The Dark Librarian

hat tip Joe Hodnicki at Law Librarian Blog.

New website aims to link inventors with retailers

Thomas Edison once said, "Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success."A new website called Edison Nation is aiming to provide the success and utility Edison spoke of by linking inventors with retailers who might be interested in their inventions. The site provides an easier way for would-be inventors to navigate the often costly and complicated course of taking an idea from conception to store shelves. They have signed on a number of retailers like Spencer Gifts and Bed, Bath and Beyond to support the site. Human experts and artificial intelligence technology scour through the submissions and select those to be sent on to a retailer. If a retailer selects an idea, the inventor will receive a $2,500 advance and annual payments based on commercialization.

Moon Man wins 1st in Bulwer-Lytton contest

The 2008 Bulwer-Lytton prizes have been awarded, and Garrison Spik, a 41 yr. old man from Moon, took first prize. An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. The prize for Purple Prose was won by another Pittsburgher, Christopher Wey.

HeinOnline technical problems

For everyone's information, this bulletin from HeinOnline:
" Brief Update on the HeinOnline System Issues
HeinOnline is experiencing technical and server issues. Some of you may notice an impact on your overall performance where as others may seem like you are unaffected. We are routing users to new servers to minimize the impact and provide full system access with browsing and searching capabilities across all 40 million pages. However, depending upon your gateway, we may not be able to route you to the proper server. Users accessing HeinOnline via Serial Solutions, Shibboleth, or other third parties may not be able to function at full capacity due to the third party redirecting you back to the original server. These users may be unable to perform searches when directed to the old server. We are working diligently to bring the old server back to full capacity.. Thank you for your continued patience as we work to bring our system capacity back to 100% for all users. "

The places where writers write

The UK Guardian has an interesting series on Writers' rooms - portraits of the spaces where authors create. Martin Amis , Sue Townsend, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, Rudyard Kipling and many more. Pretty much all UK, though.
Hat tip the LISNews blog.

Green computing tips

PC Magazine has 5 tips for saving energy and resources in your day-to-day computer use. Some of them are obvious but others are helpful. Meanwhile, several stories in the news report that computers that rich countries are "donating" to African countries are causing quite a few problems.

Meme timeline

The timeline website "Dipity" has a timeline of internet fads and memes. It has everything from LOLcats to hamsterdance to Diet Coke and Mentos to "the website is down"; it's a great trip down memory lane .

California Bar Exam and the earthquake

The Chronicle of Higher Ed. reports that the earthquake that struck California last week happened five minutes before the bar exam was finished, and some of the test-takers had to dive under their seats. Apparently some of them were allowed an extra five minutes and some weren't, so there is some controversy.
A notice (pdf) posted on the California bar website reassures visitors that in light of the earthquake "During the grading process the Committee’s psychometric consultant has been asked to perform a psychometric study on whether the earthquake impacted applicants’ performance on the first session of the examination and to report his findings to the Committee prior to the release of results from the examination. " It adds "While the Committee regrets that this incident occurred, the fact that it did was beyond its control."

Wikipedians meet at the library in Alexandria, Egypt

The New York Times reports that the new library in Alexandria, Egypt was the location of Wikimania, a meeting of over 600 people who write the Wikipedia entries. Wikipedia, now going on eight years old, is many times more extensive than anything in print, comprising 2.5 million articles in English. Wikipedias have sprung up in 263 other languages, including Sanskrit, Choctaw and Twi. Wikipedians believe that bits will outlast paper; outgoing board chairwoman Florence Devouarda is quoted as saying that "a library is often a place with a lot of dusty documents, poorly connected."

Homeland Security report

CACI International and the National Defense University (NDU) have released a report entitled "Dealing With Today's Asymmetric Threat to U.S. and Global Security: The Need for an Integrated National Asymmetric Threat Strategy." The report is an executive summary of a May 2008 symposium. It is hoped that the report will stimulate conversation about the need to develop a newnational defense and homeland security strategy which will address thethreats related to everything from Islamic extremism to natural disaster.
Thanks to Greta Marlatt, Homeland Security Digital Library Content Manager, for keeping us updated on homeland security information.

Web 2.0 resources

I've been working as a "facilitator" for the Web 2.0 Challenge, a group teaching project organized by the Computer Services librarians of the AALL. I'm working with a group of 5 "students" who are all law librarians wanting to learn more about using web 2.0 technologies in law libraries.
The past week our assignment was to work on a wiki together. The result has been a really wonderful wiki with lots of interesting resources and ideas about how we can use them in law libraries.

25 best legal movies

The feature story of the ABA Journal this month was an article about the 25 best legal movies ever made, and they also list 25 runners up. You can also vote for your favorites on their site.

At NYU, law students buy & sell seats

No I am not making this up. The ABA Journal has a story about a new phenomenon, first reported in the New York Post. As the add/drop deadline approaches, NYU Law students are offering money, gift certificates, and who knows what else for spots in classes that are already fully enrolled. They post their requests and offers on the school's online forums. Postings such as the e-mail that pleads, "WANT: Entertainment Law, Will Pay Cash."
At NYU, class registration works on a lottery basis. After the courses are distributed, students can drop or try to add them. Because there are no waiting lists, students make under-the-table seat swaps by arranging for one to drop a class just a moment before the other shows up to add it.
No word on how much is actually paid for a coveted class seat.

