Graphic: gay rights in the US, state by state

The UK Guardian has an interesting "data visualization" on their website that illustrates gay rights in the United States, state by state. The categories in which states are compared include gay marriage, gay adoption, hospital visitation and medical decision-making, and various anti-discrimination areas of law. The states are grouped by region.
Hat tip: Pat Roncevich

National Archives catches inside thief

The Washington Post reports that a sharp-eyed collector of radio ephemera has helped the National Archives bring a thief to justice. The collector was shopping on eBay for additions to his collection when he came upon an item that piqued his interest: the master copy of a broadcast radio interview with baseball legend Babe Ruth as he hunted for quail and pheasants on a crisp morning in 1937. A close look, however, made him realize that the item had been stolen from the National Archives. Working with federal authorities, he helped them track down the seller- who turned out to be a longtime Archives official who has admitted to stealing 955 items from the Archives – including original recordings of the 1948 World Series and a rare recording of the 1937 Hindenburg disaster.

NYC public schools forbid Facebook friending for teachers

The New York Times reports that the New York City Dept. of Education has issued guidelines governing social media interactions between teachers and students. Following numerous inappropriate relationships between students and teachers that began on social networking sites, the rules prohibit teachers from communicating with students using their 'personal' Facebook or Twitter accounts, and requires parental consent before students can participate in social networking for educational purposes. The rules also state that teachers have no expectation of privacy online, and that principals and other officials will inspect teachers' profiles.

LOC on born digital collections

The Library of Congress's Digital Preservation blog today has a really interesting post about the Rhizome ArtBase online archive of digital art. This is the beginning of a new series that the LOC is trying out that will focus on interesting and valuable "born digital" collections. The series will look at particular collections and include conversations with archivists, curators, librarians and others who work to collect, preserve, and provide access to "our born digital cultural record". Today's article features an interview with the digital conservator of Rhizome ArtBase, who talks about the sort of work that is in the collection including Jellotime.com (2008) and the Endangered GIF Preserve (2012-ongoing) which collects animated GIFs that have been marked for deletion from Wikipedia.

Digital library for all

Technology Review has a terrific article feature titled "The Library of Utopia". The article discusses the utopian ideal of making all knowledge available to everyone in a public library of all books ever published. In particular, the article looks at two projects with these ambitions: the Google Book project and Robert Darnton's Digital Public Library project. The author discusses the problems that have arisen with each, and the prospects for the future.

Dropbox price compared with other online storage

Amit Agarwal's Digital Inspiration blog has a useful post in which he compares the cost of "cloud" storage in the top online storage services. The services he looks at are Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, Box, and SugarSync. He points out that the pricing strategy of Google (for Google Drive) and Microsoft (for SkyDrive)has pressured Dropbox to offer smaller and less expensive plans.

The Digital Campus 2012

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a Special Report on the Digital Campus 2012. The report looks at the current status of technology in higher education, and includes articles about open education, designing online courses, and how one professor at Virginia Tech, John Boyer, teaches a megaclass of 2,670 students using technology.

Preservation Week in law libraries

+Margaret Maes, director of the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA)is highlighting projects undertaken by LIPA member during Preservation Week. The first story comes from the University of Arizona, where the Cracchiolo Law Library has established a digital projects initiative to provide online access to content from the Law Library's Special Collections. The focus has been on Law College publications (such as alumni magazines and course catalogs) and Arizona pre-statehood materials (including territorial session laws and legislative journals, among others). Many of the Law College’s own development publications, while widely distributed when first printed, are now available only through the library’s Special Collections; and although some of the Arizona pre-statehood materials can be found in subscription databases, most are not freely available to the public. By making these materials available online, the Law Library hopes to encourage use of Special Collections resources while preserving the physical items. The Law Library staff have digitized approximately 24,000 pages in-house, spanning 71 magazines, 39 newspapers, and 51 volumes. Of this, nearly half (12,000 pages) is currently available to the public on the Law library website. The Law Library’s most recent efforts involve digitizing Law College newspapers issued between 1966 and 1993, some of which are in poor condition, and transferring material to a digital repository to facilitate search and access.

Lexis teams with Overdrive for eBook lending

LexisNexis has announced an e-book library application for law firms developed in partnership with digital content distributor OverDrive. Until now, legal professionals could only buy Lexis' 1,100 e-books individually. The new Digital Library product gives firms customizable software from which lawyers can check out titles, and for librarians to establish lending policies. "About a year and a half ago, we started introducing our e-books into the market in a piloted way," noted Lexis' Susan Slisz, vice president of research. Customers asked for administrative tools, leading Lexis to find OverDrive, she said. "We looked at that and said it's kind of what we need. We worked with [OverDrive] to create a custom solution for law firms." Slisz said other features are planned. "Our e-books have links today into Lexis.com. In the very short future we're going to have links into Lexis Advance," she said. An automatic update feature for e-books is also planned, and a version for law school books is under way, she added. Digital Library is priced based on the number of users and content.

TRAC reports

TRAC has released two new reports this week, using the data they collect from the Justice Deaprtment.
There is a new report on a prosecutorial discretion initiative by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). TRAC's findings are based on case-by-case data, obtained from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) by TRAC under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). TRAC is hosting a free webinar next Thursday to discuss the report. 

A second report is on White Collar Crime Prosecutions, showing that these prosecutions are down over 40 percent since August 2011.

Pittsburgh "literary lab"

Pop City has an interesting story today about "Cyberpunk Apocalypse", a Pittsburgh writers' project.  The project is moving from Lawrenceville to the North Side.  According to the article, the Cyberpunk Apocalypse is "a multifaceted writers’ project based around a close quarters residency program. Our mission is to aid and abet writers and comic artists in Pittsburgh.a one of a kind project--the only zine residency program in the US, and the only residency program that puts zinesters, novelists, and comic artists on equal footing. We’ve grown organically, and consider ourselves a kind of literary laboratory--a place to experiment in a changing world."

Following the money

Two online databases are helping to track money going to politicians and how it affects their voting records. SOPAtrack was originally developed as the Stop Online Piracy Act was being rushed through Congress last fall without public debate. Eventually the bill was tabled because of the interest aroused by this website and others. Now Sopatrack is continuing the same scrutiny of other Congressional bills. Maplight has similar data, and presents it in a variety of formats, so that you can track money going from interest groups to legislators to influence voting on bills in Congress.

hat tip: Pat Roncevich

ABA database has trove of law school graduate info

The ABA Journal has a story about an analysis of law school data that was done by the National Law Journal using an online ABA database. The result reveals the number of 2010 grads in jobs paid for by their law schools, the number whose jobs are short-term or temporary, and the number working in different size firms. They also report that Above the Law has dubbed the University of Michigan "the Most Honest Law School" because of the transparency of its reporting on graduates. It reported that 27 graduates over the 2009-2011 3 year period had non-legal jobs, including bar owner, acotr, sheep farmer, polo coach and professional poker player.

ideas for "mixing the web with everyday things"

Technology Review reports on a new device called a "Ninja Block" that is the latest step in "democratizing computing".  Ninja Blocks contain sensors with the ability to sense their environment: acceleration, temperature, current, humidity, motion, distance, sound, light and even capture video. Consumers can program them to do a variety of tasks that would utilize these abilities. The Ninja Block is connected to the "Ninja Cloud" which connects the sensor device to social media, so that sensed events can be tweeted, emailed, etc. Without writing a line of code, Ninja Cloud allows you to control your Ninja Blocks with simple “if this then that” style tasks. The example given by the Ninja Blocks website is that with a Ninja Block you would be able to take a picture of your front yard and save it to Dropbox when movement is detected.

