Radical overhauling of 3L curriculum

Inside Higher Ed has an article describing how the Washington and Lee Law School has dramatically changed the 3L curriculum. The 3rd year of law school will now consist entirely of experiential courses in which students will do work that is equivalent to the work done by lawyers. The president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which last year published a report critical of the curriculum in US law schools, praised the school for adopting such a dramatic change.

Judicial Conference adopts national rules on judicial misconduct

The Judicial Conference of the United States has announced the adoption of uniform standards for the first nationally binding judicial discipline rules among the federal Circuit courts. The standards curtail the decentralized self-regulatory system that let individual circuit's set their own standards and closed "jurisdictional gaps," according to Judge Ralph K. Winter of the 2d U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and chair of the Conduct Committee that compiled the reforms. The changes were made in response to recommendations by a special committee chaired by Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer and pressure from some in Congress to improve implementation of the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act of 1980, the basis of federal judicial discipline.

Homeland Security Spending

The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has published a Working Paper entitled "Facts and Figures about Seven Years of Homeland Security Spending" by Dr. Veronique de Rugy, an economist and senior scholar at the Center.
Between FY2001 and FY2009 funding for Homeland Security rose from $16.9 billion to at least $68.5 billion—a 305 percent increase. The paper shows where the money is going and how the DHS is growing.

Constitutional Law: War Powers

The Law Library of Congress has put together a collection of constitutional law resources focusing on War Powers as part of its information about the Executive office and the Constitution. There are three articles and a statement to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary by Louis Fisher, an expert on constitutional law at the LLOC; all are available in their entirety in pdf format.

Crafting a Syllabus

The Chronicle of Higher Education has 2 articles about syllabi this morning. The first, "The Syllabus Becomes a Repository of Legalese", reports that the syllabus is increasingly becoming more like a legal document, full of exhortations, proscriptions, and enunciations of class and institutional policy — often in minute detail that seems more appropriate for a courtroom than a classroom. The author discusses how this modern syllabus has evolved. The second article, "Research Yields Tips on Crafting Better Syllabi" has recommendations on writing a good syllabus.

LoC budget testimony for FY 2009

The Open House Project has a report on the March 5 testimony of Dr. James Billington, the Librarian of Congress. His prepared statement (see attached) presented information on on current LoC initiatives, and described funding priorities. The testimony repeatedly mentions 2008's "deep and painful cuts to the Library’s budget", and the Librarian adds "I feel obligated to say that if we are stretched much farther, we may soon reach a breaking point." Furthermore, the statement adds,"Demand for online services, increased pressure on web services operations to enhance THOMAS, the World Digital Library (WDL), and the Legal Information Services (LIS) databases, and the need to develop new configurations and applications have severely strained technical assistance and infrastructure support provided by the Office of Strategic Initiatives (OSI) and Information Technology Services (ITS). Since 1995, THOMAS has provided free legislative information on the web. Our congressional and public constituencies have for several years been requesting upgrades to both THOMAS and LIS to enhance content and searchability. ... However, the IT and digital demands on the Library will need support from the Congress in fiscal 2010 to sustain the Library’s ability to provide services to the Congress and its constituents. "

Cuban law

The Law Library of Congress has updated their information about Cuba since Fidel Castro resigned his position as El Presidente on Feb. 19. Gustavo Guerra, Foreign Law Specialist at the library, has prepared a guide to the legal implications of Fidel Castro's resignation including links to relevant documents.

Google Advanced Search

Yesterday I noticed that there have been some changes and additions to the Google advanced search page, all of them good. For one thing, they actually use the Boolean "OR" connector right on the search page! Also, they have added more options for choosing a file format you want to find, including Google Earth files and Shockwave files. They've also added a "usage rights" option that includes the choices "free to use and share" & "free to use, share and modify, even commercially" among others. My favorite new option is that you can choose WHERE your search terms appear - in the URL, in the page title, in the text, or in links. There's also a "page specific" option that lets you search for pages similar to the page ______. Though when I tried searching for pages like the Barco Law Library page I only got 28 hits, 20 of them were law schools (Harvard on top, again) and none of them were law libraries; I hope they're tweaking that one.
Now if they would just let me display more than 100 results per page I would be a very happy librarian.

Obsolete?

Legal Blog Watch has a posting entitled "Are Law Libraries becoming obsolete?" The short answer seems to be "Maybe."

National Book Critics Circle Awards

The annual National Book Critics Circle awards ceremony celebrating the endurance of literature and literacy in America was held in New York last night. The 2007 Award winners, chosen from a strong group of finalists, were announced.
The complete list of winners in all categories:
Fiction: Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
General Nonfiction: Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
Autobiography: Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying
Biography: Tim Jeal, Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer
Criticism: Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Poetry: Mary Jo Bang, Elegy
Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing: Sam Anderson, book critic for New York Magazine
Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award: Emile Buchwald, founding publisher of Milkweed Editions

US News law school rankings leaked

The Concurring Opinions blog has published a leaked memo from an anonymous source purportedly written by a U.S. News and World Report "law school ranking executive" that provides a sneak peak at this year's law school rankings and some amazing secrets about how US News ranks law schools.
The memo instructs "Please keep this confidential, we don't want people catching on to our method. They need to think these rankings really mean something. But remember our goal - to sell issues! Lots of issues!"

Note: an update to the memo says "News flash to the very gullible: The memo is fake. After all, could the real ranking process possibly be as rational as the memo? "

New database of Chinese books

Another new database has been acquired by ULS: the Chinamaxx Digital Libraries. It contains full text access to Chinese language e-books. When you go to the database you'll see this, which is a listing of the subject categories of books in the collection in Chinese:


Hong Yu, who works in our Technical Services department and reads Chinese, has translated this page into English for us, and the categories listed are:
Political Doctrine, Military, Literature, Math Physics & Chemistry, Agriculture, Environmental & Safety Science;
Philosophy & Religion, Economics, Arts, Astronomy & Earth Science, Technology, Comprehensive books;
Social Science, Education, History & Geography, Biology, Transportation;
Politics & Law, Language, Natural Science, Medicine & Health, Astronautics.
In the Politics & Law section there are 44289 titles.