New NTIS newsletter

The National Technical Information Service (NTIS) has begun to publish a free monthly Newsletter that highlights and alerts you to recently indexed and abstracted titles of reports published in particular categories - the first issue is about Going Green. Future editions will feature various NTIS content categories and showcase the relevancy of past U.S.Government technical reports to the current issues of our times. You can request a free subscription to the newsletter by emailing your name and emailaddress to ntrnews@ntis.gov .
NTIS is a part of the US Dept. of Commerce. It serves as the largest central resource for government-funded scientific, technical, engineering, and business related information; for more than 60 years NTIS has provided businesses, universities, and the public timely access to approximately 3 million publications covering over 350 subject areas.
The NTIS mission is to support the Dept. of Commerce to promote the nation's economic growth by providing access to information that stimulates innovation and discovery.

National Defense Strategy

The US Department of Defense has announced the release of the 2008 National Defense Strategy (NDS) (29 page pdf). It's an interesting read. The document outlines the national approach to the defense of the United States and its interests. It starts by defining 5 major objectives of the DoD: defend the Homeland; win the Long War; promote security; deter conflict; and win our nation's wars. The document goes on to discuss how the DoD plans to achieve all these objectives "by shaping the choices of key states, preventing adversaries from acquiring or using WMD, strengthening and expanding alliances and partnerships, securing U.S. strategic access and retaining freedom of action, and integrating and unifying our efforts."
The NDS is issued periodically; the last one was published in March 2005.

More Wall Street Journal added to Proquest

The archives of the Wall Street Journal, 1889-1990, are now available as part of ProQuest Historical Newspapers. This resource can be accessed from Databases A-Z, Pitt's e-journals list, and PITTCat.

LexisNexis Academic updates

LexisNexis Academic has added American Jurisprudence, Second Edition, which will be available through 2010 under the rules established when it was acquired by its current publisher. They will be adding AmJur to the dropdown list on the Law Reviews search form to make it more convenient to access. They are also beta-testing a subscriber page that lets you create permanent links and view the latest additions to content (click "Reports").

JSTOR and African digital library unite

JSTOR has announced that it is uniting with Aluka (an international, not-for-profit initiative building an online digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa) in order to improve and broaden online access to scholarly resources in Africa and develop a multi-national archive of materials.

historic patent/inventor database

Wright State University has announced the Miami Valley Historical Inventors database, containing over 1800 patent documents and more than 4000 individual names, some with historical notes. The database covers the years 1814 to 1875 and concentrates on the Miami Valley of Ohio, birthplace of the Wright brothers.
Speaking of patents, a post on the Chronicle's Wired Campus Blog says that a patent application made by Apple details software that would capture video and slides from college lectures and automatically edit them into video podcasts. Hope it works.

Steelers games via online streaming

The Sports Business Journal reports that NBC is going to make 17 NFL football games available "live" on the internet via online streaming, a first for the NFL. The online video will consist of NBC’s broadcast feed, with the call by Al Michaels and John Madden. The Wall Street Journal WSJ says that The NFL approached NBC wanting to make a deal to stream its games partly because NBC's nationwide broadcasts, which averaged 15.9 million viewers last season, make for a clean test of whether online availability will boost or shrink viewership. Steelers games that will be available:

• @ Browns Sunday Sept. 14, 8:15 pm
• @ Jaguars Sunday Oct. 4, 8:15 pm

New search engine launched by former Googlers

Techworld reports that a new search engine called Cuil - that's pronounced cool - has been launched by some former Google employees. It features a superclean interface - even cleaner than Google - but the background is black instead of Googly white. Included on the search page is the number of webpages it has indexed - 121,617,892,992 as of this morning. Cuil claims to go beyond traditional approaches by analysing the context of each page and the concepts behind each query so it can provide better rankings by content rather than popularity (semantic web). It organizes similar results into groups and sorts them by category and offers tabs to clarify subjects, as well as suggestions on how to refine searches.

Spam law effectiveness

Infopackets has an article about the effectiveness of the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 - aka the CAN-SPAM Act . They report that the amount of email spam now is 5 to 10 times higher than in 2003 when the CAN-SPAM Act first went into effect. The Federal Trade Commission is responsible for enforcement of the law and while investigations are allegedly underway, and there is the occasional arrest (the last was SPAMmer Alan Ralsky in January of this year) little has been done. In May, the FTC approved four new rules (text from the CFR here) in an attempt to tighten up enforcement; the rules went into effect this month so the effects aren't yet known.

Database: Sports spending & gender equity

The Chronicle of Higher Education has issued its annual report on athletics spending and gender equity in college sports , which includes an online database containing data from all NCAA institutions. Data were taken from files submitted by colleges to the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Postsecondary Education. Under the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act of 1994, colleges must make this information public every year.

Pitt Cancer Center: Cell Phone Caution

A researcher at the University of Pittsburgh issued a warning to limit cell phone use because of possible cancer risks. The warning came from Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute. Some of the points made: Electromagnetic fields from cell phones are estimated to penetrate the brain especially in children. The most recent studies, which include subjects with a history of cell phone usage for a duration of at least 10 years, show a possible association between certain benign tumors (acoustic neuromas) and some brain cancers on the side the device is used. The warning recommends 10 precautions to take with your cellphone.

US News Rankings taken to task

An article in the National Law Journal by the dean of Case Western Law School is titled "Say 'enough' to 'U.S. News'. The article was prompted by an announcement by US News that they are considering an adjustment in their calculations. To date, one way to keep your ranking up has been to admit students with sub-par LSATs and GPAs into the part-time program only, since those students’ so-called entering credentials will then be excluded from the U.S. News rankings calculus. But now U.S. News is considering revising that calculus to include part-time students’ entering credentials. The Wall Street Journal law blog has a post about the article with plenty of comments.