DOJ files antitrust suit against publishers, Apple

Publishers Weekly reports that the US Department of Justice has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and publishers Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Group, HarperCollins and Macmillan, charging them with colluding to raise e-book prices. The complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, states that "by the end of 2009... the Publisher Defendants had concluded that unilateral efforts to move Ama zon away from its practice of offering low retail prices would not work, and they thereafter conspired to raise retail e-book prices and to otherwise limit competition in the sale of e-books. To effectuate their conspiracy,the Publisher Defendants teamed up with Defendant Apple, whichshared the same goal of restraining retail price competition in the sale of e-books."

It's official: law school applications down

The ABA Journal reports that there has been a >15% drop in law school applicants since last year, according to data from the Law School Admission Council. This comes after an 11% drop in applicants in 2011 compared to 2010. The ABA story quotes the Chicago Tribune as saying “Demand for legal education, as measured by the number of applicants, has experienced double-digit percentage declines for the second year in a row. If demand continues to decline, schools have to consider cutting class sizes or tuition, or both.”

1940 Census data available

The Census Bureau in 1940 conducted a survey of  the nation's 33 million homes and 7 million farms. On April 2, the 72 years of confidentiality expired, and the National Archives website buckled under the load as the 1940 census records were released and 1.9 million users hit the archives servers in the first four hours the data went public. At one point, the Archives said, its computers were receiving 100,000 requests per second. The data, available via the Census bureau's website, comprises more than 3.8 million digital images of census schedules, maps and other sociological minutiae.  The 1940 census was the first Census that looked deeper into the details of much of American life. 

tiny tech

The Apartment Therapy blog is geared towards young hipsters living in expensive places where space is at a premium. So not your average Pitt Law librarian.  However, today they have a very appealing blog post, "12 Tech Helpers for Teeny, Tiny Offices", about how to maximize your technocapability in a small space. Even if your home isn't cramped you might be interested in these spacesaving tips. 

FTC report on best practices for consumer privacy

The Federal Trade Commission, which calls itself  "the nation's chief privacy policy and enforcement agency", has issued a final report setting forth best practices for businesses to protect the privacy of American consumers and give them greater control over the collection and use of their personal data. In the report, "Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: Recommendations For Businesses and Policymakers" (112 page pdf), the FTC also recommends that Congress consider enacting general privacy legislation, data security and breach notification legislation, and "data broker" legislation. The report includes a chronology (page 93) of FTC action on consumer privacy beginning in 1970, and including laws, cases, reports, workshops, and educational publications. 

App that simplifies smartphones

Digital Inspiration reports on an app for Android phones that "turns your smart phone into a simple phone for seniors".  Or for anybody else who doesn't want to have to deal with all the bells and whistles all the time.  The Phonotto app is free and hides all the junk, giving access to just the essential phone functions, with  nice big readable buttons to use. 

Clever idea for pizza lovers

Japanese Court tells Google to turn off auto-complete

PC Magazine reports that a District Court in Tokyo, Japan has approved a petition seeking to force Google to turn off the auto-complete search feature. The petition against Google was filed by a Japanese man who claims the feature breached his privacy and eventually led to the loss of his job. According to the man, when his name is typed into the Google search engine auto-complete suggests words associated with criminal behavior. And when those suggested searches are clicked, over 10,000 results are shown that disparage or defame him. According to the plaintiff, this negative Google footprint has prevented him from finding employment since his initial firing several years ago. Unfortunately for him, "Google has rejected the order, saying that its U.S. headquarters will not be regulated by Japanese law."

Statistical Abstract revived

Good news for Statistical Abstract fans: ProQuest has announced that it will be picking up where the Census Bureau left off: The Statistical Abstract of the United States has been published by the Census Bureau since 1898, but the Census Bureau announced  in March 2011 that it would cease production of the Statistical Abstract after the 2012 edition, prompting widespread concern among librarians, journalists, and researchers about the disappearance of this essential research tool. .  ProQuest will take on publication of the Statistical Abstract beginning with the 2013 edition. The move ensures continuation of this popular guide to a wide array of statistics about the population of the United States. 

Lexis Advance adds graphical Shepard's

Shepard’s citator offers the direct comprehensive prior history and subsequent history of case law, showing good law, including positive treatment from courts, versus what has been overruled or diminished. Now Lexis Advance has announced Shepard’s® Graphical which the history of the citing decisions in an easy-to-browse visual grid or map format. This feature is available on Pitt Law's Lexis Advance accounts. All Shepard’s features are still available, so you can filter by editorial treatment(s), headnotes etc.

LexisNexis acquires Law 360

LexisNexis has announced the acquisition Law 360, a trusted online legal news service. Law360 publishes breaking news and analysis with a particular focus on high-stakes litigation across more than 30 practice areas. This content is distributed through online daily newsletters that are read by well over 100,000 law firm and business professionals ranging from litigators, corporate counsel and transactional attorneys to law librarians and legal administrators. Founded in 2004, Law360 produces more than 30 daily newsletters covering major practice areas and regulated industries.

More info on FDsys

The GovernmentBookTalk blog has a post with concise information about FDsys- including that "those in the know" know to pronounce it "F D sis". GPO exited the internet yesterday, March 16. The blogpost informs us that FDsys boasts key enhancements to GPO Access that allow users from librarians to scholars, researchers, lawyers and the public to:

• Easily search across multiple Government publications; 
• Perform advanced searches against robust metadata about each publication; 
• Construct complex search queries; 
• Refine and narrow searches; 
• Retrieve individual Government documents and publications in seconds directly from each search result; 
• View more information about a publication and access multiple file formats for each search result; 
• Access metadata in standard XML formats; 
• Download content and metadata packaged together as a single ZIP file; 
• Browse FDsys alphabetically by collection, by Congressional committee, by date, and by Government author; and 
• Utilize extensive help tools and tutorials.

citing tweets?