Foreign Broadcast Information Services database

The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports database is now available from ULS. FBIS Daily Reports is a collection of media content from around the world created by the U.S. intelligence community to benefit policy makers and analysts, and it offer foreign views and perspectives on historical events from thousands of monitored broadcasts and publications. There are currently 52 countries from Africa, 20 countries from the Middle East and Near East, and 8 countries from South Asia included. Additional regions be will added. Translated into English from more than 50 languages - from Arabic to Swahili - these comprehensive media reports from around the globe include news, interviews, speeches and editorial commentary. This comprehensive, fully searchable edition of the FBIS Daily Reports is comprised of the reports from Middle East and [North] Africa 1974-1987; Near East and South Asia 1987-1996; South Asia 1980-1987; Sub-Saharan Africa 1974-1980 and 1987-1996; China 1974-1996; Asia and the Pacific 1974-1987; East Asia 1987-1996; Latin America 1974-1996; Eastern Europe 1974-1996; Soviet Union/Central Eurasia 1974-1996; and Western Europe 1974-1996.

United Nations data online

A posting in Slashdot has information about the new UN data access system called UNdata that contains information from all major UN databases and those of several other international organizations. UNdata will improve the dissemination of statistics by UN's Statistics Division (UNSD) to the widest possible audience. It is an easy to use data access system that was developed to meet UNSD’s vision of providing an integrated information resource with current, relevant and reliable statistics free of charge to the global community. The design allows a user to access a large number of UN databases either by browsing the data series or through a keyword search.

Pop City celebrates 100 issues

Congratulations to Pop City, the excellent online magazine about Pittsburgh, for publishing its 100th issue. If there's anything cool happening in da 'burgh you'll find it in Pop City.

Pitt's Audubon prints

The Chronicle of Higher Ed. has a story today about the Pitt Audubon prints. The Digital Research Library - the one we visited last summer out at Thomas Blvd. - has digitized all 435 of the images in the double elephant folio set and made them available online as part of their project to digitize the entire Darlington collection. Only 120 sets of these hand-colored masterpieces of ornithology are known to exist. Kudos to Ed Galloway, Aaron Brenner, Mike Bolam and everyone else over at the Digital Research Library for a job well done.
I remember learning about the Audubon prints in library school at Pitt - not just about their beauty and rarity as a collection, but during a class on paper sizes because of their "elephant" size.

Oxford University Press

A new message from the AALL Committee on Relations with Information Vendors has been posted on some of the listservs. The committee will be doing a site visit to the Oxford University Press facilities in Cary, North Carolina on May 6-7 and will meet with executives of the publishing company. The committee is soliciting questions, concerns and comments about Oxford University Press products including former Oceana titles that they can bring up during the visit.
Please email your comments and questions to JoAnn Hounsell at jhounshell@kentlaw.edu by no later than Tuesday, April 1st.

Westlaw Patron Access Terminal

The posters and flyers about the new Westlaw Patron Access terminals have arrived. I've put a display of the flyers next to the terminals. They are free for any patron who wants to use the terminal.

New Database: the rights of internally displaced persons

A new online database has been launched today: the Global Database on the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement . This database is geared towards helping the more than 25 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in 50 countries around the world who have been forcibly uprooted from their own homes as a result of armed conflict and human rights violation and need protection and assistance. Meant to assist policy makers and legal advocates in the development of national legal and policy frameworks for the protection of IDPs, the database provides instant access to official documents, including recommendations of United Nations treaty-monitoring bodies, reports of UN charter bodies, and UN General Assembly resolutions about the rights of these IDPs. A joint effort of Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM) and the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement, it is a resource for scholars, policymakers, legislators, and humanitarian activists to research, develop, monitor and enforce implementation of IDP policies.The website is available in English, French and Spanish.

The IRS uses LII for the tax code

There's a great blog post on LII explaining how the IRS is including the LII version of the tax code in the IRS Tax Products CD/DVD package — a tax preparer’s main resource. Congrats to LII, we all love you.

Law School Rankings, the play

Today's Legal Blog Watch mentions this paper recently posted on SSRN. It's a one-act play titled Rankings: A Dramatization of the Incentives Created by Ranking Law Schools and it's been published by Jeff Sovern, a professor at St. John's University School of Law and co-author of the Consumer Law & Policy Blog. The intended audience is the subset of consumers known as "law students". The play dramatizes Prof. Sovern's belief that "law school rankings encourage schools to shift resources away from improving the quality of the education they provide in favor of investing in improving their standings in the rankings."

The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

There's an interesting article in Inside Higher Education today about law school marketing. The irreverent Green Bag has announced announces in an editorial in its forthcoming issue that is going to take a look at whether “whether faculty members do the work that the law schools say they do” in their marketing materials on their official websites. "Puffery is double-edged" warns the editorial. The information that the Green Bag gathers will be used in a publication called the Deadwood Report.

New AALL blawg

The Washington Affairs Office of the American Association of Law Libraries has just announced the launch of its new blog. The blog, named AALL’s Washington Blawg, will highlight bills that the AALL is tracking in Congress, Action Alerts, news, resources, events and more. The blog will will cover legislative, judicial and regulatory activities on the state, national, and international levels and address important topics such as access to government information, digital authentication, copyright, and open government issues. The WAO is located at the Georgetown University Law Library in Washington, D.C., a location that allows them to work closely with the three branches of government. They are involved in several active coalitions, including the Library Copyright Alliance, OpenTheGovernment.org, and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. You can keep receive regular updates by subscribing to the RSS feed, signing up for email updates, or by visiting the blog for the latest news.

Anarchy in the MARC Records?

The headline in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. reads An Upstart Web Catalog Challenges an Academic-Library Giant. The story is about a 21-year-old named Aaron Swartz who is taking on WorldCat by building a free online book catalog that anyone can update, like Wikipedia. The project, Open Library, is set to go live in early March with records on 20 million books. Mr. Swartz also wants to integrate his database with Wikipedia so that a citation of a book on Wikipedia links to the book's page on Open Library. Another idea is to integrate Open Library with LibraryThing, a site that helps people catalog and share their own books.

Thomson and Reuters Merger Approved All Around

The $17 billion takeover of Reuters Group PLC by Canada's Thomson Corp., has been going through a long approval process. Finally the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as regulatory authorities in Europe and Canada (where Thomson is based), cleared Thomson's purchase of Reuters on Tuesday, creating a financial-data giant, on the condition that the companies divest some assets. An investigation by the EU and the U.S. DOJ's antitrust division concluded that the takeover would have eliminated competition between the two main suppliers for financial data in areas including broker reports, analyst earnings estimates and some key macroeconomic data.
Both Thomson and Reuters have agreed to divest themselves of copies of databases that include financial-information products, together with assets, staff and customer bases within six months, to let a buyer quickly compete against the merged Thomson Reuters. The idea is to encourage other parties to compete to allay the anticompetitive effect of reducing the number of players in the financial database business from three to two.
The deal will claim roughly 34% of the global financial-information market.

