technical Information Service (NTIS) has announced the availability of a new information dissemination service known as NTIS Selected Research Service (SRS). NTIS serves as the largest central resource for government-funded scientific, technical, engineering, and business related information; federal agencies are required to make copies of their scientific and technical reports available to NTIS.   The SRS is a tailored information service that delivers complete electronic copies of government technical publications from agencies such as the Department of Defense (DOD), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Department of Energy (DOE), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The program offers:

• Full Text PDF format of Federal technical reports
• Comprehensive coverage of Federal technical content
• Ability to select from 378 subject categories
• E-mail notification when new documents in subject areas of interest are available. 

The cost of each document you request from this NTIS program is $3.00.  The 378 subject areas are detailed in the SRS Catalog (pdf).