Very cool new search engine

Snaps to Mary Ellen Bates for pointing us to Searchme, a cool new search engine. According to their press release, Searchme "uses visual search and category refinement. We think it will help you find what you’re looking for, faster, with a lot less spam. It’s a new way to search that takes advantage of the size and bandwidth of today’s Internet and the increasingly visual way that we all interact online. The idea for Searchme came when Mark Kvamme, Searchme’s chairman, got tired of looking through a bunch of unrelated results for articles on motocross. He suggested to founders Randy Adams and John Holland that they create a search engine that sorted results into categories."
I've only used it a little but I'm impressed so far, and Mary Ellen Bates always has excellent tips.

Second Life CLE

Check it - the Wired Campus Blog reports that the California Bar approved a CLE that takes place in Second Life, the virtual world and is sponsored by the Second Life Bar Association. According to the blogpost there were 25 avatars in attendance at the first session.

Center for Economic Document Digitization

The St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank has established a new center, called the Center for Economic Documents Digitization (CEDD), to recognize and emphasize their commitment to digitizing economic documents and the FRASER (Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research) project. The collection contains historical economic statistical publications, releases, and documents including U.S. government publications, Federal Reserve publications, photographs, manuscripts, and multimedia formats.

Digital Copyright slider

The Chronicle's Wired Campus blog has a post pointing readers to the "digital slide rule" developed by the American Library Association's Office for Information Technology Policy. Is a work in the public domain? Do you need permission to use it? When does copyright expire? Find the answers using the digital slider. This is a great tool for librarians, teachers, artists, students, researchers, attorneys and anyone who needs clear, concise information on copyright terms and conditions. The slider was created by Michael Brewer, a librarian at the University of Arizona and an OITP Copyright Advisory Committee member.

Most Prolific Law Schools

Science Watch reports on the five most prolific law schools, 2003-2007 Based on each institution's percentage of the 10,127 papers published in Thomson Reuters-indexed law journals between 2003 and 2007.

AALL Portland 2.0

Another beautiful day in Portland as the conference winds down. The first meeting of the day is at 7 am which means getting up around 5:30- so I've been trying to keep my body clock on Eastern time. The Computer Services group has been very busy and active for this year's conference, there's a lot of interest in Web 2.0, online research and digital libraries. We had a very successful Web 2.0 presentation - 600 people in attendance! Some of the Barconians are heading back to Pittsburgh tonight, so at least a few of us will be back on the job on Thursday.

AALL Tuesday

So many interesting discussions, so little time! My schedule is packed but there are still talks that I'm missing. We are trying to cover all the important sessions between us and taking lots of notes. Today I started at a talk where I learned several new online tricks - will share when I get back and have a chance to try them out. Roundtable discussion about using technology to teach, someone showed how they had edited CALI lessons to customize them for their class. Another person talked about his successful integration of the Westlaw TWEN polling feature into a legal research class. Then had lunch with my "students" for the Web 2.0 Challenge at a very nice coffee bar/ lunch spot called the J. Cafe.
Weather perfect. We're all enjoying Portland, at least what we are able to see of it when we get away from the convention center. I think I missed the "Law of Beer" Presentation, but I hear that Brian Hare was going to attend so ask him!

AALL in Portland

All the Barco librarians are in Portland OR at the annual AALL conference along with about 2,000 other law librarians from around the country. The plenary this morning at 9 am (yes, on a Sunday). The plenary was this morning with keynote speaker David Pogue who blogs about technology for the New York Times at Pogue's Posts. He was informative, interesting, entertaining and got a standing ovation (partly because he saved us all a lot of money on our phone bills. Also his sendup of the RIAA, to the tune of "YMCA", was inspired.)
After the plenary there were so many informative sessions my head is throbbing. And any free time in between sessions is spent talking with friends from other law libraries. Hope my notes are good. More later.

Google makes up

On the heels of the Wired Campus Blog post about librarian complaints abt Google, Google has posted a new librarian newsletter.

Google played us?

Today's Wired Campus Blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education has a story entitled "Librarians Accuse Google of Using and Discarding Them". Apparently the Library Stuff blog has a posting that accuses Google of making nice to librarians until it got what it wanted - the library books for the Google Books digitization project.

A history of Congressional committees

The Law Librarians' Society of Washington D.C. has added a new publication to its Legislative Sourcebook page. The publication , a 22 page pdf, is entitled "An Overview of the Development of U.S. Congressional Committees" and it gives a informative history of these committees from 1789 to the present.

Google Lively

Google has debuted anew service called Lively in which three-dimensional software enables people to chat in 3D. "Lively," is Google's answer to "Second Life," where people deploy animated alter egos known as avatars to navigate virtual reality. Google thinks "Lively" will encourage even more people to dive into alternate realities because it isn't tethered to one Web site like Second Life, and it doesn't cost anything to use. After installing a small packet of software from lively.com, a user can enter Lively from other Web sites, like social networking sites and blogs. Google already has created a Lively application that works on Facebook and is working on a version suitable for MySpace. Lively lets users create avatars and digital environments. The rooms in Lively can include a large-screen television that plays clips from YouTube.

Call for white papers: Web 2.0 best practices

Pike & Fischer (a BNA company) has announced an opportunity to share Web 2.0 best practices at their upcoming Legal Risk Management Forum. They are calling for submission of white papers covering relevant topics including content infringement, privacy, reputation preservation, and other critical issues facing Internet businesses. Qualifying papers must be non-commercial titles formally published within the last year and must be submitted by Friday, September 5, 2008. Submit papers to customercare@pf.com.