Omeka: a new web platform for online collections

"Omeka" is a newly launched website geared towards "cultural institutions, enthusiasts, and educators." Developed by The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) in partnership with the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS), Omeka's purpose is to provide a free online display platform that museums, historical societies, scholars, libraries, etc. can use for publishing collections and exhibitions online. It allows users to curate items professionally by offering easy creation of online collections.
Features that Omeka offers for online collections include:
- A Dublin Core metadata structure and standards-based design that is fully accessible and interoperable
- Professional-looking exhibit sites that showcase collections without hiring outside designers
- Theme-switching for changing the look and feel of an exhibit in a few clicks
Plug-ins for geolocation, bi-lingual sites, and a host of other possibilities
- Web 2.0 Technologies, including:
Tagging: Allow users to add keywords to items in a collection or exhibit
Blogging: Keep in touch with users through timely postings about collections and events
Syndicating: Update your users about your content with RSS feeds

Court orders Wikileaks website shutdown

A US federal court has shut down Wikileaks a controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to post corporate and government documents anonymously. According to a report in PCWorld, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco issued an injunction ordering Dynadot, which controls the site's domain name, to remove all traces of Wikileaks from its servers. The court also ordered that Dynadot must prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website and demanded that details of the site's registrant, contacts, payment records and "IP addresses and associated data used by any person...who accessed the account for the domain name" be handed over. Wikileaks used to be at www.wikileaks.org but you won't find anything there now - though the site remains online in other countries, including Belgium, India and Germany.
The court order came because Swiss banking group Julius Baer filed a lawsuit after "several hundred" documents were posted about its offshore activities. Some of those documents, which were allegedly posted by a former vice president of the bank's Cayman Island's operation, allegedly reveal that Julius Baer was involved in offshore money laundering and tax evasion in the Cayman Islands.
Wikileaks was founded in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.

Judicial Misconduct in State and Federal Courts

There are processes in place for reporting and dealing with judicial misconduct of federal and state court judges. For the federal judiciary, Congress has created a procedure that permits any person to file a complaint in the courts about the behavior of federal judges in every federal jurisdiction, according to the Courts website. In the states, each state has a process for dealing with complaints about judges' conduct: independent judicial-conduct commissions have been established by state constitution in 28 states, by statute in 15 states and the District of Columbia and by court rule in seven more, according to the American Judicature Society (AJS). The AJS website is a good place to find information about how states deal with judicial misconduct including a list of the organizations from each state established to investigate allegations of misconduct by state court judges; the composition of state judicial conduct commissions; and at what point confidentiality ceases in judicial discipline proceedings in the different states. AJS also provides information about federal judicial misconduct.

Vermont Law School to offer new joint programs

The Vermont Law School is partnering with the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona to offer several degree programs in which students can get a master's degree from Thunderbird and a juris doctor or master of studies from Vermont, according to a press release from Thunderbird. Students will be able to select from Thunderbird’s MBA in Global Management, the Master of Arts in Global Affairs and Management, or the Master of Science in Global Management and combine that with Vermont Law School’s Juris Doctor or Master of Studies in Environmental Law. Each of the options will have different program lengths and sequencing depending on the combination and can be done in as little as three years.

New free website for current events

Silobreaker is a news search site that is much better than Google news and other news sites I've used at refining and pinpointing information. A "silo" is something that is kept separate or compartmentalized; Silobreaker offers a few ways of looking at news across compartments, in a visual manner that goes beyond text. The site has sophisticated analytics, including an indexing system, that make search results more relevant, and it offers options to filter and contextualize the relationship.
The basic search, called "360° Search", gives you a comprehensive and wide-ranging overview of all that is relevant to your search:
News, Blogs, Reports and Audio/Video content; Quick-links to Silobreaker Network, Trends and Hot Spots; Fact sheet (if available); Related people, places, companies, organizations, topics and keyphrases; Quotes; and a Content volume chart.
Everything is clickable and allows you to drill down or quickly switch focus.

Blogs to watch

Blake over at LIS News has published his "10 Non-librarian Blogs to read in 2008" which were nominated by his blog readers. On the list are many of our own favorites, including BoingBoing, Slashdot, Lifehacker, and Open Access News.

Fastcase opens the "Public Library of Law"

The Fastcase Public Library of Law was launched yesterday as "the most comprehensive free resource for legal research online." PLoL claims that it is the largest free law library in the world. A cursory examination shows an easy to use interface with links to caselaw, statutes, and regulations. You can look at federal law or choose your state from a dropdown menu. We'll all have to spend some time trying it out to see if it's a resource we can enthusiastically recommend. There are also links to content you have to pay for - legal forms, for example, is one of the main tabs but you have to buy the forms after viewing them. I'm not crazy about that - But most of the links are free. Fastcase is a commercial legal research company that specializes in caselaw databases. Offering free, well-organized legal information is probably a smart business decision too if it builds the name and reputation of your company.

New Social Networking site for business and personal use

MIT's Technology Review has an interesting story about a new social networking site called Moli that is aimed at a more mature audience than the teenagers targeted by many social-networking websites. Geared towards users who have a need to balance personal and professional networks, Moli offers multiple profiles-with different privacy settings -within one account. So you can have a LinkIn-style business profile and a different profile and network for your family and friends. It takes just a few moments to set up a free account using the attractive and user-friendly Moli interface.

Harvard faculty vote unanimously to publish papers freely online

This huge story is everywhere today - the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Ed., and Inside Higher Ed. among others. Harvard's Arts and Sciences faculty unanimously approved a plan on Tuesday that will require faculty to post finished academic papers online free, unless scholars specifically decide to opt out of the open-access program. While other institutions have online repositories for their faculty’s work, Harvard is the first university in the United States to mandate open access to its faculty members’ research publications. Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science at Harvard who proposed the new policy, said after the vote that the decision “should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated.”
The Harvard Crimson has an editorial about the importance of open access to scholarship in which the impact on libraries and scholarship is discussed. The Crimson also reports that the Harvard University Library will be in charge of the new initiative. The library will set up an Office for Scholarly Communication to make the open-access repository an instrument for access to research across all disciplines in the spirit of the “one-university” environment that the HOLLIS catalog now provides for holdings in all the libraries.

Publishers begin to experiment with the internet

There's an article in Ars Technica that discusses how 2 big publishers - Harper Collins and Random House - are exploring digital publishing. Both publishers have made bold moves to distribute their content in new ways: Random House will sell selected books by the chapter, while HarperCollins will offer selected titles for free.