Digital Inspiration has a post titled "The Proper Way to Cite Tweets in Your Paper". The author notes that "tweets, though still limited to 140 characters, regularly inspire news stories in traditional media, researchers cite tweets in their academic papers and authors have written complete books using curated tweets " He goes on to provide two widely used academic citation styles - the APA (American Psychological Assocation) and MLA (Modern Language Association) - for citations to Twitter. Bluebook style is not mentioned.

There's an excellent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today called "Digital Magic Preservation for a New Era".  It's by an English professor who talks about the problem of keeping our writings accessible even if they are preserved in formats that are obsolete or becoming obsolete, like floppy disks and CDs.  

Goodbye GPO Access

News from the Federal Depository Library Program:  On March 16, 2012 (not coincidentally, James Madison's birthday), after 16 years of keeping America informed, GPO Access will shut down for good. URL redirects will be enabled to send users to the FDsys equivalent of GPO Access resources.

Vuitton claims Penn Law IP symposium poster infringes their trademark

An post on the Business Law Post blog has an interesting story. The University of Pennsylvania Law School's Penn Intellectual Property Group is planning a March 20 symposium on Fashion Law. The students hosting the symposium designed a poster that parodies the well-known Louis Vuitton handbag design, with copyright and trademark symbols inserted into the design. This triggered a cease-and-desist letter from Louis Vuitton to the law school's dean. However, Penn's general counsel disagreed in a response that discusses willful infringement and parody.

PA ethics for cloud computing

The Pennsylvania Bar Association's Committee on Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility has published an ethics opinion (20 page pdf) on the use of cloud computing by attorneys. It discusses the risks and benefits of using cloud computing for storage of potentially sensitive information, with access both from computers and portable devices such as smart phones. The committee provides a long list of specific precautions and questions to ask in the development of an office’s data storage practices and discusses the risks and precautions necessary in the use of web-based email services. The PA opinion joins a growing body of ethics opinions and reports about the use of cloud computing in law firms, warning that care must be taken in choosing vendors as protective provisions granted to data can vary substantially.

US - Canadian joint law degree program

The University of Houston Law Center and the University of Calgary Faculty of Law have announced a new program, beginning in fall 2012, that will allow students to obtain U.S. and Canadian law degrees in four years. In the International Energy Lawyers Program, law students at the universities of Calgary and the University of Houston Law Center will earn both Canadian and American law degrees in four years, rather than six years if the two degrees were done separately. Students will spend two years at each law school and take courses that will enable them to be admitted to bars in the United States and Canada. The program will focus on on preparing students to practice natural resources, energy and environmental law.

PA Code still available in print, but index is online-only

A recent discussion on the law librarian listserv has alerted PA legal researchers that the master index to the print Pennsylvania Code is dead. Yes, that's right, the PA Code itself is still published in print, but without an index. As several librarians have pointed out, the death of the index "makes the print set pretty much unusable". Apparently, one is supposed to use the online index when referring to the print PA Code. One librarian at a multi-office firm says that she investigated this with with Fry Communications, the publisher of the official Code, and learned that Fry was instructed by the PA Legislative Bureau (i.e. the Commonwealth of PA), that the Index would no longer be produced and that subscribers should be told to pitch their current Master Index and Finding Aids contents. 

Consumer Advocacy Caucus on vendor business practices

The blog of the newly formed Consumer Advocacy Caucus of the AALL is asking  law librarians for thoughts on significant anti-consumer problems with legal information vendors in law libraries. Once they identify a problem they expect to survey AALL members to discern the nature and scope of how the problem is affecting law libraries. As an example, they say "according to Principle 3.2(a) of AALL’s Guide to Fair Business Practices for Legal Publishers, “[p]ublishers should not bind their customers to a non-disclose clause as a non-negotiable requirement of doing business.” But many information service providers appear to have routinely violated this principle, severely compromising our ability to make informed purchasing decisions on behalf of our employers. Does this problem deserve our attention for a survey and first recommendation, or does some other problem concern you even more?"

Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act

AALL reports that the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA) has been introduced in California (SB 1075), Colorado (HB 1209) and Tennessee (SB 2894 and HB 3656). AALL members in those states are working closely with AALL's Government Relations Office, state legislators, the Uniform Law Commission and allies to ensure passage. The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act would make specified legislative materials, bills, codes, and statutes available to the public in electronic form and provides  for the official designation, authentication, and preservation of certain legal material in electronic records by an official publisher.

Vote for your favorite legal movie line

Bloomberg Law has put together a collection of video clips titled the "10 funniest, most moving, or most inspiring legal movie lines." After you watch the clips, you can vote for the one that you think is the best of the best.

New version of Word Perfect

Law Technology News reports that an upgraded version of Corel's WordPerfect is available this spring. The article is subtitled "Does It Matter?" and goes on to discuss the history of WordPerfect and its decline, saying that "the only fiercely loyal users are older attorneys at very small firms."

WestlawNext Enhancements

WestlawNext recently prepared a document titled "Westlaw Next Enhancements: 2011 Year in Review", with a month-by-month listing of the additions and improvements to WestlawNext. The list is too lengthy to reproduce here, but it is pretty impressive and seems to indicate a commitment to enhancing Next with additional features and improvements.  One of the new  features is that you can use Next on an iPad to move documents you are using offline so that you can review and annotate your research even when you don’t have an internet connection.

Love Fonts

It's probably too late to send a Valentine in the mail but you can still design and make a beeeautiful card for someone you love using these 99 Valentine fonts from Designorati. Note that these fonts are for PCs, but he includes a link to a site where you can convert them to Mac.

Legislative Data and Transparency Conference

The Committee on House Administration held a Legislative Data and Transparency Conference in Washington D.C. on February 2, 2012 and their website now has video of the conference. There is more information about what went on during the conference, as well as links to blogposts and ppt presentations, available on Rob Richards' Legal Informatics Blog.

ABA supports Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act

The ABA Journal reports that the ABA House of Delegates has approved Resolution 102B  in support of the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act, governing the authentication and preservation of laws, court decisions and other legal materials published online. According to the article, the resolution was approved by a voice vote, though a significant number of delegates voted against the resolution. The accompanying Report on the Uniform Law states that "TUELMA addresses the critical need to manage electronic legal information in a manner that guarantees the trustworthiness of and continuing access to important state legal material. The goals of the authentication and preservation standards contained in the act are to enable end-users to verify the trustworthiness of the legal material they are using and to provide a framework for states to preserve legal material in perpetuity in a manner that allows for permanent access."

Do students own copyright in the notes they take in class?

MindShift is a blog that covers current topics in technology and education, and it recently featured an interesting post titled "Do Students Have Copryight to Their Own Notes?".  The post looks at how universities, especially in California, are restricting how students can share notes, and how these policies raise questions about whether teachers or students have copyrights to the notes taken in class. 