Guidelines for Fair Use

The Chronicle's Wired Campus Blog has a story, including a video report, about researchers at American University who have published a study of fair use in copyright law. The study, Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video, by Center for Social Media director Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, co-director of the law school’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property. The online report includes links to examples of videos and argues that many uses of copyrighted material in today’s online videos (think YouTube) are eligible for fair use consideration. The study points to a wide variety of practices—satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups)—all of which could be legal in some circumstances.

Legal Research in a Nutshell links

The University of Virginia law school has a webpage with links to websites referenced in Legal Research in a Nutshell by Cohen and Olson. The links are listed by chapter - chapter titles include "Constitutions and Statutes", "Legislative Information", "Case Law Sources" and "The Law of Other Countries".

WPA Historical Records Survey digitization project

Yesterday there was an interesting post on the govdocs listserv about a potential digitization project at the University of Missouri. Their library has been given what appears to be a complete set of WPA Historical Records Survey books. Originally part of the WPA Federal Writers' Project, the Historical Records Survey was devoted to inventorying and indexing historically significant record collections in state, county and local archives. Among their accomplishments were indexes of vital statistics, book indexes, bibliographies, cemetery indexes and newspaper indexes, the American Imprints Inventory, the Atlas of Congressional Roll Calls Project, a historical index of American musicians, surveys of portraits in public buildings, maritime records, a history of grazing, a food history project called America Eats, and a necessary survey of the federal Archives. According to the Government Documents Librarian, the strength of the work is in the wonderfully detailed annotations which accompany each individually listed record set.
The University librarians are considering digitizing the complete collection (all states) for the University of Missouri Digital Library . They are soliciting any information about whether this collection has already been digitized and made freely available online to help them with this decision.

Nature offers free archiving of scholarly articles

The Nature publishing group has announced a new service that it will provide to scholarly authors : to deposit authors’ papers in free online repositories, in order to to help fulfil funder and institutional mandates. Nature will be the first publisher to offer the archiving service whose publications are not themselves open-access journals. The Nature journals allow, and now will facilitate, archiving that goes public six months after papers are published

The first IT guy helps a librarian

Federal court order raises privacy concerns

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has blogged about their objections to the latest development in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Viacom against YouTube. A federal court order that requires Google Inc. (owner of YouTube) to provide information about videos watched on YouTube is renewing concerns about online privacy. YouTube has a database that records each time a video is watched and pairs that with two kinds of information about people who viewed it.
People who put videos on the site, or want to comment on videos or email or embed videos have to sign up for a Youtube account. Under the judge's order, Google must deliver the log-in names that users created to sign up for those accounts. For the people without accounts, Google stores - and must now provide - IP addresses of user computers that some privacy experts fear can be linked with individual users.
The case is being heard in the Southern District Court of New York, docket number 1:07-cv-02103-LLS Viacom International, Inc. et al v. Youtube, Inc. et al Louis L. Stanton, presiding.

Survey on Lexis v. Westlaw

The advanced legal research instructors at Stanford law school have blogged about the results of the Westlaw v. Lexis survey they conducted; a full report is posted on their page of publications as a 183 page pdf.

Differences between Macs and PCs

Walt Mossberg's column today spells out the basic differences between Mac and Windows and is very helpful for anyone considering switching from one to the other.

AARP.com's Old Timey Techie Blog

This doesn't remind us of anyone we know. ;-)
Hat tip to Barco's youtuberina - Katie Nye.

McAfee publishes results of spam study

McAfee has just released a report of a study it conducted about spam email. Participants in the study, 5 people from 10 different countries (including a US housewife) were told to answer every spam email message and every popup ad for one month.
Some of the results:
The most popular subject received was financial spam.
UK participants received 23% of the Nigerian email scam spam
The top 5 spam-receiving countries were the United States, Brazil, Italy, Mexico and the UK.

Northwestern offers a JD in 2 years

Northwestern University Law School has announced that it is offering an "accelerated JD" program for highly motivated students. Students accepted into the program will begin their studies in May and take 86 hours of course credits (the same as other JD students) in 5 semesters. In order to qualify for the program students must have at least 2 years of "substantive" post-college work experience.
Hat tip to Valerie Weis.

Minerva Research Initiative for social science research

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the National Science Foundation has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Dept. of Defense to work together supporting social science research of interest to the Pentagon. The NSF will review project proposals submitted to the Minerva Research Initiative - the title of the new project - for grants on specific topics. The full announcement (22 page pdf) including grant proposal submission requirements is on the Army Research Lab website.

Rand report on pre-war Iraq planning

Rand has released a report called "After Saddam: Prewar Planning and the Occupation of Iraq."
The report examined activities through June 2004 and part of an 8 volume collection of reports that the RAND Arroyo Center undertook to prepare an authoritative account of the planning and
execution of combat and stability operations in Iraq. Six of the volumes are classified. The other unclassified volume is being finalized.

Demographics in Europe

The Sunday N.Y. Times magazine had an interesting article that explored the dramatic demographic change occurring in Europe. Entitled "No Babies?", the article presents data and discusses the impact of the “lowest-low fertility” phenomenon.

Vermont Law bars military

Vermont Law School has barred the military from its campus, according to a post on the WSJ law blog. The school is protesting the "don't ask, don't tell" policy and will lose somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000 in federal funding as a result.

