Copyright Public Modernization Committee announced by the Library of Congress

 The Library of Congress has announced the members of the new Copyright Public Modernization Committee (CPMC), which includes several librarians:  

Name	Affiliation
Todd Carpenter	National Information Standards Organization
Wahaj Chaudhry	Amazon.com
Susan Chertkof	Recording Industry Association of America
Brewster Kahle	Internet Archive
Roy Kaufman	Copyright Clearance Center
Keith Kupferschmid	Copyright Alliance
Melissa Levine	University of Michigan Library
Pamela Malpas	Association of American Literary Agents; Copyright Committee co-chair
Micah May	Digital Public Library of America
James Neal	Columbia University Librarian Emeritus, ALA, ACRL
Kathleen Rodriguez	Warner Media
Jeff Sedlik	Picture Licensing Universal System (PLUS) Coalition
Scott Weingart	Carnegie Mellon University Libraries

The reason the Committee is being convened is "to expand and enhance communication with external stakeholders on IT modernization of Copyright Office systems" and "to enhance communication and provide a public forum for the technology-related aspects of the U.S. Copyright Office’s modernization initiative."   

The first public meeting of the committee is a virtual meeting scheduled for Thursday, July 22 from 1-4 pm. The meeting is free and open to the public, but participants must register here in advance. 

According to the announcement, "Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter and Library of Congress Chief Information Officer Bud Barton will provide opening remarks and Library subject-matter experts will provide an update on the development of ECS and other modernization efforts. Attendees will have an opportunity to hear directly from CPMC members and participate in a live Q&A. The meeting will be recorded and made available for viewing after the event."

Book discusses bias in algorithms, searching, and library "discovery" systems

The beSpacific blog today featured a post about a book titled "Masked by Trust: Bias in Library Discovery" by librarian Matthew Reidsma, who works at Grand Valley State University Libraries. He starts by discussing how most librarians develop, on their own, a favorite search that they use to evaluate "the dizzying array of search tools that are a part of modern librarianship." But as he studied the way variations in search terms can pull up results that can vary significantly, he decided to look more closely at the inner workings of search and the sorts of biases that can happen.

For this research, I investigated four library discovery systems, with varying degrees of access to each: Ex Libris’ Summon and Primo, OCLC’s WorldCat Discovery, and EBSCO’s EDS...Because these systems bear a remarkable resemblance to one another, it is easy for users to assume that they will all give the same results for similar searches. But in fact, the combination of di#erent centralized indexes, varied collection development practices at subscribing institutions, and competing relevancy algorithms means that it is unlikely that these systems will return the same results for the same searches.

The book is full of great examples and provides many useful  citations to other articles. It is written in plain language without a lot of technical terminology, and is available both from Library Juice Press and as a PDF download under a Creative Commons license.  

Hat tip: Sabrina Pacifici

Bar exams will be in person next year

The ABA Journal has an article titled "Online bar exams axed by NCBE beginning next year," in which it reports that law school graduates planning to take the bar exam next year should expect to take the exam in person. According to the article, the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) has announced that its test will be made available to jurisdictions only in an in-person form beginning in February 2022. The NCBE develops licensing tests for lawyers that are used by most U.S. jurisdictions. Since October 2020, states could choose either an in-person or an online exam developed by the NCBE. Twenty-nine jurisdictions are planning a remote bar exam in July, while 24 jurisdictions are planning in-person exams. Pennsylvania is one of the states that will administer the July 2021 bar exam remotely.

New Maryland state law supports library e-book usage

The Association of Research Libraries has a great (for libraries) story reporting that Maryland is the first state in the nation to enact a state law ensuring that libraries can license e-books and audiobooks under the same terms available to consumers. The law, House Bill 518 in the MD legislature, was enacted by the Governor on May 31. It begins:

"FOR the purpose of requiring a publisher who offers to license an electronic literary 4 product to the public to also offer to license the electronic literary product to 5 public libraries in the State on reasonable terms that would enable public libraries 6 to provide library users with access to the electronic literary product..."

The article points out that  while the bill specifically names public libraries, academic and university libraries will also benefit from improved terms and business practices. The Maryland public libraries expect that the legislation will cause publishers to bring down the prices they charge libraries for e-books, although some price discrimination likely will remain. Additionally, the legislation will result in Maryland public libraries obtaining access to titles now available only to consumers. Similar legislation is pending in other state legislatures, and the adoption of the law in Maryland can be expected to accelerate this legislation.