Pittsburgh Data and Map resource

Pittsburgh's  Department of City Planning has created a new website called PGHSNAP, providing city neighborhood data and interactive maps.  According to the website, they've done this "because we believe that public information should not only be easily accessible, but easily understood". All of the 90 datasets presented in PGHSNAP are already available to the public, but are housed in many different locations, with varying degrees of difficulty in accessing them. Many are organized at differing levels of analysis, and aren't available by Pittsburgh neighborhood. PGHSNAP has taken those datasets and organized them by neighborhood and put them into an easy to understand format.  The interactive map is particularly useful, allowing you to zoom in and out on areas of Pittsburgh and providing layers that can be added to the map, including "Public Amenity",  "Planning and Development", "Political", and "Environmental" layers.

hat tip: Nate Traurig

PA Supreme Court redistricting opinion online

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Friday struck down the recent legislative redrawing of state House and Senate district maps.   In the majority opinion, Chief Justice Ron Castille said the proposal developed by the state Legislative Reapportionment Commission, which drew the new districts, overstepped the law by unnecessarily dividing counties and municipalities across the state. In the official decision handed down Friday afternoon, the justices explained the 4-3 decision against the newly proposed state House and Senate maps last week and detailed what changes should be made for the maps to meet constitutional muster.
The majority opinion, 2 concurring opinions and 1 dissenting opinion are all available on the PA Supreme Court website.

hat tip: Joel Fischman

Free CALI webinar, Topics in Digital Law Practice

CALI is offering a free nine-week, online web-based course on Topics in Digital Law Practice to help address these issues beginning on Friday, Feb. 10, 2012 at 2pm ET. The course is designed to provide an overview of the changes that are occurring in the practice of law today, especially with respect to technology. It will introduce law students for real-world situations that they will encounter in the job market and point law professors to new avenues to cover in their courses. The course will run for one hour a week for nine weeks and will feature a different guest speaker each week. Each class will be delivered via webcast and will have a 30 minute lecture presentation followed by a question & answer period and an online, interactive homework assignment for all course students to complete. There will be no formal assessment like a final exam. The detailed schedule, with topics and speakers,  is available on the CALI website  Attendees need to register for the course . This offer is open to faculty, students, and librarians.

Email providers work together to stop phishing

Information Week reports that the big free Email-service providers Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and AOL Inc., along with financial service companies Bank of America and Paypal, are backing a new effort intended to dramatically reduce "phishing" emails which attempt to trick recipients into thinking they come from a legitimate source. To achieve that, the firms have created DMARC.org, a working group of 15 companies that plans to promote a standard set of technologies that they say will lead to more secure email, making email more trustworthy and phishing more difficult.
Besides email providers and financial-service firms, initial participants include social-networking companies such as Facebook Inc. and LinkedIn Corp. and messaging-security providers such as Agari Data Inc. DMARC chairman Brett McDowell says it won't cost a lot for companies to start using the standards, but it will require them to identify every server that sends email and ensure that the technologies are in use. The same holds true for third-party firms such as marketing agencies that send email on behalf of a company.

law school lunch theft "epidemic"

Above the Law reports that there has been a rash of student lunch thefts at the UCLA School of Law. The law school's administration sent an email to all the students reminding them that "there is no locking mechanism on the student refrigerator. As such, you always assume the risk of using the student refrigerator". Shortly after this report, another lunch theft email, this time at Washburn University School of Law in Topeka, KS, was reported.

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries

The Association of Research Libraries has just published the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries, which was developed in partnership with American University's Center for Social Media and Washington College of Law. The Code identifies eight situations where there is consensus about acceptable practices in the fair use of copyrighted materials. Librarians affirm that fair use is appropriate in each of these contexts, providing helpful guidance about the scope of best practice in each. The Code states that “This is a code of best practices in fair use devised specifically by and for the academic and research library community. It enhances the ability of librarians to rely on fair use by documenting the considered views of the library community about best practices in fair use, drawn from the actual practices and experience of the library community itself." Pitt Law professor Mike Madison was a member of the legal advisory board that helped develop the Code.

First US county gets Super wi-fi

Wilmington, North Carolina and New Hanover County have deployed the first "Super Wi-Fi" network in the US. The innovation will let the public have wireless internet access outside in county parks.  According to an article in the Wilmington StarNews Online, a new type of "white spaces" technology allows the wireless service to go through trees and thick foliage outside, something nearly impossible with the type of Wi-Fi service familiar to most. White spaces will help eliminate bandwidth constraint and will allow wireless services to reach rural areas and other places that the standard wireless signal can't access, said Alan Stillwell, deputy chief of the Federal Communications Commission's Office of Engineering and Technology. For more information, the Gizmodo Blog has a nice clear explanation of how Super Wi-Fi works. 

Wikipedia anti-SOPA protest

Wikipedia has announced that tomorrow, Wednesday, January 18, 2012, it will black out the English language Wikipedia for 24 hours as a protest against proposed legislation in the United States—the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate—that Wikipedia says would seriously damage the free and open Internet, including Wikipedia.  The blackout will begin at  05:00 UTC (midnight in the Eastern time zone).  Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, says:

"This is an extraordinary action for our community to take - and while we regret having to prevent the world from having access to Wikipedia for even a second, we simply cannot ignore the fact that SOPA and PIPA endanger free speech both in the United States and abroad, and set a frightening precedent of Internet censorship for the world." 

Guggenheim eBooks

The Guggenheim Museum has digitized a number of out-of-print publications and is offering them free on their website - a treasury of art books. Selections from key museum titles dating back to the founding of the Guggenheim in 1937 are now freely accessible. Over 60 catalogues of Guggenheim shows were scanned in their entirety with the help of the Internet Archive project. Included in the collection are classic titles such as Alexander Calder: A Retrospective Exhibition, or the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Non-Objective Paintings (1937), one of the museum’s first publications. The website also offers the Syllabus as a finding aid, which highlights key themes, topics, and trends found in the Guggenheim archives. The Syllabus also offers suggestions for additional readings as well as links for further exploration. This is a fine example of  how creative digitization by thoughtful educators can make knowledge and learning more widely accessible to the public. 

Dewey B Strategic Asks: Is Lexis the Next Acquisition for Bloomberg?

Dewey B Strategic: Is Lexis the Next Acquisition for Bloomberg? is a thought-provoking blog post by law librarian Jean O'Grady about a report that discusses problems with Reed Elsevier's management of  LexisNexis and implies that Bloomberg Law might be in the wings waiting to possibly buy LN or some of the LN content.  

And then again, maybe Google's new search isn't so great?

Slate Magazine has an opinion piece by technology columnist Farhad Najoo that is pretty much all negative about the new Google+ search. The piece is subtitled "Google’s disastrous decision to muck up its search results with stuff from your social network", and begins "Google just broke its search engine.