BNA tests new web interface for Reports

BNA is moving all BNA current reports to a new platform with a new look and with functionality enhancements and new personalization options. A beta version of the new design is now available for anyone to preview. The beta version is very easy to access - near the top of each Current Report there is a prominent link that says "Preview Our New Platform" in red letters. See, for example, U.S. Law Week ; click the red-lettered link to go the Welcome page and then the link on that page to go to the beta version. The Welcome page also has links to a Quick Tour of new features, a Quick Reference Card (2 page pdf), and a form to sign up for a 30-minute live instructor-led Webinar.
There is also a link to a survey where you can give BNA feedback on the new design.
According to the BNA announcement, they hope to keep the link from the old to the new available for several months, after which only the new design will be available.
Our BNA subscriptions include:
ABA/BNA Lawyer's Manual on Professional Conduct
Antitrust and Trade Regulation Report
Bankruptcy Law Reporter
Criminal Law Reporter
Electronic Commerce & Law Report
Employment Discrimination Report
Environment Reporter
Family Law Reporter
Health Law Reporter
International Trade Reporter
Labor & Employment Law Library
Patent, Trademark, & Copyright Journal
Patent, Trademark & Copyright Law Daily
Privacy and Security Law Report
Securities Regulation and Law Report
Tax Policy Weekly Report
U.S. Law Week
World Intellectual Property Report (Note: this database doesn't yet have a link to the beta test.)

Georgia State answers complaint

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Georgia State University has filed a response in the copyright lawsuit that Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage Publications have filed against them. The plaintiffs argue that course readings that professors and librarians disseminate online at Georgia State infringe publishers' copyrights. Named in the lawsuit are the President of the university, the Dean of Libraries, and the Associate Provost for Information Systems and Technology. In the response, Georgia State says that "Plaintiffs’ claims are barred by the doctrine of fair use pursuant to 17 U.S.C. § 107, including the fact that any alleged use of copyrighted materials was for the purpose of teaching, scholarship or research and for nonprofit educational purposes. "
The case is in the Northern District Court of Georgia, docket number 1:08-cv-01425-ODE.

Statutes At Large online

beSpacific reports that the Statutes at Large for the 109th Congress, 2nd session are now available online at GPO Access. The US Statutes at Large is the permanent collection of all laws and resolutions enacted during each session of Congress; every public and private law passed by Congress is published in the order of the date it was enacted into law and arranged by Public Law number.

Copyright Office expands online services

Government Computer News reports that as of July 1, the public will be able to use the Electronic Copyright Office (eCO) portal to submit basic claims and copyright applications electronically, make online payments and upload works being registered. For those who want to submit hard copies of the registered material, shipping labels can be generated online and printed out. The project has been beta testing since last July, and has gradually expanded over the past year. Since the beta test began, about half of the online registrations have been published works, many of them registered by large companies such as publishers. The other half have been unpublished works, from screenplays to photographs, many registered by individuals.

Landmark Second Amendment opinion online

"We turn first to the meaning of the Second Amendment." Thus begins the majority opinion for the District of Columbia v. Heller , handed down by the Supreme Court today, and available online (pdf) thanks to Scotusblog.

The Duke University law school has a Webcast District of Columbia v. Heller: The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms made on March 24, 2008 in which Robert A. Levy, co-counsel for the plaintiff gun-owners in the case, discusses the legal issues implicated in the case. This was the first Supreme Court case to seriously consider gun-ownership rights in the context of the Second Amendment since 1939.

University Presses sign on with Amazon's Kindle

Inside Higher Ed. reports that a number of university presses are making their books available for digital downloading onto the Amazon Kindle - among them Princeton University Press, Yale University Press, Oxford University Press and the University of California Press - and the number of scholarly books is growing rapidly. Neither the presses nor Amazon would discuss the financial arrangements but said that they were revenue-sharing deals, and that preparing the books for release on Kindle was not particularly burdensome or expensive.
The article notes that illustrations aren't included in the books due to copyright issues, so books that benefit from illustrations (art books, for example) aren't available for the Kindle yet.

NH law school grads have option to bypass the bar exam

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that New Hampshire has an alternate certification program that allows law students to bypass the usual bar exam, and its first 13 members were sworn in last month. Supreme Court justices teamed up with New Hampshire Board of Bar Examiners, the state's Bar Association, and the Franklin Pierce law school to create a training and certification program that would require students to prove that they know how to prepare and try a case, examine a witness, negotiate a settlement, and reflect on their own strengths and weaknesses as future lawyers. Students in the program, called Daniel Webster Honor Scholars, have spent the past two years honing their courtroom skills and demonstrating them to judges and lawyers.

SSRN in the news

Today's New York Times has a story about SSRN and how it has turned into a sort of rankings system for legal scholars. "The network was not created to be a Top 40 list for academics, said Michael C. Jensen, its chairman and one of its founders, but it has turned out that way."
The ABA Journal Daily Newsletter picked up on the story, using the headline "S.S.R.N. Rankings Temporarily Boost Instapundit Law Prof Above Cass Sunstein". The reporter said that SSRN is a good thing for law professors who are achieving notoriety because of frequent downloads of their papers - Instapundit and U. Tennessee law prof. Glen Reynolds, for example.

The Firewall of China

PC Magazine has a fascinating article that takes an in-depth look at how the Chinese government polices the internet- something they've been getting flack about, especially in anticipation of the many foreigners who will be attending the Olympics in August.

New Search Engine gathers info from Wikipedia

Mary Ellen Bates's Infotip today discusses Powerset, a search engine that pulls information from Wikipedia. Powerset’s goal is to change the way people interact with technology by enabling computers to understand our language- they are attempting to make searching much more intelligent by teaching the computers to understand the sense of what is being asked and the sense of what is on web pages, and then to match the most applicable pages. According to the Infotip, "PowerSet is best used for those searches that cover a number of topics or areas. It's not perfect, and it only searches Wikipedia, but I find it an exciting new approach in the efforts of search engines to make sense out of web content. " A search for "First Amendment rights" did an excellent job of pulling relevant information and ordering the results.

