Students use of technology

Inside Higher Education has interesting writeup about a new report from the Educause Center about how students in higher education use information technology. They interviewed 27,846 students at 103 higher education institutions and studied what kinds of information technologies these students use, own, and experience; their technology behaviors, preferences, and skills; how IT impacts their experiences in their courses; and their perceptions of the role of IT in the academic experience. The entire report is available free on the Educause website.

Let sleeping judges lie?

For those of you who don't follow the LawLib listserv, here's a case one of our members in Australia sent us. The appellants claim that their conviction at trial was a miscarriage of justice because the judge slept through most of it. You're going to have to read the case to see what happens next...

Friday fun: are you juggling too many things?

Take a lesson from this guy!

A Shaggy Dog tale

A blogging group of law librarians in Oregon are blogging about a real life story in 6 parts of a librarian dilemma: the FBI confiscated a patron's books and among the books were 2 belonging to the library. How to get them back?

Beautiful libraries

Curious Expeditions has blogged about some of the world's beautiful libraries; the post includes many gorgeous photos of many gorgeous libraries. The only modern building included in the list is the rare book library at Yale, which deserves mention, although the photo doesn't really capture the beautiful glow that suffuses the building's interior and doesn't include the case with the Gutenberg Bible. Do the librarians really turn one page a day?
Speaking of the world's libraries, an accident at the National Library of Scotland came perilously close to damaging their Gutenberg Bible.

End of an Era: adieu Shepard's

It's the end of an era. The Shepard's Citators are being discarded (we are saving some of them in the giant library storage facility at Thomas Blvd.) Farewell books, hello computer databases! Think of all the brain cells that have been spared in the minds of law students who no longer have to struggle with figuring out how the heck to use Shepard's. There are a couple of large trash containers in the back of the library filled with old Shepard's that are being dumped. Of course they might make good doorstops...

Constitution Day at the LLOC

The Law Library of Congress in Washington DC is marking Constitution Day, Monday Sept. 17, with a bipartisan panel discussion on "National Security and the Rule of Law". Virginia Sloan, president of the Constitution Project will moderate the panel will include former congressman Mickey Edwards (R-Okla.), former State Department official Morton H. Halperin and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage. If you're going to be in DC and are interested in attending you can email them. If not, they will be filming the discussion and will have the webcast available within 2 weeks of the program.
The LLOC wil also be launching a new web site on Constitution Day which will have a new and different look compared to the current website, stay tuned.

prison libraries

We've had prison librarians come talk at Barco and one of the questions people always ask is what sorts of books they have, what books prisoners read, and what books are forbidden. The New York Times has a story about prison libraries and their collection development (actually more like collection un-development) policies. Apparently a bureau of the Justice Department has a Standardized Chapel Library Project, which entails removing some religious books from prison libraries.

New translation site

Windows has launched "Windows Live Translator Beta", a new website that allows you to enter up to 500 words of text or a url for translation. It will translate English into an impressive variety of languages, including Chinese, Korean, and Arabic as well as the more prosaic French, Spanish and Dutch. I haven't had a chance to compare its translation prowess with that of the other free online translators like Google or Freetranslation dot com, feel free to share your experiences.

Improve legal education?

The latest edition of The Complete Lawyer is focused on the question "What Can Law Schools Do Better?" The lead article by Roy Stuckey encourages practicing attorneys to become involved in trying to change the way law students are educated.

ABA committee on Second Life

The ABA section on IP law is starting a new subcommittee on Computer Gaming and Virtual Worlds and is looking for members who'd like to help form ABA policy in this new area. They're planning to hold virtual meetings "in world".

Short List

I was so buried in work that I somehow managed to miss the announcement of the Booker short list on Thursday. Howard Davies, the chair of the judges (and a dead ringer for Richard Armstrong, the Carnegie director), has a blog in which he talks about the shortlist process.
So what made the cut?
Ian McEwan On Chesil Beach (England)
Nicola Barker Darkmans (England) 840 pages
Mohsin Hamed The Reluctant Fundamentalist (America)
Lloyd Jones Mr. Pip (Australia)
Anne Enright The Gathering (Ireland)
Indra Sinha Animal's People (India)

No time to read all 6 before the winner is announced on Oct. 15? You can read The Short List Digested by John Crace, reviewer for The Guardian. And if you like an occasional flutter you can read what odds the bookies are offering on the 6 finalists.

What do the bookmakers say?