Google Search + Your World

Google has just launched an update to their search engine called 'Search plus Your World,' intended to incorporate users' social network with Google search. Searches on Google will automatically provide personalized search results based on Google+ friends, sharing, pictures and likes. These personalized matches will appear along your normal search results. For example, if you are searching for images of babies, Google will now personalize your search results and give high preference to baby photos from your Google+ circles

New CALI lesson feature

Just in time for the new semester, CALI (Computer Assisted Legal Instruction) has announced a new lesson feature called CALI Lesson Resume. Many students have requested this feature; until now, when a student left a lesson before completion the score wasn't saved. With this new feature, when a student leaves a CALI lesson, the student can now return to the spot they left off with the scoring details saved. It's automatic: it doesn't matter if the student left the lesson by closing the browser, shutting down the computer, or losing internet connectivity. The only time resume is not available is when the student opts to "finalize" the lesson.

AALL on the Stop Online Piracy Act

The American Association of Law Libraries Government Relations Program has published an advocacy information statement on SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.  The statement was authored by Barco Law Library Director George Pike, who chairs the AALL Copyright Committee.  From the statement:

"AALL urges members of the House of Representatives to vote “No” on SOPA because:
- SOPA is overly broad. If used as intended, SOPA provides mechanisms for attacking websites that engagein infringing activities. However, the broad language opens too many websites to liability. For example, a library website that streams or posts content that is knowingly or unknowingly protected by copyright -- even if the post is arguably covered by fair use, or is reposted from another site -- could be subject to the sanctions by SOPA. Many websites that are neither rogue nor trying to enable infringement could be sanctioned.
- SOPA threatens free speech and fair use rights. The expansion of content-owner notice and take-down powers could be used to target fair uses and chill willingness of users to fairly utilize copyrighted works.
- SOPA inhibits free expression. SOPA discourages the use of copyrighted or potentially copyrighted works (e.g. orphan works) for any purpose, even legitimate, non-harmful ones. For example, the criminal penalties raise the specter of YouTube videos of individuals “covering” copyrighted songs being subject to criminal sanction even if their use of material is non-harmful and non-commercial."

Bibliophilia

This lovely video, the Joy of Books, comes to us from Type, a bookstore in Toronto.

hat tip: Pat Roncevich

Duncan School of Law files suit against ABA for non-accreditation

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the Duncan School of Law of Lincoln Memorial University, located in Knoxville TN, has filed suit against the ABA in federal court after learning that the ABA's accrediting arm had denied Duncan's bid for provisional accreditation. Instead of appealing the decision by the ABA, the law school  filed a  complaint on Dec. 22, 2011, in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. The school claims that an appeal would be futile because of the “complete and utter disregard” by the Council of the ABA of all the facts presented by the law school. This week the ABA filed an opposing brief with the court this week, detailing why Duncan had not fulfilled the requirements for provisional accreditation.
The school  claims that the ABA colluded with other law schools to restrain competition amongst other schools by denying accreditation for the school.  The Duncan School of Law was featured in a recent New York Times article about how the ABA's accreditation standards contribute to the high cost of a legal education.

LexisNexis Academic free online seminars

LexisNexis is hosting a series of free webinars on the LN Academic database in January and February. There is a webinar specifically addressing legal research on LN Academic offered on three different days:
Thursday, Janaury 26, 2012 2:00p.m.-3:00 p.m. (Eastern Time)
Thursday, February 16, 2012 1:00p.m.-2:00 p.m. (Eastern Time)
Thursday, March 1, 2012 1:00p.m.-2:00 p.m. (Eastern Time)
You can read more about the webinars and register for individual webinars on their Online Seminar Registration page.

Holiday gift for bibliophiles..

The CB I Hate Perfume website (from a guy who hates perfume, at least brand name perfumes) offers a scent called "In the Library" capturing "the scent of books and of the libraries where they live." As CB says,    "There are few things more wonderful than the smell of a much-loved book."
Available as perfume, home spray, and "water perfume". 

ebrary E-books Can Now Be Downloaded

The Pitt University Library System has announced that Ebrary has made their e-book collection downloadable for Pitt users. ULS has turned this feature "on" for all titles for which we have multiple user access. This includes all of the titles in our Academic Complete subscription as well as those individual titles that we have purchased with a multiple user license.
There are two download options. You can convert a book chapter (or page range) to pdf format OR you can download the full book using Adobe Digital Editions software (free download).  The books can be read with this software or transferred to compatible devices (Kindles are not compatible.) You then have access to the ebook for 14 days.  Note that there are some titles for which the full download option is not available; note also that you have to create an ebrary account to download material.

Bar Reciprocity dot com provides one-stop shopping for Bar information

There is a new website called www.BarReciprocity.com that was created to help users navigate the convoluted process of attorney bar admission.  The site  collects and organizes  information about bar exams, bar admissions,  and reciprocity  for the entire United States. It has an interactive map to help navigate the information for individual states.  The site  includes information on special licenses for special attorney categories such as Military Attorneys, law professors, and students; it also provides the pro hac vice rules and procedures (allowing attorneys to practice law in a particular proceeding in a jurisdiction where the attorney is not admitted) for all the states.

Dept. of Justice investigates ebook pricing

Business Week reports that the United States Dept. of Justice has confirmed that it is investigating the pricing of electronic books  to look at whether there was improper collusion by Apple and publishers to prevent discounting.  This comes after the EU announced on Tuesday that it is investigating possible anticompetitive practices between Apple and five major publishers, including France's Hachette Livre, German-owned Macmillan, U.K. publisher Penguin, and U.S.-based Harper Collins and Simon & Schuster.

TRAC webinar on "ICE Charging Practices in the Immigration Courts"

TRAC is offering a webinar on Weds. Dec. 7 at 2:00 p.m. on "Monitoring ICE charging practices in the Immigration Court". The webinar will include a short (approximately 15-20 minute) overview and demonstration of TRAC's newly released web monitoring tools for immigration courts, followed by a question and answer session. If you would like to join the webinar, please email TRAC.

TRAC report on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) is a non-partisan research organization associated with Syracuse University. TRAC from has prepared a report on deportation proceedings in US immigration courts, with accompanying data tools which allow tracking by charge, nationality, and specific location. TRAC's findings, based upon very recent case-by-case data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act from Immigration Court files, appear to contrast with the White House's announcement that under the President's direction DHS during the past year has prioritized the removal of people who have been convicted of crimes in the United States. The data shows that in ICE-initiated Immigration Court deportation proceedings during July-September 2011, only 7,378 individuals or 13.8 percent of the total were charged with having engaged in criminal activities. The proportion of alleged "criminals" of those targeted is down significantly from the already low level of 16.5 percent during FY 2010, and has been declining steadily throughout the past year.

Want to know what plane is flying overhead?