Greatest Defunct Websites

CNet has an article featuring "The Greatest Defunct Websites and Dotcom Disasters" including search engines that have bit the dust. As the author says, Welcome to the dotcom bubble: the black hole of Web history.

Sandra Day O'Connor developing educational computer game

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has announced that she is working on the development of an educational computer game that will teach about the Judicial branch of our government according to an article in Wired magazine. Speaking at the annual Games For Change conference at Parsons School For Design in New York, O'Connor said that she plans to work alongside University of Wisconsin-Madison professor James Paul Gee to create Our Courts, an online interactive game geared at 7th and 8th graders that will familiarize students with the legal system. In her speech, O'Connor said that she is motivated to provide better civics education for students because "Only one-third of Americans can name the three branches of government, but two-thirds can name a judge on American Idol."

10 websites for litigators

Yesterday's edition of The Virtual Chase has an article about the Top Ten Essential Web Sites for Litigators. Most but not all are free. The list includes one of our favorites, the Cornell Legal Information Institute; GPO Access, The Bluebook online version (subscription), and one we didn't know about, the BRB Publications Inc. site that has great links to government agencies that provide free online access to public record information.

Librarian in the janitor's closet

The Chronicle's Wired Campus blog has a funny entry that points to a very entertaining blogpost by Stephanie Willen Brown at the official blog of the ACRL (Assn. of College and Research Libraries). Stephanie spent a month holding office hours in a janitor's closet in her academic dept. building instead of the library, and talks about how that went - but she also talks about office hours more generally and has some interesting information.

Adobe Acrobat online!

Computerworld reports that Adobe Acrobat, the Adobe software program that is used to create pdf "documents", is now available (in beta mode) online. You need to register and are only allowed to create 5 pdfs from files on your computer, but it looks like Adobe is definitely moving into web-based applications; the beta site also has a web-based word processor called Buzzword that Adobe says creates more polished documents than other web-based apps like Google docs.

The future of books and libraries

There's an excellent article about the history and future of information technology in the New York Review of Books. Written by Robert Darnton, director of the University Library at Harvard, the article traces the history of information technology from the codex through the internet and concludes "Therefore, I say: long live Google, but don't count on it living long enough to replace that venerable building with the Corinthian columns. As a citadel of learning and as a platform for adventure on the Internet, the research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future."

Stanford Law eliminates letter grades

Inside Higher Education reports that the Stanford Law School faculty has voted to drop letter grades and replace them with four levels of achievement: honors, pass, restricted credit and no credit.

InSITE website revamped

Cornell Law Library's InSITE website, a current awareness service, highlights selected law-related Web sites in two ways: as an annotated publication issued electronically and in print; and as a keyword-searchable database. The law librarians at Cornell evaluate potentially useful Web sites, select the most valuable ones, and provide commentary and subject access to them. InSITE was recently revamped and now features a quick search on the home page and a great new feature - it allows anyone to search all the websites ever annotated by InSITE with a single click!

Pitt Recycling Info

The new blue recycling cans in offices and the big trash cans marked “Recyclable” are ONLY FOR PAPER and are emptied on Tues & Fri. They are for most types of paper but NOT paper towels or tissues.

If you would like to recycle :
§ aluminum beverage cans
§ tin cans
§ glass bottles and jars
§ plastic containers : (only those marked PETE 1 and HDPE 2 are recyclable)
they must be put into the special trash containers marked “ALUMINUM, GLASS AND PLASTIC.” There is one on the first floor in the lobby.
The Pitt Facilities Management website has more information on Pitt's recycling efforts.

EPA library update

Not so great news about the EPA libraries. Congress ordered the EPA to reopen the libraries it had closed but apparently the EPA is only grudgingly complying. According to the PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) website one of the libraries is being stuck in a space that is smaller than the men's rooms in the same building. And a political appointee with no library experience has been made the EPA "library czar". Stay tuned.

Creative moments in American law

Robert Blomquist, Aa law professor from Valparaiso University Law School, recently published a paper on SSRN titled "the 100 Most Creative Moments in American Law." According to the abstract, the article discusses the most creative moments in Anglo-American law and compares legal creativity with other kinds of creativity (corporate, artistic, military and rhetorical). The article then ranks the top hundred moments in American law. The top 10 include the Constitution, Northwest Ordinance and Marbury v. Madison. The final 20 are all Supreme Court opinions including Miranda v. Arizona and Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council.

Google Book Search bibliography now available

Digital librarian Charles W. Bailey Jr. has posted a Google Book Search bibliography on the Digital Scholarship website. The bibliography focuses on the evolution of Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues associated with it. Where possible, links are provided to works that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories.
Meanwhile, Inside Higher Ed. reports that Microsoft is ending two projects - Live Search Books and Live Search Academic - designed to digitize books and journals. A post on the official MS Live Search blog explains that they digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles but concluded from this experience that best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries.

Copyright infringement news

The Associated Press reports that Google's lawyers have filed documents that claim Viacom's copyright infringement lawsuit of YouTube is a threat to the freedom of the internet. Google owns YouTube and was responding to Viacom's latest lawsuit alleging that the Internet has led to "an explosion of copyright infringement" by YouTube and others.
And Ars Technica has a story about multimillion dollar infringement judgments against 2 small websites, ShowStash.net and Cinematube.net, for copyright infringement of various movies and TV shows. They were sued by the Motion Picture Association of America and were found guilty of contributory copyright infringement because they searched for, identified, collected, and indexed links to illegal copies of movies and TV shows - even though they didn't host any infringing content. The folks blogging at Techwhack say that " similar charges can now be levied against search engine giants like Google and Yahoo which also enable users to hunt for pirated media online. "

Congradulations!