Law Schools oppose Feingold proposal

According to Inside Higher Education a group of law school deans and the Judicial Conference of the United States, among others, are objecting to an amendment that Sen. Russell G. Feingold successfully attached to a U.S. Senate bill last month. The bill would significantly elevate the pay of federal judges, and Feingold's amendment would restrict the outside income of federal judges and Supreme Court justices. The amendment would prohibit federal judges from accepting any sort of gift, income or travel reimbursement from programs designed to educate federal or state judges, except for programs sponsored by a bar association, a judicial association, or a government. Feingold’s amendment would also limit to $2,000 the amount that a judge or justice could receive in income or reimbursement from any “single trip or event” sponsored by any entity but a bar or judicial association or a federal, state or local government.

How to reduce textbook costs

There's an interesting article in this week's Chronicle in Review Newsletter entitled One Way to Rein In the Cost of Textbooks: Make Them Free. The author, an emeritus professor, suggests that there are two sets of costs involved in publishing textbooks: the writing/editing/organizing of the book and the publishing/distributing/marketing of the book. He suggests both sets of costs could be greatly reduced using current technologies - the writing by using Wikipedia-style collaboration and the publishing by publishing online. He has 4 textbooks that he's written available online.

PA legislative alerts

The Pennsylvania General Assembly has begun an email alert service that you can subscribe to in order to keep up to date on legislation as it goes through the Assembly. There is a Daily Session Update that is sent out at the end of each day containing lists of all Bills and Resolutions that were acted upon. There is also an Individual Bill Update sent out every hour - you specify which Bill(s) or Resolution(s) you're interested in, and you will receive an email if one or more of your subscribed bills has had an action in the previous hour.
Hat tip: Joel Fishman

Emilio Estevez making movie about homeless in libraries

According to Reuters, Emilio Estevez is making a movie titled "The Public" that is loosely based on a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece written by Chip Ward, a retiring librarian in Salt Lake City, which discussed the epidemic issue of libraries becoming de facto shelters for the homeless and the mentally ill in light of many social program cuts. The story takes place during the two coldest days of the year in Los Angeles, when the library is overwhelmed by people seeking shelter.

The Real ID Act and religious freedom

CNET news has an interesting article about how the Real ID Act, a federal law that takes effect on May 11, will cause problems for Americans who object to facial photograph requirements on religious grounds. The lengthy new regulations released by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as a result of Real ID set minimum standards for state-issued driver's licenses and IDs, among which is a "full facial digital photograph" that adheres to specific federal requirements. Religious groups including some Amish, Old Order Mennonites, Muslims, members of Native American faiths, and fundamentalist Christians object to identification cards bearing their photographs. The article includes an interactive map of the US that lets you check how various state driver's licenses comply with the federal law. PA: Pennsylvania has requested and received an extension. In the longer term, however, the state may not comply. "We're undergoing a comprehensive review of those regulations right now to look at some potential options, the cost that would be involved and also the impact to the citizens of Pennsylvania. Being granted this initial extension just allows us more time to do that and allows the citizens of the commonwealth to continue using their state driver's licenses and IDs through December 31, 2009."

Online Child Protection and free speech

The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) has released a report from a joint project they conducted with the Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF). The project tracks more than 30 pieces of federal legislation that seek to protect children online, some of which pose serious threats to free speech. The reports summarize and categorize child online safety bills introduced in the 110th Congress, analyze free speech implications of key bills, and provide recommendations to Congress on how it can promote child online safety without impinging on First Amendment rights. Here's the Bill Tracking Report [38 page PDF] which is nicely organized - it has the legislation indexed by popular name, topic, Senate Bill and House Bill numbers, and federal agency/department. For each bill you can see the text in html or pdf and then concise information about the bill as well as the analysis by both the CDT. You can also download the CDT Analysis [PDF] and the PFF Analysis [PDF] of the legislation. In their summary the CDT states that " Many of the child protection proposals now pending in Congress... would not be effective child protection measures and would raise very serious policy and constitutional problems."

Civil Rights online resource

Columbia University has created a website about the civil-rights movement from 1954 through 1975. The site, called the Amistad Digital Resource, includes audio and video clips of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil-rights leaders. It includes archives of images, organizations, documents and maps of locations where civil-rights demonstrations took place and has a timeline of the Great Society.

Westlaw public access

We now subscribe to Westlaw for public access and we have information and simple directions for using this subscription. This database is available to anyone who wants to do legal research - university, alumni, and public patrons. They will need to be logged in to one of the computers with this subscription.

Here comes the Lexpo!

Lexis has a new marketing gimmick, according to the Dayton Daily News. They just launched a 39 foot red RV, called the Lexpo, which is going to travel the USA with an interior designed to look like a booth at a trade show, with computer stations where visitors can explore LexisNexis legal products. You can read more about it on the Lexis website.

Google scanning at Michigan - a million books!

The Chronicle of Higher Ed.'s Wired Campus Blog reports that the number of books scanned at the University of Michigan reached a million on Friday. Just 6.5 million to go! The dean of libraries said "As far as I know, Michigan is the first library to have one million books from its own collections digitized and available for search (and, when in the public domain, available for viewing)."

Calculators and converters

Here's a handy new website that you might want to bookmark: Easy Calculations. It's a one-stop shop for every sort of calculator and converter imaginable - from square roots to bits 'n bytes 'n terabytes, from amortization to nautical miles.
There's even a Love Calculator.

National Defense Intelligence College Press online

The National Defense Intelligence College Press is now posting their publications on their website. The publications, all of them free, are in pdf format and can be downloaded or read online.
Titles range from Crime Scene Intelligence to A Muslim Archipelago: Islam and Politics in Southeast Asia and the intriguingly titled Shakespeare for Analysts: Literature and Intelligence
(from the Foreward: "Shakespeare’s interests coincided in many ways with the daily preoccupations of intelligence analysts: coups d’etat (Richard II), political assassination (Julius Caesar), civil wars and international wars (Henry V, Henry VI—Agincourt, Warof the Roses), political tyranny (Richard III), political/military leadership (all of the above, but the author focuses on Henry V). ... Shakespeare, as the author argues, does help inform us regarding the key questions that intelligence analysts habitually ask. Why do some men covet power? What is it liketo usurp power? What is it like to lose power? What are the limits on the exercise of powerand the use of force? When does the decision to use force emerge? How does violenceexpand? What kinds of behavior and actions does use of violence produce? How is vio-lence justified by both sides of a conflict? How do unintended consequences emerge fromcarefully planned events? )

Campus Accessibilty Map

I'm advising a group of freshmen students at the Engineering School on a website development project and they showed me another great website made as a freshman project - a map of all the buildings on campus and their disability access points. The purpose of the project was to facilitate access to information on the locations of accessible entrances and ways of getting to them for University faculty, staff, students, prospective students, and visitors. The students who created the website also work to review, update, and add to a database containing numerous measurements of the handicap-accessible entrances of each building, ensuring that each is in compliance with the requirements set forth in the Americans with Disabilities Act Accessibility Guidelines (ADAAG).

