Anti-bribery & -corruption laws app

New: the AB&C Laws Application is free from the Apple iTunes app store. The app, created by firm Latham & Watkins,is designed to inform users about anti-bribery and anti-corruption laws. about anti-bribery and anti-corruption laws in major jurisdictions around the world, including China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Users can look up the anti-bribery and anti-corruption laws in a covered jurisdiction and find out what constitutes an offense, whether the laws in one country apply outside its borders, how to reduce risk, and what potential punishments are available. The app also includes pop-up windows that define legal terms. hat tip: Law Technology News

2 new libraries from HeinOnline

Two new HeinOnline libraries are now available from Barco Law Library.

• Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law Publications: This collection includes more than 50 publications from the prestigious Parker School of Foreign & Comparative Law at Columbia Law School. View publications such as the 22-volume set, A Bibliography on Foreign and Comparative Law. Book and Articles in English by Charles Szladits, along with An Introduction to the Legal System of the United States by E. Allan Farnsworth, among various others. A more detailed description of the content is on HeinOnline (4 page pdf). 
• Immigration Law & Policy in the U.S.: This monumental collection is a compilation of the most important historical documents and legislation related to immigration in the United States as well as current hearings, debates and recent developments in immigration law. This first comprehensive database includes BIA Precedent Decisions, legislative histories, law and policy titles, extradition titles, scholarly articles, an extensive bibliography, and other related works. A more detailed description of the content is on HeinOnline (4 page pdf). 

Google enters the MOOC arena

There's an interesting article today in the Chronicle of Higher Education titled "Google and edX Create a MOOC Site for the Rest of Us".  MOOC, of course, stands for Massive Open Online Courses. It seems that Google is partnering with a nonprofit company founded by MIT and Harvard called edX and together they have created a website called MOOC.org .  The site will provide a platform allowing "any academic institution, business, and individual to create and host online courses,” according to the article. In an interview, Anant Agarwal, president of edX, referred to the site as a “YouTube for courses.”  At the moment, MOOC.org is still in its formative stages - if you visit the website you will see a message saying "mooc.org goes live in the first half of 2014. Are you interested in creating or hosting courses on mooc.org? Complete one of the three forms below and let us know how mooc.org fits into your plans. We'll be in touch as we get closer to launch".

Tarlton Law Library Digital Resource

The Tarlton Law Library at the University of Texas School of Law has announced the release of a number of digital resources created by Tarlton's staff. The resources chronicle aspects of the history of Texas law and of the University of Texas School of Law, and can be found at the Tarlton Special Collections web site. The following are some of the newest digital collections:
 Texas Constitutions 1824-1876, completely updated and revised in 2013, contains the text of all the organic documents of Texas, including those from the period under Mexican rule and of the Republic of Texas. Also part of the collection are constitutional convention journals and debates and the printing history for each version of the state's constitution.
The Texas Jurists Collection includes over 400 photographs of Texas jurists that were donated to the Tarlton Law Library by Texas Supreme Court Justice Jack Pope. This collection complements the related web site, Justices of Texas, 1836-1986, which features photographs and brief biographies of Texas Supreme Court justices and judges of the Court of Criminal Appeals.
 The World War II News Sheets were created by Helen Hargrave, the University of Texas' Law Librarian from 1940 to 1965. Her goal was to provide information on UT law students, alumni and faculty serving in the military during World War II; the News Sheets, published between March 1943 and August 1945, were central in keeping the close-knit law school community connected during the war.

New! CALI webinars begin Friday Sept. 6

On Friday, Sept. 6, at 3 pm,  Sarah Glassmeyer of CALI will host the first of a series of short - SHORT! 15 minutes! - webinars on CALI tips and tricks. More information including the registration link is here.  The webinar will use Go to Webinar, which allows for screen sharing, easy interaction with the participants and CALI has a license. Recommended for law students, librarians and faculty. 