Congratulations and best of luck to all of our newly minted JD's, graduating today. We'll miss having you around the library - and remember, you can always email or call us for help with your legal research!

Lexis Academic webseminars

Lexis Academic is offering a number of free online 1-hour seminars this summer; register on their website if you're interested.
The schedule is as follows:
SUMMER SESSION I
June 17th: 12 noon: LexisNexis Academic Basic Overview
June 18th: 12 noon: Legal Research Using LexisNexis Academic
June 19th: 12 noon: Finding Sources on LexisNexis Academic
June 20th: 12 noon: Business Research Using LexisNexis Academic

SUMMER SESSION II
July 22nd: 1:00 pm: Business Research Using LexisNexis Academic
July 23rd: 1:00 pm: LexisNexis Academic Basic Overview
July 24th: 1:00 pm: Legal Research Using LexisNexis Academic
July 25th: 1:00 pm: Finding Sources on LexisNexis Academic

SUMMER SESSION III
August 19th: 1:00 pm: LexisNexis Academic Basic Overview
August 20th: 1:00 pm: Finding Sources on LexisNexis Academic
August 21st: 1:00 pm: Legal Research Using LexisNexis Academic
August 22nd: 1:00 pm: Business Research Using LexisNexis Academic

The session on Finding Sources (taught by Andrea Sevetson) combines techniques within the interface for finding sources (what’s different about Browse and Find, for example) and for searching for individual titles with using sources like the Subscriber Resources site and del.icio.us tags for creating direct links to sources and creating URLs for searches.

Changes in the US Code from LII

The Legal Information Institute (LII) at Cornell is the first place many of us go when we need to research something in the US Code. LII has added a feature to their US Code information: when you scroll down the page and look at the Titles of the US Code you will notice a little RSS feed icon next to each Title. You can use these to subscribe to an RSS feed of any classification updates (that is, new legislation) affecting that Title.

OCLC and Google Book Search ink agreement

Info Today reports that OCLC and Google Book Search have formalized an agreement that strengthens the ties between WorldCat and Google Book Search's "Find in a Library". The article reports that Google will have access to MARC records from WorldCat and OCLC will create MARC records for Google Book Search digitized content from existing records for print content in their system and will also create new records for any content they do not already have.

Public Law news

There was an interesting exchange on the law librarian listserv yesterday. Someone was researching a federal bill that was just signed into law and wanted to know where it was going to be codified so he could cite it. A response came from Bryan Carson that provided a link to an OFR listserv that will automatically let you know when a law has been passed with the Bill number, Public Law Number, Name of Act, Approval date, and the U.S. Statutes at Large page citation. It usually takes about a week or so for the law to make it from the President's pen to the OFR listserv announcement.

Google calendar

Speaking of tips... I know a lot of you use Google Calendar, and Computerworld has some great tips about how to be a savvy user. At the same time, they offer an article about the top ten Google failures (remember Google Answers?).

Tips for DIY copyright protection

The Online Journalism Review from USC's Annenberg School for Communication has an article with tips about how to protect your intellectual property online. The article recommends some websites for finding out if any of your writing is being "stolen" and has tips about what to do about it.

Jonathan Zittrain on the future of the internet

Big Think has a feature on Oxford Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain and his book "The Future of the Internet". Prof. Zittrain is an American Internet law professor at the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford and visiting professor and researcher at Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. You can see the Big Think video in which he discusses the question "Why is the future of the Internet so bleak?"

Personal information on the Web

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had an article (subscription required) with the disconcerting title "New Sites Make It Easier to Spy On Your Friends." The author points to free websites that make it easy to find information about anyone on the web. The websites include Spokeo.com , a search site that lets users see what their friends are doing on other Web sites; ZabaSearch.com for public records (including criminal history and birthdates); Spock.com for finding up personal pages, such as social-networking profiles; Zillow.com for real estate valuation (it estimates the value of people's homes by looking at other home sales in the area); and Jigsaw.com where people can share information from business cards they've collected.
The article also tells how to keep your information private on some of the big websites like Amazon and Flickr.
Is it just a coincidence that the two people interviewed for the article who talk about how they found surprising/embarrassing information information are both librarians?

Interview with a military librarian

The Association of College and Research Libraries has an online article about Greta Marlatt, information services manager at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, California. In the article Marlatt talks about military librarianship and her work on the Homeland Security Digital Library.

GPO would like your input: public access assessment

The Government Printing Office has announced the drafts of 2 documents that they plan to use to assess the public access policies and practices of Federal Depository Libraries (Barco is one). They are asking for comments from anyone interested in the FDLP program and free public access to government documents; the deadline for comments is May 23.

"Trainee Lawyer" rocks the house

A British "trainee lawyer" (is that like a US law student?) got a standing ovation for his recent TV performance.