CNET has a story about a feature that can be used with the iPhone 4S Siri app (Siri is a voice-activated assistant app built into the phone's operating system that allows users to interact with the iPhone 4S by voice). According to the article, if you tell your iPhone "Ask Wolfram what flights are overhead" it will retrieve the information and tell you the overhead airline(s), flight numbers, and altitude.
Wolfram is the database that does dynamic computations on a wide range of web-based objective data.

hat tip Ryan Vandegrift

British Library announces historical newspapers site

The British Library has announced the launch of the British Newspaper Archive, offering access to 4 million pages from 200 18th & 19th Century newspapers from the UK and Ireland. The project is a collaboration between the British Library and Dundee-based IT firm Brightsolid. Over the next 10 years the project will digitize an additional 40 million pages spanning 3 centuries. The archive includes articles reporting on the Great Exhibition of 1851 plus stories on infamous murder trials and men, women and children being transported to the other side of the world for minor crimes. It also includes eyewitness accounts of social transformation – newspaper reports, commentary and letters to the editor on topics ranging from the railway mania of the mid-19th century to the extraordinary expansion of the temperance movement; as well as advertisements and illustrations. According to the press release, "Alongside first-hand accounts of historic events such as the wedding of Victoria and Albert and the Charge of the Light Brigade, these newspapers also provide countless vivid details of how our ancestors lived and died, how they went up and down in the world and how they fed, clothed and entertained themselves."

Canadian government data free

Embassy Magazine reports that all of Statistics Canada’s standard online products, including the census, socioeconomic and geographic data, will be offered to the public for free starting February 2012. While Statistics Canada has been working towards opening up more of its data for several years, it still currently charges for some online data, including some data sets inside its its “key socioeconomic databas”, the Canadian Socioeconomic Information Management System. Researchers, economists and other individuals buy these products, and several firms are also licensed by the agency to act as redistributors. Some of those firms charge for reselling the data, and some roll it into other value-added products they sell. Organizations currently buying the data from Statistics Canada will be “encouraged” to redistribute information under the government’s new open data licence agreement.

Lawschools & Lawyering: front page news in the New York Times

Yesterday's Sunday New York Times had a lengthy  front page story titled "What they don't teach law students: lawyering."  The article discussed a lack of "practical training" in law schools, saying "Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, with classes that are often overstuffed with antiquated distinctions, like the variety of property law in post-feudal England. Professors are rewarded for chin-stroking scholarship, like law review articles with titles like “A Future Foretold: Neo-Aristotelian Praise of Postmodern Legal Theory.”"  and "nearly half of faculty members (at top tier law schools) had never practiced law for a single day." 

Report on the status of digitizing vital legislative documents

The Sunlight Foundation has posted a review of the progress that's been made in digitizing 3 key legislative documents: the Constitution Annotated, the Congressional Record, and the Statutes at Large. A year ago the Congressional Joint Committee on Printing directed that these three sets of  documents be published online "as quickly as possible." According to the Sunlight Foundation review there's only been progress on one, the Statutes at Large. The review says that "Unlike with the other two publications, there is tangible evidence of progress. GPO has now publishing a digitized version that covers from 1951-2002, which is a significant undertaking. However, the documents have not been integrated into THOMAS, and are still somewhat difficult to use because of their large size. Moreover, GPO published another set of digitized documents, from 2003 to 2007, that are kept in a separate location on GPO's website and stored at a much greater level of granularity. This project is only partially complete, with a sizable gap in the public record from 1874 to 1951. Moreover, the documents haven't been integrated into THOMAS."

Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act

The Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act, introduced in the House (HR 1974) and Senate (S 1411), would require the Public Printer to establish and maintain a website accessible to the public that allows the public to obtain electronic copies of all congressionally mandated reports in one place.

Law faculty criticize SOPA in letter to Congress

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a group of more than 100 law professors have signed an open letter to Congress criticizing HR 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), as well as similar legislation pending in the Senate ( S 968, the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011, or Protect-IP.) The letter explains that the legislation would unfairly expand liability for online copyright infringement, allow the government to block access to Web sites that facilitate infringement, and permit private rights holders to block Web sites to host ads or conduct credit-card sales.

Trial of 2 BNA resources

We have a 30 trial of 2 BNA products that we currently don’t subscribe to: the Money and Politics Report and the Internet Law Resource Center. You can access both from the BNA main page dropdown box. The BNA MONEY AND POLITICS REPORT provides comprehensive behind-the-scenes coverage of campaign finance, lobbying, and government ethics issues at the federal, state, and local levels, including Full-text documents and summaries of Lobbying Disclosure Act filings. The BNA INTERNET LAW RESOURCE CENTER is comprehensive resource for case law, statutes, news, research, and analysis on Internet and e-commerce law all in one place. “Stay informed of the latest cyber law developments, quickly locate key legal primary sources, and benefit from the practical insights of experienced practitioners from a single integrated site.”

"Ten Top Tricks" from HeinOnline

As a part of Hein’s recent Customer Appreciation Week their "Support Guru" Tim Hooge presented his top ten tricks for using HeinOnline in two 15 minute webinars. Both are available on the HeinOnline webinars wiki. The tips are also available in pdf format on the HeinOnline website. The tips include how to use proximity searching in any HeinOnline library, how to find Supreme Court cases on a specific topic, and how to browse contents in the US Federal Legislative History Library.

PA unconsolidated statutes online

The librarian of the PA Legislative Reference Bureau has announced that Pennsylvania "unconsolidated statutes" are now on the General Assembly's website , joining the "consolidated statutes". They are listed under the category "Law Information".  You can search by "keyword" or "act number" or browse by "act name" or "year." The "chronological history" of each act is included and shows amendments, repeals, and certain decisions and rules of court by section.
 Also new under the "Law Information" category is a link to the Legislative Reference Bureau's  website for the historical Pennsylvania Session laws Preservation Project.  New to the site are the years 1802, 1803 and 1804. As time and manpower permit, the goal is to make all PA session laws available on this website.

Have Women’s Law School Numbers Peaked?

The ABA Journal online has an article this morning about a report (22 page pdf) from the National Assn. of Women Lawyers finding that women make up 47 percent of first- and second-year associates, down from 48 percent in prior years- suggesting that "the pipeline may be shrinking". The report also shows that the highest percentage of law degrees awarded to women occurred in 2004 and has been declining ever since. “The percentage of women entering law schools may have peaked,” the NAWL report says. In 2009-10, women made up about 47 percent of the law school population and 45.9 percent of all law school graduates.

PITTCat+ Summon

Links to the new Summon version of PITTCat+ have been added to the Barco Law Library webpages. Summon, from Serials Solutions,  has replaced Aquabrowser as the online catalog for the University Library System, is more robust and provides a much more user-friendly experience. 