Chronicle of Higher Ed on library databases

There's an interesting post via the Chronicle of Higher Education titled "The 3 Click Dilemma: are library databases nearing the tipping point of obsolescence?"  The author tells us that he recently had a conversation with a history professor (and library lover) during which he was told that "it’s getting harder for me to get students to use the library— especially the databases— anything beyond three clicks is just too many.”
The article goes on to explore what this evolving attitude towards databases might mean for libraries. 

New: study room reservations

The Barco Law Library is looking forward to a good year.  And with the start of the new year we introduce Study Room Reservations, new for 2013-14. Study rooms are now available by online reservation using an online form.
Some things to know:
You must be a Pitt Law student, faculty or staff to reserve a room
Please use your Pitt email address to make the reservation
Please have your reservation confirmation handy
Individuals can reserve a maximum of one 2 hour slots in any given day
Individuals can reserve a maximum of five 1 hour slots per month
If a room is not reserved it's available on a first come/first served basis
Minimum occupancy of two persons; maximum occupancy for each room listed on the reservation form
Please be courteous and respect others' reservations

ProQuest Congressional webinars

With the school year fast approaching, you might like to brush up your research skills with these useful August webinars from ProQuest Congressional (the links will take you to a registration page for the webinars):
Executive Branch Documents 1789-1932 Wed. 8/7/13 3:00 pm and Wed. 8/21/13 10 am. Content targets the entire range of executive branch publications listed in the authoritative 1909 Checklist, created in 1911 by the U.S. Superintendent of Documents. The 1909 Checklist is the only systematic effort to provide a complete listing of all documents published by the U.S. Government in its first 120 years. Executive Branch Documents 1789-1932 includes all of the 200,000+ executive branch titles listed in the 1909 Checklist that were not included in the U.S. Serial Set, as well as an additional 200,000 titles from 1910-1932. The webinar will cover what the product is, how it relates to the other ProQuest Congressional Digital Collections, and what's in this rich resource.
Reviewing Congressional Basic Fri. 8/9/13 3:00 pm and Fri. 8/23/13 11:00 am
   Congressional Basic is a resource for 1970-present research with content ranging from the Daily Congressional Record, indexing for Reports, Documents, Hearings and Prints (and a lot of full text in there too), and information on Members of Congress ranging from voting records to campaign contributions.
Are You Ready for Reference: Statistical Insight and the Statistical Abstract of the U.S.: Wed. 8/14/13 3:00 pm
Find out how to use Statistical Insight and the Statistical Abstract of the U.S. effectively at the reference desk. Note: there will be a brief overview of the various modules customers might have in Statistical Insight at the beginning of this session.
 Are You Ready for Reference: Congressional Mon. 8/19/13 1pm
Use  ProQuest Congressional to answer ref questions about laws and legislation, as well as find answers related to the many topics that Congress considers. Includes how to use citations, names, and dates to retrieve bills, laws, reports, hearings, and related documents.The database is an effective source for general research in many academic disciplines, in addition to research related to specific legislative proposals and laws.
Legislative Insight: Recent Supreme Court Decisions Fri. 8/30/13  1:30 pm  
Will discuss recent or important Supreme Court opinions that involved research into Congressional documents and legislative materials. Despite well-known disapproval by at least one justice for looking to legislative intent, we'll look at when and why they look at legislative history and how we can use Legislative Insight to do that research.
Using the ProQuest Statistical Abstract of the U.S. Online Edition Thurs. 8/8/13 11:00 am and  Wed. 8/21/13 11:00 am
Questions come across the reference desk on all topics: how many hate crimes were there in 2008? Are there many book clubs in the U.S.? Do you have the GDP for the U.S. for the past ten (or so) years? How many people use facebook? All of these questions can be answered by the new ProQuest Statistical Abstract of the United States online edition. The webinar will demonstrate how to browse for content, search for content and how to personalize the spreadsheet files available for every single table. We have updated hundreds of tables since the online product was released so we will look at updated tables and learn how ProQuest is archiving past data. 