GPO's fugitive publication project

The GPO has released a white paper on the results of its recently completed “Web Harvesting Pilot Project” and is requesting comments from the public. They had to extend the comment period until Fri. Feb. 8 because apparently they’re not getting any response, so the folks at Free Government Information are urging people to take the time to look at the project and make comments.
What is the project? Many publications being published by Federal agencies are not being included in the Federal Depository Library Program that distributes all government documents. These documents have come to be known as “fugitive publications”; with increasing frequency, federal agencies are publishing content only in electronic formats and they frequently fail to inform GPO of these new publications for inclusion in the FDLP. In light of the large number of publications that have become fugitive, GPO is seeking Web crawler and other technologies that can provide a solution for the identification and harvesting of fugitive documents and publications from agency Web sites.
A summary of the results of the pilot project (they used the EPA website as the subject of the pilot) is available here (pdf) and the simple online comment form is here on the GPO website.

Google China founder speaking at CMU

Kai-Fu Lee, CMU graduate, former CMU faculty, founder of Microsoft Research Asia and founder of Google China, is in Pittsburgh and will give a free public lecture today at CMU. His lecture is titled "Google China – Can a Multinational Internet Company Succeed in China? and the date time and location are: Friday, Feb. 1st, 4:00 PM - University Center McConomy Auditorium (in the University Center building). There will also be a LIVE WEBCAST (uses Windows media player) of the talk.
Lee was the was the subject of a legal tug of war between Google and Microsoft in 2005 when he left his position as a vice president at Microsoft to found Google China. Microsoft sued Lee and Google, arguing that Lee signed a noncompete agreement in 2000 that would have blocked him from working for Google for one year after leaving Microsoft. A judge ultimately allowed Lee to work for Google but barred him from working on projects that would compete with Microsoft, such as developing search technology.

Female sperm?

Now there's a headline I never expected to see. But it does appear in the MIT Technology Review editors' blog today. Apparently scientists are close to creating real female sperm that will work just like male sperm so it will be possible for a child to have two female biological parents. Legal implications? I leave that to our experts.

Social bookmarking site for academics

Inside HIgher Ed has an article about CiteULike, which is described as a nerdy version of Facebook or del.icio.us for academics. It's a social bookmarking tool that allows users to post, share and comment on each other’s links which, in this case, are citations to journal articles with titles like “Trend detection through temporal link analysis” and “The Social Psychology of Inter- and Intragroup Conflict in Governmental Politics.”

New Journal on Terrorism

There's a new online journal from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point that may be of interest to some. It's titled the CTC Sentinel , and the January 2008 issue (Volume 1, Issue 2) includes articles on Al-Qaida’s Extensive Use of the Internet and Al-Qaida’s “MySpace”: Terrorist Recruitment on the Internet.

Online Tutorials on Congressional Research

The library at U.C. Berkeley has created a website housing short online Flash video tutorials that teach how to do Congressional research. The tutorials teach about finding bills, hearings, and debates (including how to use the Congressional Record in paper), and allow the user to pause the tutorial at any point and practice in the live database below the tutorial (if there is a database). The website also contains links to current congressional news, recent votes, and a Google Custom Search Engine focused on Congressional websites. The site is still a work in progress, and the webmasters invite suggestions to improve these tutorials or ideas for a new tutorial on an aspect of Congressional research that isn't covered yet.

Library materials preservation

The Washington State Library has an active preservation program for their state and federal documents. They have created handouts on simple book repair materials and preservation techniques and have made these available on the State Library blog. Scroll down the page to the listing for Presentations and Events, and look at the links to the Conservation Kitchen. The handouts include information on book preservation methods and supplies, preservation of other sorts of materials, links to useful preservation websites, and a bibliography on preservation.

UN Treaty Series online

There is news of the UN Treaty Series database. We were paying a subscription fee but recently they notified us that the treaty series is now FREE online (now there's something that doesn't happen too often.)
However, the database hasn't been updated since November, and the International Law Librarian listserv has posted the following message from the UN:
"we need to alert you to the fact that the website that you see will be abolished and replaced by a new website, which is currently under construction. As the opening page of the current site mentions: the site was frozen per 15 November. This means that the status of the multilateral treaties has not been updated since. The Depositary Notifications have been added since then. We do intend to inform you widely, once the new site is in place."
Thanks to Linda Tashbook, our Foreign and International Law librarian, for the information.

PA has a new CIO

Brenda Orth is the new Pennsylvania Chief Information Officer and Deputy Secretary of Information Technology according to an announcement from the state Office of Administration. The state CIO's is responsible for leading and coordinating IT services for the state. She will oversee governmentwide technology policies, standards, architecture and solutions to enhance system interoperability, data security and cost effectiveness. Before she worked for the state of PA Orth served 20 years with Exxon Mobil Corporation as an information technology professional, where she implemented major, multi-national business projects and managed large, strategic information technology systems.

Leading State Industries

There is a new Census Bureau website that presents state-level industry data from the 2002 Economic Census. The data includes industries catagorized by their NAICS codes and their annual sales or receipts for 2002, both total and per capita. According to the press release about the website, "economically speaking, every state leads the nation at something." Industries in which Pennsylvania is first include pharmaceutical and medicine manufacturing, pharmaceutical preparation manufacturing and railroad rolling stock manufacturing. We're also first - no other state comes close - in "Chocolate and confectionery manufacturing from cacao beans", shipping 44% of US shipments (by value). Mmmm, thanks Hersheys. Though I also have a soft spot for Wilbur Buds.
The 2007 Economic Census is underway - the economic census is done every 5 years.
Hat tip to beSpacific.

Law student solves a mystery

There's an interesting story in MIT Technology Review today about how an NYU law student and his fiancee returned a camera they found in a New York taxi - by doing some serious sleuthing (with the help of his mother). It doesn't say whether any of them are librarians but I wouldn't be at all surprised.

Opensource legal database

An announcement came today from a law library listserv that there is a new opensource legal database called PreCYdent that employs a unique search strategy incorporating network science. The basis for the strategy is described in the SSRN paper The Web of Law by Thomas A. Smith of the UC San Diego law school, who was involved in developing the database. In the article Smith says that "preliminary analysis suggests the citation network of U.S. Supreme Court cases is nearly identical to the network of high-energy physics papers, and is well described by a two-power-law model. The Web of Law is organized with hub cases that have many citations and the vast majority of cases, which have very few."