Prof. Bridy on copyright, internet regulation

Visiting Associate Professor Annemarie Bridy has a couple of terrific blog posts that I found via LLRX - LLRX reprinted her post on The Digital Death of Copyright's First Sale Doctrine. This article discusses the implications of the Supreme Court's declining to review Vernor v. Autodesk, a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision involving the applicability of copyright's first sale doctrine to transactions involving software and other digital information goods. Prof. Bridy says that "As the transition from physical to streaming or cloud-based digital distribution continues, further divorcing copyrighted works from their traditional tangible embodiments, it will increasingly be the case that consumers do not own the information goods they buy (or, rather, think they've bought)."
A second blogpost, published yesterday, is titled Don't Regulate the Internet. No, Wait. Regulate the Internet. It talks about the RIAA's seemingly contradictory stances on regulation of the Internet.   Prof. Bridy says that "The RIAA’s political strategy in the war on piracy has been alternately to oppose and support government regulation of the Internet, depending on what’s expedient. I wonder if rights owners and the trade groups that represent them experience any sense of cognitive dissonance when they advocate against something at one moment and for it a little while later—to the same audience, on the same issue." 

GPO Access sundowning

On Friday, November 4, 2011, the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) draws one step closer to shutting down GPO Access.  GPO has now stopped  updating GPO Access in terms of both database content and HTML pages. This marks the start of the "archive only" phase of GPO Access;  new content will only be loaded to FDsys. During this phase, GPO Access will remain publicly accessible as a reference archive.
In order to make the switchover from GPO Access to FDsys as seamless as possible for users, GPO is in the process of creating one-to-one redirects from GPO Access content to the FDsys equivalent. This will ensure that bookmarks, Web links, URLs in print publications, and other GPO Access references point to valid Web resources. Once this has been completed, GPO Access will be taken offline. A date has not yet been established for the final shutdown of GPO Access; however, it is slated for fiscal year 2012.

Report to Congress on mandatory minimum penalties

The United States Sentencing Commission has released a Report to Congress: Mandatory Minimum Penalties in the Federal Criminal Justice System. The 645 page report says that the Commission "generally continues to believe that a strong and effective guideline system best serves the purposes of sentencing established by the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984," and also recommends a number of reforms of mandatory sentencing. "While there is a spectrum of views on the Commission regarding mandatory minimum penalties, the Commission unanimously believes that certain mandatory minimum penalties apply too broadly, are excessively severe, and are applied inconsistently across the country."  
An Executive Summary of the report (49 page pdf) is also available.

Publisher sues Bit Torrent pirates

Publishers Weekly reports that publisher John Wiley and Sons has filed a "willful infringement" copyright suit and a trademark infringement suit in  the Southern District of New York federal court  involving 27 “John Does” it claims are illegally copying and distributing the  "FOR DUMMIES®" books "through the peer-to-peer file sharing software known as BitTorrent". Though Wiley doesn't know the identities of the accused infringers, in its complaint, Wiley lists their IP addresses and ISPs.

National Law Journal's law school blog on legal education

There is an interesting post in the Law School Review blog written by a law professor at Indiana University.  The post discusses the challenges facing law schools, faculty, and curriculum given a number of factors that are changing the way law is practiced.  The post is very thoughtful and there are interesting comments following the post.  

Grocery shopping in the subway (with your smartphone)

This doesn't have anything to do with law, but one of the people on the CALI listserv posted this cool video:
I wonder if library books could work the same way?

Federal Court opinions on FDsys

The office of the United States Courts has announced that more than 12,000 opinions from three federal courts – the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island, and the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Florida – have been posted on the Fdsys website and made available to the public. By the end of 2011, 12 ofederal courts will have opinions posted on Fdsys and work is underway to bring the opinions from an additional 22 courts to Fdsys in early 2012.

ACLU on photographers' rights

The American Civil Liberties Union has an online guide for photographers, with information about rights to take pictures and videos in public places. The guide says that "Taking photographs of things that are plainly visible from public spaces is a constitutional right – and that includes federal buildings, transportation facilities, and police and other government officials carrying out their duties."

Organizations oppose proposed new FOIA rule

The ACLU, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and OpenTheGovernment.org announced that they have joined together to file comments opposing a provision of a proposed rule from the Department of Justice, which would amend the DoJ’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Regulations by adding section 16.6(f)(2). The paragraph states: “When a component (federal agency) applies an exclusion to exclude records from the requirements of the FOIA pursuant to 5 U.S.C. 522(c), the component utilizing the exclusion will respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist.” In their letter, the opposed organizations say that "Authorizing government agencies to lie to FOIA requesters by affirmatively denying the existence of agency records when they actually exist undermines the purpose of FOIA, obstructs judicial review of agency FOIA decisions, and destroys integrity in government."

Study shows rise in spending on state court races

A report just released by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law school shows an increase of 60% in independent spending on state supreme court elections by state parties and special interest groups in 2009-10 over spending in elections four years earlier. A total of $38.4 million was spent on state high court elections in 2009-10. The most expensive high court elections were in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio, where the courts are closely divided by party or judicial philosophy. According to the report's Introduction, "(t)he story of the 2009-10 elections, and their aftermath in state legislatures in 2011, reveals a coalescing national campaign that seeks to intimidate America’s state judges into becoming accountable to money and ideologies instead of the constitution and the law. In its full context, the most recent election cycle poses some of the gravest threats yet to fair and impartial justice in America."
The report can also be viewed online at Scribd.

Sustainability: ideas for using computer heat

MIT's Technology Review has an interesting article about ideas for using all the heat generated by data center computers and servers. According to the article, about half of the massive amounts of energy used by computing and data centers goes toward cooling down the computer chips. How can all that waste heat be used? There is a lovely photo of a botanical garden at the South Bend Conservatory, which is heated by University of Notre Dame servers sitting at the rear of the conservatory. According to the article, the servers are connected to the university’s main computing cluster and are given more processing tasks if higher temperatures are needed. This is just one example of creative reuse of the waste heat generated by computers.

law review articles: Really ?

The Wall Street Journal law blog has a post about a recent "study" on how the titles of academic papers affect their rate of citation and download. The study showed law review articles containing a question mark in the  title were downloaded more but cited less; and articles containing a colon in the title had fewer downloads and fewer citations.  Hmmm. 

redesigning the eBook

Technology Review has an articlediscussing how some publishers are experimenting with creating new kinds of reading experiences with ebooks, rather than simply digital versions of text on a page. The author talks about Pottermore, a website where JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, has hired a team to create a new way to read her books. "Over time, the site will weave the books together with interactive and social features that allow readers to connect with one another and with the characters in Row­ling's world."
 The article goes on to discuss a second example of redesigning the eBook, Principles of Biology, published by Nature Publishing Group. It is written as a series of more than 200 self-contained modules; the publisher has suggested an order for the modules, but instructors who use the book in their classes can freely drop or shuffle them. Instructors can also choose settings that increase or decrease the difficulty of the material. Principles of Biology links related modules as well as journal articles, summaries of those articles, and other online resources. This is not the sort of e-book familiar to users of the Kindle or iPad but is fundamentally a website designed for interactivity and can be "read" on any device with a Web browser.