Pittsburgh hosts American Council of Learned Societies

The annual meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies was held in Pittsburgh last week and much of the program focused on the effects of the internet on scholarly communication and publishing as well as legal and political obstacles facing international scholars according to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. The agenda featured a panel discussion on the future of scholarly publishing during which Michael A. Keller, university librarian at Stanford, sparred with a philosopher who blamed libraries for playing along with commercial publishers' overpricing of journals in the science, technical, and medical fields, wreaking havoc with library budgets. "Libraries blew it," Mr. Keller agreed, "when they started shelling out for all the crap journals" distributed by the commercial-publishing giants.
The keynote lecture was delivered by Theodor Meron, Appeals Judge and former President, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and Charles L. Denison Professor of Law Emeritus and Judicial Fellow at NYU Law School; he is the first lawyer to be awarded the ACLS Charles Homer Haskins prize which recognizes distinguished humanists for a life of scholarly achievement.

Why consumers return electronic purchases

There was an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today entitled "The War on Returns" about how retailers and manufacturers of electronic goods are trying to stem the tide of product returns. According to the article, consumers return between 11 and 20% of all the electronic goods they purchase - wireless phones, GPS units, MP3 players and wireless networking equipment have the highest rates. Only 5% of the items are returned because they are defective. A whopping 68% are returned with "no trouble found" simply because consumers didn't understand the product, and 27% are returned because of "buyer's remorse" (spent too much, spouse got mad).

Historic Documents from the Copyright Office

The US Copyright Office is making a number historical documents available on its website. There are reports and publications, announcements from 1954-2001, annual reports from 1866 to the present, the copyright laws of 1790 and 1909, and biographies of the Registers of Copyright. There are also some interesting illustrated articles about "copyright lore", including stories about the copyrights for the Statue of Liberty and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Dept. of Education postpones ABA review

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the US Department of Education has postponed its review of the authority vested in the American Bar Association to accredit law schools. The Dept. of Ed. wrote to the ABA and told them that they have to fully investigate allegations in comments filed by the Thomas M. Cooley Law School and Wallace Riley (a past ABA president) and analyze all of the documents the ABA filed. According to the Chronicle, the ABA has attracted scrutiny over its requirements that law schools prove they are taking concrete steps to diversify their pools of students and faculty members, and that their graduates meet certain passage rates on bar examinations.

Internet Archive challenges FBI

Silicon Valley dot com reports that the Internet Archive has successfully challenged an FBI attempt to get information about one of its users. The Internet Archive is a non-profit Internet library that offers permanent access to historical collections that exist in digital format. The FBI presented a national security letter in November asking for a library patron's records but the Internet Archive sued the FBI a month later, alleging the letter violated free speech rights because they prohibit recipients from talking to anyone else about them. The Internet Archive said today the FBI agreed to withdraw the letter last week and make the case, which was filed under seal, public.

Another threatened federal library

The Washington Post reports that the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville Maryland is threatened by looming budget cuts begining Oct. 1. The library was signed into being by Abraham Lincoln in 1862 and is the greatest agricultural library in the world according to the WaPo.

Oregon claims the Oregon Revised Statutes are copyrighted

Lawyers for the state of Oregon are accusing online legal publisher Justia of copyright infringement for publishing the Oregon state code on the Justia website. Oregon's Legislative Counsel Committee sent Justia cease-and-desist letter accusing them of copyright infringement. The Justia website makes laws, regulations and legal decisions freely available online. Oregon does not claim a copyright in the "text of the law itself," but rather in "the arrangement and subject-matter compilation" of the law, Legislative Counsel Dexter Johnson says in an April 7 letter to Tim Stanley, chief executive officer of Justia.com. The letter advised Justia that it may link to the law on the state's own Web site, or it must pay for a license to publish it.
Sam Bayard of the Citizen Media Law Project blogs that "it looks extremely suspect (for Oregon) to claim (intellectual property) rights in the overall organizational structure and the numbering for each statutory section."
Hat tip: Valerie Weis

Patent filed for sending scent over cellphones

German interactive services firm Convisual has announced that it has, along with ISI institute of sensory analysis and marketing consultancy, filed for a patent for applications allowing users to send scents to properly equipped cell phones. According to the announcement, "In the near future, you will have the ability to send a text message along with a whiff of a fresh ocean breeze".

Harvard Law School Library appoints Palfry

The Harvard Crimson reports that John F. Palfry is the new head of the Harvard Law School Library. Palfry is a well-known scholar of cyberlaw and has been the director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School’s largest affiliated research institute and one of the most prominent cyber law centers in the country. According to the Berkman Center website, Palfrey is Harvard Law School's first Associate Dean of Library and Information Resources; he will take over as director of the Harvard Law School Library and become a tenured professor at the Law School.

Bluebook survey

The editors of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation are making revisions to the forthcoming Nineteenth Edition and request that Bluebook users take an online survey about how they can improve the updated version. Surveys must be received by June 30, 2008 in order to be considered for the Nineteenth Edition.

Don't be a victim of identity thieves

Walt Mossberg's column in today's Wall Street Journal has great information about how to avoid being scammed and robbed of your identity or money by online "social engineering" attackers.
He discusses his main points in this video:

Recent reports on Iraq Reconstruction

Several recent reports on the status of reconstruction in Iraq have been released this week from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) and are in the news; the SIGIR homepage is here. The reports are in pdf format and the titles of recently released reports include:
08-011 Review of Outcome, Cost, and Oversight of Electricity-Sector Reconstruction Contract with Perini Corporation
08-017 Transferring Reconstruction Projects to the Government of Iraq: Some Progress Made but Further Improvements Needed to Avoid Waste
08-013 Interim Report on Iraq Reconstruction Contract Terminations
08-015 Interim Analysis of Iraqi Security Force Information Provided by the Department of Defense Report, Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq
08-016 U.S. Anticorruption Efforts in Iraq: Progress Made in Implementing Revised Management Plan
08-014 Progress on Recommended Improvements to Contract Administration for the Iraqi Police Training Program