Privacy of Court Records online presentation

Tom Bruce, Director of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell has announced that the LII, along with Cornell's Information Science program and the University Computer Policy and Law group, is streaming a presentation by Peter Winn about issues of privacy in court electronic filing systems. The presentation by is Wednesday from 4-5 at http://ucpl.cornell.edu/. The presenter, Peter Winn, is an attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice. He is a part time lecturer at the University of Washington School of Law, where he teaches privacy law, and a senior fellow at the University of Melbourne where he teaches cybercrime. He received his J.D. from Harvard Law School, his B.A. from Williams College, and an MPhil in Philosophy from the University of London, where he studied as a Marshall Scholar.

Old Faithful online

OK, the legal connection is tenuous, but if you're feeling cooped up inside you might enjoy this news: the National Park Service has announced the first webcam at Yellowstone National Park. Donated by Canon USA, the full-motion, live-streaming webcam is located near Old Faithful and brings online visitors views of several other geysers in the area. When geysers such as Beehive, Lion, or Giantess are erupting, the camera will be aimed at them and zoomed in for optimal viewing enjoyment. When bison, elk, coyotes, or the occasional bear wander into the camera’s view, live video images will be transmitted.
At the moment it looks very snowy and cold there, but darned if there aren't a bunch of people all bundled up watching the geyser erupt.

WSJ online not free after all

Wall Street Journal publisher Rupert Murdoch has quashed speculation that the Online Journal would become freely available, according to stories in a WSJ blog and Business Week. The site, WSJ.com (subscription required for some content), will continue to operate on a hybrid of advertising and subscription dollars and will keep a significant portion of its content behind its paid-subscription wall.
During a talk at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland Mr. Murdoch remarked that
“We are going to greatly expand and improve the free part of the Wall Street Journal online, but there will still be a strong offering (for subscribers). The really special things will still be a subscription service, and, sorry to tell you, probably more expensive.”
An anonymous comment on the WSJ blog said that the price is due to rise from $99 to $119 a year sometime in March but this could not be verified.

Religious Liberty Archive

The Religious Liberty Archive is a resource from the religious institutions law group at Rothberger Johnson & Lyons LLP (offices in Denver, Colorado Springs, and Casper WY). It contains links and information about state and federal laws pertaining to religious freedom in the United States including religious liberty cases, commentaries, federal statutes, state constitutions, and important historical materials relevant to religious freedom in the United States.
Hat tip to the latest edition fo InSITE-L from Cornell.

Books that make you dumb

A guy named Virgil Griffith at Cal Tech has a website called "books that make you dumb". His basic premise is "Ever read a book (required or otherwise) and upon finishing it thought to yourself, 'Wow. That was terrible. I totally feel dumber after reading that.'? " He does some statistical hocus-pocus with Facebook's "favorite books" at various colleges and said colleges' average SAT scores.
I wish he'd do the same with high school reading. I would wholeheartedly nominate The Scarlet Letter.
(Yes, it's tongue-in-cheek. But kinda funny.)

The life of a law student

There's a new documentary called The Trials of Law School about what it's like to be a law student. The website tells us that it "captures both the stress and emotion, both inside the classroom and out, as they try to juggle family and relationships with school commitments. These students, including a single mother looking for a fresh start, a husband and father of four, and a military wife trying to raise six children, compete with competitive and highly successful peers for grades and jobs that will determine their future. Their journey is contrasted with insight from over 25 acclaimed law professors and legal scholars from around the country."
Hat tip to Joe Hodnicki at Law Librarian Blog and Brian Hare who works here at Barco. Here's a YouTube trailer:

Campaign fundraising information

MAPLight.org, "Money and Politics: Illuminating the Connection" is a public database meant to "illuminate" the connection between campaign donations and legislative votes. According to the website, "Elected officials collect large sums of money to run their campaigns, and they often pay back campaign contributors with special access and favorable laws. This common practice is contrary to the public interest, yet legal. MAPLight.org makes money/vote connections transparent, to help citizens hold their legislators accountable."
MAPLight combines three data sets: Bill texts and legislative voting records, Supporting and opposing interests for each bill, and Campaign contribution data from the Center for Responsive Politics and the National Institute on Money in State Politics in order to make visible key information that could never before be determined easily.
They also have a cool Presidential Money Race widget that you can add to your blog or website.

Google maps

How did this one get by me? I used Google maps today and now there's a Distance Measurement Tool that is typically Google -easy to use, and fun. You click on a link that says "I'm feeling geeky", and then you can measure distances on a map in meters, miles, yards, feet, inches, cubits, furlongs, light years, parsecs, football fields, Olympic swimming pools, and much more! For instance, the distance from Barco to the swimming pool in Bellefield Hall is 14 Olympic swimming pools.
It doesn't take topography into account - yet. Maybe that's coming, so we can measure the walk from Barco to, say, the medical library realistically (taking the hill into account somehow).

Gov Docs - del.icio.us tagging project

The librarians at Free Government Information are investigating the usefulness of tagging government documents that don't get cataloged in a "traditional" way and are asking for help from anyone with a del.icio.us account (you can set up a free account at http://del.icio.us ).
They have posted 32 documents that the GPO picked from the EPA web site and posted them to the Internet Archive. Over the next three months, they hope to have as many
people as possible tag and describe these documents using the del.icio.us bookmarking service. For a full project description and instructions on how to participate, please visit
http://freegovinfo.info/epatagging.

Hoover Institute to get Iraq archives

Approximately 7 million pages of records and other artifacts from Saddam Hussein's regime as Iraq's president are going to find a new home at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University according to an article in today's Chronicle of Higher Ed. The items have been sitting in 2 large shipping containers at a US Naval facility for almost 2 years. The Hoover Institute is getting the items through a deal it has made with the Iraq Memory Foundation—a private, nonprofit group that has had custody of the documents since just after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003. According to the terms of the agreement, the records will be held at the Hoover Institute for 5 years, and at the end of that period, the two parties will examine the possibility of repatriating the documents to Iraq.
The deal came despite recent impassioned calls from Iraq's national archivist for the collections' immediate repatriation back to Baghdad. Saad Eskander, the director general of the Iraq National Library and Archive, argues that the records of the Baath Party—which ruled Iraq from 1968 to 2003—are inalienable public property and belong in the national archive without delay

Peer reviewers v. blog commenters

Here's something from the Chronicle that grabbed my attention: the title is "Blog Comments and Peer Review Go Head to Head to See Which Makes a Book Better." Wha? There's a professor of communications from (of course) California who is publishing a book with MIT Press (title Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies). He also writes a blog called "Grand Text Auto" with 5 colleagues, and the blog is read by many of the same scholars he sees at academic conferences. He is going to post sections of his book on the blog and invite readers to add critiques right in the margins. He expects the blog-based review to be more helpful than the traditional peer review because of the variety of voices contributing. His editor at MIT Press insisted on running the manuscript through the traditional peer-review process as well. So the "experiment" will provide a side-by-side comparison of reviewing—old school versus new blog.
Ben Vershbow, editorial director at the Institute for the Future of the Book, concedes that comments on blogs are unlikely to fully replace peer review - but thinks that academic blogging can play a role in the publishing process.