Lexis Advance tips

You can still do Boolean search in Lexis Advance.  The "Help" menu at the upper right corner of the page has lots of information about working in Advance.  Go to the page "Searching with Lexis Advance" and you will see links to pages where you can learn how to use Search Connectors and Commands, limit your Sources, use Filters, and search Segments.  For Segment searching, there is a very helpful Excel spreadsheet you can download that shows what segments can be searched in which type of documents.  

WestlawNext tips

Here are a couple of tips on WestlawNext that our rep has provided.
1. Printing snippets: You now have the option to print less than an entire document.  It's a bit of a workaround but it does work: Highlight the paragraph(s) or whatever snippets you want to print and Save to a folder. You can then select the snippet in the folder and print it.
2. Uniform Commercial Code State Variation Service: There is a database for the UCC that contains a state-by-state and section-by-section analysis of variations from the official text of the UCC as adopted in each state, called the Uniform Commercial Code State Variation Service published in the UCC Reporting Service (identifier is UCC-VAR). There is a nice template you can use to search with the UCC section number, a state's section number, or by selected states.  

Bloomberg Law news

The CEO of Bloomberg Law sent an email message to subscribers recently, viewable here. In the message he announced that "Bloomberg is taking the next step to deliver better and faster solutions for our clients. Beginning in January 2014, we will join together into a single subsidiary all of our Bloomberg Law legal and business intelligence solutions, as well as Bloomberg BNA's industry-leading legal and regulatory businesses." He adds that "We are committed to making individual users more effective, and our clients' enterprises more profitable. For example, we are exploring how to integrate the BBNA Tax Management Portfolios with the Bloomberg Law DealMaker product to give tax professionals even more powerful tools for serving their clients."
We'll keep you posted.  

FRED database continues to grow

The St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank (FRED) database now has more than 140,000 economic time series available, due to the addition of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)'s Main Economic Indicators. You can check out all the data at the FRED website. The additional data allow users to make cross-country economic comparisons for the 34 OECD-member countries, plus Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, the Russian Federation and South Africa. These data include granular employment data by age, status and gender; balance of payments data; monetary aggregates; and compensation. The folks at St. Louis Fed continue to work to make economic data easily accessible, with many options for saving, sharing, and customizing the display. You can email them with requests for other data.

Detroit declares Chapter 9 bankruptcy

Detroit's bankruptcy filing is big news all over the country.  The Office of the United States Courts a very good post titled "When Cities Go Bankrupt" that explains Chapter 9 Bankruptcy with a map and links to more info.
UPDATE: BloombergLaw has an excellent discussion about Detroit's bankruptcy with bankruptcy attorney Harvey Miller.  

Public Resource challenges the Bluebook

Public Resource has published a letter it sent to the Harvard Law School Dean and "select members of the faculty".  The letter points out that Harvard Law is one of the 4 sponsoring institutions of the Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation. It goes on to say that  "it is clear that the stringent and unbending copyright restrictions surrounding the Bluebook® are a huge brake on innovation for the legal profession. Those who would build new legal tools that incorporate the mechanics of citation are prohibited from doing so by the terms of use and the lack of response to requests for permission by the current corporate owners of the Bluebook®....enforcing a monopoly over a system of citation in the Internet era is immoral and nonsensical." Public Resource bought a copy of the Bluebook, translated it into valid xhtml, put the resulting document on a thumb drive and sent it along with their letter, saying "if you or others choose to publish the enclosed work, we would be delighted."  