Law students' information literacy skills

Ian Gallacher (who teaches legal writing at Syracuse law school) reports the results of a law student information literacy study he did in a very interesting new paper on SSRN. The hourlong internet survey of 740 students at 7 law schools was conducted in the summer of 2006 and was designed to gather information about law student reading, writing, and research habits. The paper on SSRN is chock full of interesting graphical displays of the collected data and includes information about gender differences in law student reading, writing and research.
As we might expect, students are using the internet more than the library to do their research.
When asked where they conduct research, 11.3% said they always use the internet for research, and 40.1% said they usually use the internet but will sometimes use the library. By contrast, 25.1% said they use the internet and library about the same amount for their research needs, 5.9% said they usually use the library but will sometimes use the internet, and only 0.4%, or three students, answered that they always research in the library and never use the internet. According to Gallacher, law students have a sense that the physical library retains some role in performing legal research but believe the internet is a more important source of legal information. Among the conclusions he reaches is that teaching legal research with an underlying assumption that first year law students have basic information literacy skills may be flawed - even though the 1L students are generally very confident about these skills.

perpetual access to online subscriptions

If you're on the ERIL (electronic resources in libraries) listserv you know that there's been a groundswell of interest in how various publishers are offering continued access to their online publications - especially as so many libraries are cancelling their print subscriptions. ERIL has just created a wiki for sharing this sort of information among libraries. Check it out.

Facebook becomes searchable

Facebook, the popular social networking website, has announced that it will be making its content searchable by search engines "so that people can see which of their friends are on Facebook more easily". Depending on individual privacy settings, Facebook page holders can be found more easily by Google, MSN Live, Yahoo, etc.

Why law school rankings are perverse

We all suspect that the US News & World Report law school rankings are perverse and cause distortion in how law schools make decisions, but now there's proof! A study published in the AJS (American Journal of Sociology) reports on how the rankings become self-fulfilling prophecies. The authors, Wendy Nelson Espeland of Northwestern University and Michael Sauder of the University of Iowa, interviewed law-school administrators and faculty members, and they also collected data about how law schools' application and yield rates have varied over time. Among their conclusions, the authors write that "The challenge for USN is that, as a journalistic enterprise, they are unqualified to create incentive systems to change law schools. The authority of their rankings rests, precariously, on their status as valid scientific measures and USN's reputation as unbiased journalists reporting "the news" rather than creating it. "
Thanks to Pat Roncevich for bringing the study to our attention.

eLearning: a paradigm shift for law school teaching

There's a fascinating article in Law.com by Diane Donahoe, chairwoman of the Legal Research & Writing program at Georgetown. While many law professors debate whether to allow laptops in the classroom, Donahoe has fully embraced eLearning and has dramatically changed the way she teaches to meet the needs of a generation of law students who learn in new ways - she calls them "digital students". Her courses are entirely paperless, and the online "textbook" she authored (which replaces the traditional paper law school casebook) integrates nonlinear text, interactivity, immediate feedback and multimedia with rich legal content that fits this generation of students' digital learning style.

Pitt Law faculty rank high in Leiter study of scholarly impact

We should all be proud of the results of the Leiter study of the top law faculties in the US based on scholarly impact, where Pitt was ranked at 21, and made the listing of top law schools. The study gives objective evidence of the excellent quality of the faculty at Pitt Law. It is particularly noteworthy that we substantially outrank several law schools in the first tier of the US News & World Report rankings, including BU, Emory, Ohio State, UC Hastings and USC ( based on mean per capita citations.) Congratulations to our faculty for this well-deserved recognition of their legal scholarship.

American Council of Learned Societies eBooks

ULS now subscribes to the ACLS Humanities Ebook Collection - an online collection of over 1500 books "of high quality" in the humanities. Member of Learned Societies worked together to choose the books. Fields currently covered include: Area Studies in Australasian/Oceanian, Byzantine, Canadian, Caribbean, Native Peoples, and Women's Studies. Historical Studies include African, American, Asian, Comparative/World, Eastern European/Russian, Economic, European, Latin American, Legal, Methods/Theory, Middle East, and Science/Technology. HEB also encompasses the fields of Art History, Literature, Political Science, and Religion. Forthcoming fields include Archaeology, History of Medicine, and History of Philosophy.
The collection . Searching and browsing are easy, and although this is not a legal database, searching for Law or Legal pulls up titles that may be of interest to law faculty, for example: Islamic law in the modern world (1959); African women & the law: historical perspectives (1984); Lawyers against labor : from individual rights to corporate liberalism (1995).
More info about the HEB database is available on the ACLS website.

cellphone discussion rages

For those of you who are on the law librarian listserv you already know that an innocent question about patrons' cellphone use set off a flurry of postings yesterday. This is always a hot button topic. The suggestions fell into 3 categories: 1. BAN them completely 2. Designate a room for cellphone use 3. technological fixes, such as offer earplugs to people disturbed by the cellphone use, use iPod w/earplugs to block the sound, use (illegal) signal blocker technology, or (my gadgetphilic suggestion) invent a personal cellphone bubble/umbrella. (Not that I'm planning on inventing it, I leave that to someone else.)
This is a problem in libraries everywhere, of course. Barco asks people to use the elevator lobby for cellphone conversations, but this rule isn't strictly enforced and when you get a couple of people on their cellphones in the elevator lobby it gets distracting for people working in the library offices. Some women use their cellphones in our restroom stalls. The central staircase is also popular.
At least one of Pitt's law professors announces in his syllabus that "If yours (cellphone) goes off audibly, you will be considered absent that day."
If anyone comes up with a good solution for managing the pesky things, they should win the Nobel Peace Prize.