Geotagging of photos increasing

The MIT Technology Review has an article about the rise of "geotagged" digital photos. Cellphones and digital cameras increasingly have built-in GPS (Global Positioning System) capabilities, allowing users to easily add metadata about exactly where a photo was taken. Why? If a picture is worth a thousand words, a picture with geotagging can add a few hundred more. Uses mentioned in the article: naturalists can map their bird sightings or chart out seal populations; archaeologists can mark where they unearth artifacts; travelers can add a new dimension by adding maps to slideshows.
The geotagged photos are showing up online, of course - one site, Jelbert, is trying to create a photographic map of every street in the world.

Reasonable Doubt

The Chronicle Review has an interesting article about the origins of the doctrine of "reasonable doubt". According to a new book, The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial by Yale Law professor James Q. Whitman, reasonable doubt was not designed primarily as a protection for defendants, nor as a rule of factual proof. Rather, the doctrine emerged in common law as a protection for jurors' souls, an assurance that jurors could convict a defendant without risking their own salvation.

Law Journal Rankings page updated

John Doyle from Washington & Lee Law School has sent around an announcement that the W & L Law Journals: submissions and ranking page has been changed/updated because they have tweaked the statistical methodology in several ways, detailed on the methodology webpage.

LOC Report

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article today about a recently released report , "On the Record: Report of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control", from the Library of Congress. Termed a "call to action" for libraries, it is the result of a year of work by research librarians and executives from technology companies like Google and Microsoft, with input from the public. They looked at how libraries can improve the distribution and use of their materials in a technology-centric environment and suggest that they should share records more with one another, make greater use of the Web, and bring more attention to their special collections.
The study is worrisome to some in the library community because it suggests that the Library of Congress should scale back its role as the leading organization for cataloging and classifying library materials.

50 states database: media

As part of the ongoing work at the ALA wiki project "State Agency Databases Across the Fifty States", we've constructed a list of "media" databases produced by states or their political subdivisions that provide online access to historical photographs, video, or audio. As always, the wiki welcomes any additional databases that aren't on the list - you can add them yourself, or contact the wiki project coordinator , or (if they are for Pennsylvania) the PA coordinator with the information.

Emprical Legal Studies database

Collaboration between law librarians at Cornell and UCLA has created a new online database - the Empirical Legal Studies bibliography. You can read about the collaboration or just go straight to the search page. Searching is straightforward - you can search by Author, Year, Title or Subject. The dropdown menu of Subject categories is long and interesting, including such topics as War, Globalization, Competency to Stand Trial, Academic Tenure, and lots more.

Technology helps pro se litigants

The National Center for State Courts recently released a report (pdf here, 122 pages) on Trends in Courts: 2007. The report examines key issues facing the nation's courts and identifies effective ways to handle them. One section of the report , titled " Increasing Access to Justice for the Self-Represented Through Web Technologies " , finds that technological advances in the courts, such as e-filing and e-delivery mechanisms and live-chat features are benefiting pro se litigants. Another section, Using Technology to Improve Customer Service , suggests a number of ways for courts to make things easier for "customers" such as check-in kiosks for defendents.

Top Tech in Pgh

Today's issue of Pop City features a story on the Top 10 Pittsburgh Tech companies to watch in 2008. Included in the list is Vivisimo, the search engine company in Squirrel Hill, which was also was named 2008 Technology of the Year for the third year in a row for the best Enterprise Search Solution by InfoWorld magazine. According to InfoWorld, "Vivisimo Velocity 6.0 extends its easy search interface and ability to crawl enterprise repositories with social tagging, bookmarking, and networking. Voting and ratings improve search accuracy, while tagging provides another way to filter results. Searches can be annotated with comments for increased collaboration."

Library In-Service Day

ULS held its First Annual Library In-Service Day on Dec. 17, and there's a webcast of Rush Miller's speech as well as his powerpoint presentation on the CIDDE website.

Librarians in the Wired Chronicle

Today in the Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus blog 8 of the 10 stories come from the ALA midwinter meeting. Don't miss the story featuring Rush Miller, the Director of the University of Pittsburgh Library System : according to the story, Mr. Miller, who holds a doctorate in medieval English history, said that when he came to Pittsburgh, in 1994, he concluded that the library was a feudal society. “I said, Whoa, I haven’t seen this since I studied it,” he said, as the audience broke out laughing. “You had kings and lords and people surrounded by moats.”

Blawging lessons

Jones Day partner and blawger Mark Herrmann has an online article about the lessons he's learned from blogging. Apparently the Wall Street Journal's Journal Blawgrecently made amention of his book, The Curmudgeon's Guide to Practicing Law - and within a day it rocketed from #47,369 to #434 in the Amazon rankings!

Cornell Law Library revamps search sites

Julie Jones, Editor of Legal Research Engines at the Cornell Law Library, has informed us about improvements and updates that they recently made.
The InSITE website has been revamped to feature both a quick search and an advanced search. You can also search all the websites ever annotated by InSITE at once: this is a full search of over 1,000 law-related websites that have been vetted by professional law librarians, updated with each new issue of InSITE.
The library's Legal Research Engine now has three searches : you can search for authoritative legal research guides, search the legal web (using the InSITE search), search academic blawgs, or search all three together.

Big Think: a "YouTube for intellectuals"

There's an article in Computer World about Big Think, a website that is a sort of YouTube for serious intellectuals (motto: "We are what you think"). Big Think is still in beta but is already offering over 100 hours of video interviews with leading thinkers, movers and shakers. You can search the videos and - here's the main point of the site - respond to them with your own video, audio, comments and ideas (registration is required but free and easy).
You can browse the videos by category - in the category of law, for example, the videos include Alan Dershowitz on "How did we develop legal systems?", Justice Stephen Breyer on "Does globalization pose new challenges for the Supreme Court?" and Yale Law professor Stephen Carter on "What are the great issues facing the legal system today?"
Find out more on Big Think's About page.

ACRL Insider blog

There's lots going on in the "library world" what with the ALA midwinter meeting coming up in 2 days (ah, Philly in January!).
The website includes an announcement of a new blog from the ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) called the ACRL Insider, "designed to keep you informed on the activities, services, programs, and governance of ACRL." The blog so far includes an interesting podcast of the ACRL President interviewing filmmaker John Waters about early influences on his work, censorship, and freedom to read.