University of Cincinnati Law Review

The University of Cincinnati Law Review has launched its online full-text version hosted on Digital Commons. The student editors have put the current issue as well as several earlier issues online, and are working to add older issues.

Wikileaks temporarily suspends publishing

Wikileaks, the whistleblower website,  has announced that it is temporarily suspending publication because of financial constraints. It claims that several large financial institutions have made it difficult to receive donations as the result of "aggressive retaliation" for publishing classified State Dept. documents last fall. 

DOJ proposes change in rules governing historic grand jury materials

Attorney General Eric Holder has written a letter to the Advisory Committee on the Criminal Rules of the federal judiciary in which he recommends amending the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure to allow federal judges to release historically significant grand jury materials in cases that are 30 years old or more. Currently, the federal rules do not recognize any "temporal end point for grand jury secrecy".  The proposed amendment of Rule 6(e) "would accommodate society's legitimate interest in securing eventual public access to grand-jury materials of significant historical interest while at the same time defining the contours of that access within the text of Rule 6(e)."
The proposed amendment includes three parts:
1. Define the term "archival grand-jury records" by adding a new Rule 6(j):   (j) "Archival Grand-jury Records" Defined. For purposes of this Rule, "archival grand-jury records" means records from grand-jury proceedings, including recordings, transcripts, and exhibits, where the relevant case files have been determined to have permanent historical or other value warranting their continued preservation under Title 44, United States Code.
2. The following addition to Rule 6(e)(3)(E) to permit district courts to grant petitions for the release of archival grand-jury records that have exceptional historical importance after 30 years in appropriate cases:
(E) The court may authorize disclosure-at a time, in a manner, and subject to any other conditions that it directs--of a grand-jury matter:
(vi) on the petition of any interested person if, after notice to the government and an opportunity for a hearing, the district court finds on the record by a preponderance of the evidence that:
(a) the petition seeks only archival grand-jury records;
(b) the records have exceptional historical importance;
(c) at least 30 years have passed since the relevant case files associated with the grand-jury records have been closed;
(d) no living person would be materially prejudiced by disclosure, or that any prejudice could be avoided through redactions or such other reasonable steps as the court may direct;
(e) disclosure would not impede any pending government investigation or prosecution; and
(f) no other reason exists why the public interest requires continued secrecy.
An order granting or denying a petition under this paragraph is a fmal decision for purposes of Section 1291, Title 28.
3. Finally, they propose  to make the following addition to Rule 6(e)(2) to establish the authority of NARA to release archival grand-jury materials in its collections after 75 years.
(2) Secrecy.
(C) Nothing in this Rule shall require the Archivist of the United States to withhold from the public archival grand-jury records more than 75 years after the relevant case files associated with the grand-jury records have been closed.


hat tip: Blog of the Legal Times 

Uniform Electronic Legal Materials Act

Prof. Barbara A. Bintliff of the University of Texas School of Law has posted "The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act Is Ready for Legislative Action,"on the Legal Information Institute's VoxPopuLII Blog.
Prof. Bintliff  is the Reporter for the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act (UELMA) and in her post she explains the provisions of UELMA : a new, proposed, uniform, U.S. state statute requiring states that enact it to authenticate, preserve, and provide permanent public access to legal information that those states publish in electronic formats. The statute is intended to “ensur[e] the trustworthiness of online legal resources and preserv[e] … electronic [legal] publications to provide for continuing accessibility.”
Her post also examines the policy principles that inform the Act, especially the Act’s “outcomes-based” approach, intended to accommodate technological change and to afford states substantial flexibility in complying with the Act, as well as the origins of the Act in the American Association of Law Libraries’ 2007 National Summit on Authentication of Digital Legal Information.  The UELMA is scheduled to be introduced into a number of U.S. state legislatures in January 2012.

hat tip: Rob Richards

PA Supreme Court is tweeting opinions and rulings

 The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania announced yesterday that it has established a new Twitter feed to increase online ease and access to its rulings and decisions. The feed will provide instant notification of the online posting of most Supreme Court information, such as orders, new rules, opinions and concurring and dissenting statements written by the justices. The link will appear on the state court system’s website.
All new rulings posted to the Pennsylvania Judiciary Web site will be linked to a Tweet, and available immediately on a follower’s personal home page.Each tweet will have a link to the Pennsylvania Judiciary's website.  The new service complements and expands the Pennsylvania Judiciary’s online offerings through cell phones and other devices.

Tinker v. Des Moines podcast from the Supreme Court

A new podcast in the Supreme Court Landmarks series is available. This episode focuses on the 1969 U.S. Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines, which involved student protests during the Vietnam War. In each podcast  landmark case is discussed,  with a law professor covering the case’s background and why it is important today. You can access more episodes at the Supreme Court Landmarks page .

Federal Court Opinions Beta Collection Now Available on FDsys

The Federal Depository Library System Desktop reports that at the request of the Judicial Conference, the U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) has been working closely with the Administrative Office of the United States Courts (AOUSC) on a pilot project to make lower Federal court opinions available through FDsys . The pilot currently is in the public beta test phase and GPO and the AOUSC are very interested in any comments or suggestions anyone may have regarding the U.S. Courts Opinions Collection.

Federal coloring books

A big shoutout to Carlos Diaz, the gov docs librarian at Central Washington University, for creating a webpage with links to all the coloring books published by Federal government agencies. 

New Institutional Repository for federal agencies

The National Technical Information Service (NTIS) has announced that they have recently formed a Joint Venture (JV) partnership with Information International Associates (IIa) to develop an Institutional Repository Service for federal agencies. Institutional Repositories (IR) are collections of agency scientific and technical information documents and other content that represent the work and mission of the agency, provided as a searchable, digital collection. Individual IRs will be developed for agencies based on a core set of services including those based on Web 2.0 technologies.  Agencies will be able to respond to growing Administration Open Government requirements for transparency and citizen involvement. The Insitutional Repositories will provide a framework through which federal agency content can be made available, providing users with increased ease of access and agencies with cost savings.

FreeLegalWeb

FreeLegalWeb is  a new UK-based project that hopes to connect the multitude of separate and unorganized free legal resources currently residing on the web, including legislation, judgments, guides and articles.  Initiated by Nick Homes of infolaw, the project is supported by many who are involved in the publishing of legal materials, including attorneys, law students, and legal information specialists. Among its many aspirations, the project plans to link its articles to primary law resources, maintain a comprehensive citations database that is automatically updated from free resources, and provide a Citator. There are at present two main sections of the website: Discover and Create.  "Discover" is for browsing and searching the site’s contents; primary materials are organized by source, while articles are organized by subject. "Create" is for contributing articles and commentary to the site.

hat tip: Jean Pajerek