Unpaid internships come under scrutiny

A recent decision favoring the plaintiffs in an unpaid internship lawsuit in federal district court has led to more suits being filed against employers who use unpaid interns. It was decided by Judge William H. Pauley III, federal judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, in Glatt v. Fox Searchlight Pictures Inc., (11 Civ. 6784 (WHP) decided June 11, 2013) that two interns working on the set of the film Black Swan should have been paid, given that the work they accomplished did not meet the six criteria used for determining that an internship may be unpaid, as published in a fact sheet by the U.S. Department of Labor. The judge determined that Fox Searchlight violated the minimum wage law when it failed to pay its interns for their work. The New York Times reported the day after the decision that “ Two former interns filed a lawsuit against Condé Nast on Thursday, saying the company failed to pay them minimum wage at their summer jobs at W Magazine and The New Yorker, and asked that it be approved as a class-action suit.” The ABA Journal reports that the Hearst (publishing) Corp. which has been defending the use of unpaid interns, is supporting the plaintiffs in their request for an interlocutory appeal of a recent trial court ruling in order to obain federal appellate court clarification on the topic.
   Legal commentators at BU,  Business Insider , the Law of Work blog (Canada) and others are  predicting a flurry of lawsuits and saying the days of unpaid internships may be numbered.

"Gov Info on the Web" libguide

Government info librarian Kathy Amen of St. Mary's U. library has moved her helpful "government information on the web subject index" to a libguide. The purpose of the index is to provide starting points for browsing government info subject areas, bringing both broad and detailed subject listings from many libraries together in one index. It aims to provide a single place to find link collections on particular subjects, taking advantage of the varied organizational schemes and terminologies developed by federal depository libraries and other organizations. The Government Printing Office has accepted the Index as a Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) Service Partnership, publicizing and supporting the Index.

ULS adds new database PolicyMap

The University Library System at Pitt has announced that we now have access to PolicyMap, thanks to a state grant. PolicyMap is a fully web-based Geographic Information System that captures data and presents it visually through custom demographic maps, tables, reports and an analysis tool. You can also use the GIS mapping services to incorporate your own data along with that of PolicyMap. Available data include demographics, home sale statistics, health data, mortgage trends, school performance scores, unemployment, crime statistics and city crime rates. The PolicyMap Data Directory has a complete list of the available data.

United States Code Website Beta from the OLRC

The Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the United States House of Representatives has been working to create a new website for the Office and the United States Code. The latest (second) version of the beta website is now available for testing and feedback.
Some key features of the new release are:

•  Default search and browse is now the most current USC (now called "Online", formerly called "prelim") 
• Ability to search and browse previous versions of the Code 
• Internal links between USC sections and chapters 
• Updates to explanatory material
•  External links from the United States Code Classification Table to public laws 
• Miscellaneous usability enhancements derived from first release feedback.
Features still under development include  additional enhancements to external links and additional download formats.
 The new website will replace the current website as the primary site after the testing and feedback period is complete. Your comments and questions about the beta are welcome and can be sent to uscode@mail.house.gov .

Notable Government Documents of 2012 published

The list of 2012's Notable Documents appears in the latest issue of Library Journal and is now available online. This was the result of an effort to raise awareness of noteworthy government information resources issued by state, local, and national governments, and intergovernmental organizations.

Finding or Compiling Federal Legislative Histories Electronially

Recently at a Congressional Information Symposium Federal Reserve Board law librarian Rick McKinney gave a presentation entitled "Finding or Compiling Federal Legislative Histories Electronically." The eight page PDF handout containing more than 240 links, which accompanied the presentation, can be found on the Legislative Source Book of the Law Librarians' Society of Washington, D.C. The topics of the Presentation include: -

•  What Are Federal Legislative Histories and How Are They Used - 
•  What Kind of Documents Are Included in a Federal Legislative History - 
•  Some Helpful Resources for Federal Legislative History Research - 
•  Major Electronic Sources for Compiled Federal Legislative Histories -
•  Electronic Sources for Customary & Miscellaneous Federal Legislative History Documents - 
• How Federal Legislative Histories Are Generally Arranged - 
•  Options in Using Free and Commercial Electronic Legislative Sources - 
•  Some Bibliographic, Print and Microfiche Sources for Federal Legislative Histories