Pittsburgh Courier Historical Archive

The Historical Archive, 1911-2002, of the Pittsburgh Courier is now available in the Pitt digital library via ProQuest Historical Newspapers. The link hasn't been added to the A to Z Databases list yet, so until it gets listed you can find it in PITTCat (do a title search for Proquest historical newspapers Pittsburgh courier). So far, all I've done is browse the archive. Once you're in the database, click on the "Publications" tab, choose the timespan you would like to browse, and then select the months/years you would like to browse. There are pdf files of all articles and also pdf files of every page in the newspaper.
The Pittsburgh Courier is one of the oldest and most prestigious African-American newspapers in the United States. Established in 1907 by Edwin Harleston, a guard in the H. J. Heinz plant, the Pittsburgh Courier gained national prominence after attorney Robert Lee Vann became the newspaper’s editor and publisher, treasurer, and legal counsel in 1910. In his lifetime, Vann saw the Courier grow to become the largest, most influential Black newspaper in the nation with a circulation of 250,000 and over 400 employees in 14 cities.
This historic database is a wonderful and remarkable addition to Pitt's digital library.

Annotated Justinian Code

The University of Wyoming law library now has the Annotated Justinian Code available digitally on its website. It contains pdf's of Justice Fred Blume’s copiously annotated (4,500+ pages) English translation of Justinian’s Code—the only English translation made from the Latin version regarded as most authoritative. The site also contains Blume’s scanned translation of the Novels, his “The Code of Justinian, and it’s Value" address delivered to the Riccobono Society in 1938 but never published, and a few other Blume-related items. Right now the "Quick Links" aren't live links, and every link on the page goes to a pdf document.

Purdon's (unofficial) online

West's Unofficial Purdon's Pennsylvania Statutes is online and linked from the PA General Assembly homepage. The website allows free access to an unannotated version of West's Purdon's Pennsylvania Statutes and Consolidated Statutes. There is a basic natural language searchbox. Links to annotations and cases appear on the search results page, but you have to pay by credit card to go to those links if you don't have a Westlaw account.

Google's Book project update

There's a very interesting article in the most recent issue of Campus Technology that takes a long, thorough look at Google's Book project and how it's going. It starts out with "Once you get past the freakishly high numbers bandied about, the two-dozen-plus distinguished institutions that have signed on, the legal paranoia and the ultra-ultra-secret processes and technologies involved-you'll find that Book Search (from the fifth most valuable company in America) is simply another high-cost effort that is simultaneously visionary and crude. It doesn't even have to succeed in order to impact the transformation of scholarship activities."
The author interviewed Daniel Clancy, the engineer in charge of the project, who has many interesting things to say. Food for thought: "As you open up all this content, these are research challenges for libraries, for the research communities, and for Google to say: How does this change scholarship?"

new PALINET wiki for "library leaders"

PALINET is going to formally announce its new wiki - the PALINET Leadership Network - at the big ALA midwinter meeting next week in Philly. The wiki already has interesting articles and links that librarians (not just 'library leaders') may find worthwhile.

New AALS website on law school curriculum

In the wake of last week's AALS (Association of American Law Schools) meeting in New York, a new website has been created to highlight and encourage innovation in the law school curriculum. Information on the website is divided into four sections: an overview of curricular innovation; descriptions of innovations that some law schools have already implemented; starter documents containing brief discussions of important themes in curricular innovation; and resource documents consisting of brief surveys of published materials, websites and other resources on themes relevant to innovation.

Public Domain Day

The dedicated librarians who run the Free Government Information blog celebrated this New Year's Day by reminding us that it's the day when the works of authors who died in 1957 (for life +50 copyright countries) or those that died in 1937 (in the life+70 countries) go into the public domain.
They also provide a link to a useful spreadsheet of information about copyright laws in different countries (yes, it's in Wikipedia but it's still a good quick reference).
And a link to a copyright blogger in California who goes one better by listing many creators (not just authors), American and foreign, who are now in the public domain.

Ebooks

Against the Grain, a journal for librarians that reports "the latest news about libraries, publishers, book jobbers, and subscription agents" now has a website where it is compiling useful information about eBook publishers and their products.

New website shows decline in law school diversity

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a report today on the dicussions at the AALS meeting that focused on today's law students, both in terms of what it's like to teach "millennial" students and on the sobering statistics showing a decline in diversity of law students. These statistics from the Law School Admission Council are highlighted on a new website created by the Lawyering in the Digital Age clinic at Columbia Law School. The website includes a page of links to online diversity resources .

Wikia: new search engine set to launch

The buzz is all over the internet - Wired, CNet, and the WaPo to name a few sources - that Wikipedia is set to launch the new Wikia search engine next Monday, Jan 7. The main difference with Wikia search is transparency- users will be able to contribute to how pages are ranked and to edit search results, and the search engine will have open-source search algorithms and application program interfaces. WebProNews is a little dubious about the venture - their editorial entitled "Wikia Shmikia" reminds readers that there are other ways to search that aren't getting much press.

Words to banish list, 2007

Lake Superior State University has released its 33rd annual list of Words Banished from the Queen's English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness.

Institutional repositories

There's an interesting article on LLRX about establishing institutional repositories for storing and organizing disparate information online. What's interesting is that the author talks about creating institutional repositories for small "institutions" - she mentions a law firm that can store these kinds of information: "an associate has prepared a continuing legal education PowerPoint presentation that resides on the hard drive of the associate's laptop. Another associate has served as an expert witness at a U.S. congressional hearing and the testimony is available on the GPO's website. The law firm's annual report from last year is stored on the intranet on the firm's web server. The firm's librarian has delivered an educational presentation at a professional meeting that is available on the web as a podcast." If the firm has an institutional repository all of these diverse items can be captured, archived, organized and readily accessible on the web in one location for public access.

Google tools you forgot about

Lifehacker has a blogpost about 10 Google tools you probably forgot about (or never knew about) and might find useful. Google Alerts, for example, is a great easy current awareness tool.

Federal information not easily Googled

Federal Computer Week reports that Google searching doesn't find much Federal information. Agencies do not let commercial search engines index their sites and they have been slow to adopt the Sitemap protocol - a web management tool that invisibly indexes online content and makes it easier for search engines to find.

Boston Public Library digitizing govdocs

The New York Times reports that the Boston Public Library is embarking on a project to digitize its entire print Government Documents collection. The digital documents will be made freely available online. The library will begin the project by digitizing the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings from the 1950s, which are regularly sought after by its patrons. Public.Resource.Org, a nonprofit group seeking to open public access to government records, and the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based digital library, are partnering with the library on the project.