Article: The “Legal Epidemiology” of Pandemic Control

General Counsel News recently referenced an interesting article in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled "The 'Legal Epidemiology' of Pandemic Control:"

"The centrality of law as a public health intervention has been undeniable during the Covid-19 pandemic. In just the first half of 2020, more than 1000 laws and orders were issued by federal, state, and local authorities in the United States in an effort to reduce disease transmission... It is past time for a broad recognition in our health system that law is a ubiquitous treatment, one to which hundreds of millions of people are routinely exposed. If that simple but telling analogy is accepted, a more pressing point follows: we should devote much more health research money and talent to the scientific study of the health effects of laws and legal practices (“legal epidemiology”)...
The imperative is to scale up the infrastructure for at least three kinds of research: study of the mechanisms, effects, side effects, and implementation of laws designed to influence health, such as Covid control measures; research on how the legal infrastructure of the U.S. health system — the allocation of powers and duties, as well as limits on authority — influences the effectiveness of the system; and perhaps most important for addressing health equity, studies of how laws that may appear to have no health purposes — such as the tax code, minimum wage, and labor rules — shape the social determinants of health."

The article was authored by Scott Burris, J.D., Evan D. Anderson, J.D., Ph.D., and Alexander C. Wagenaar, M.S.W., Ph.D., affiliated with the Beasley School of Law, Temple University (S.B.), and the Schools of Nursing and Medicine, University of Pennsylvania (E.D.A.) — both in Philadelphia; the University of Florida College of Medicine, Gainesville (A.C.W.); and the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta.  

University of Maryland Libraries becomes the institutional home of SocArXiv

The University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries has announced that it has become the institutional home of SocArXiv. SocArXiv is an open archive of the social sciences that provides a free, non-profit, open access platform for social scientists to upload working papers, preprints, and published papers, with the option to link data and code. SocArXiv is dedicated to opening up social science, to reach more people more effectively, to improve research, and build the future of scholarly communication.

hat tip: Pat Roncevich

Pittsburgh: free housing legal help available

 WESA, Pittsburgh's NPR news channel, reports that Pittsburgh residents can Now apply For free housing legal help. According to the report, the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) has announced a $1 million initiative to help renters and homeowners alike deal with housing issues like eviction and forecosure. Renters can access everything from legal advice to full courtroom representation to deal with an eviction. But the aim is to prevent evictions in the first place. To that end, the program will offer mediation between landlords and tenants. Homeowners, meanwhile, can work with a lawyer to get clear title to a home or to prevent foreclosure. Mayor Peduto said that "for too many Pittsburghers during this pandemic the threat of losing homes has been a constant worry, especially for those with low incomes.”
Those who need help can contact RentHelpPGH or the Pittsburgh Hispanic Development Corporation.

hat tip: Karen Shephard

Law Libraries after Covid

 Susannah Tredwell over at Slaw, "Canada's Legal Magazine," has an interesting article in which she discusses the changes law libraries have undergone during the Covid pandemic, and whether these changes will stick.  How will library services be affected post-Covid? She covers several topics: 

• Death of the looseleaf?  
• Greater adoption of digital library resources by users, in which she points out the dramatic increase in print resources now available online as well.
• Library space continues to shrink (or disappear completely?)
• Greater flexibility in how publishers licence (Canadian spelling) products?
• Increase in library staff working remotely. 

We are all looking forward to finding out how our law library will continue to be affected by the changes during Covid. 

FDLP: No more "Fugitive Documents"

The Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) has announced that it is discontinuing use of the term "fugitive documents" to describe "Public information products that are not discoverable through the Government Publishing Office's Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP)."  According to the announcement, "It is time to replace the phrase “fugitive documents.” Going forward LSCM will use “unreported publications.” This change was approved by the Depository Library Council, the Superintendent of Documents, and the GPO Director.
You may notice some changes over the next several weeks as LSCM staff work to reflect this change in external and internal documentation, public facing web pages on FDLP.gov, and in askGPO. We will not replace the term in past conference presentations or in previously published articles. Our goal is to have changes completed by the end of May 2021."

Justice Clarence Thomas "goes rogue on the Bluebook"

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas recently made the headlines in both the ABA Journal and Law 360 for using what both publications termed a "rogue" Supreme Court citation in the opinion he wrote for Brownback v. King, 141 S.Ct. 740 (Legal Writing Professors take note). 
The ABA Journal says that Justice Thomas "went rogue on the Bluebook when he embraced an appellate lawyer’s suggestion for dealing with 'citation baggage'... that distracts from the point."
What was this bold move? Justice Thomas used the suggestion to used the parenthetical "(cleaned up)" after a citation to denote the court's omission of quotations within quotations and the need for a quoting citation parenthetical, as dictated by Bluebook Rule 5.2. The appellate lawyer who made the suggestion in an SSRN article is Jack Metzler of the Federal Trade Commission. Metzler told the ABA Journal that this is a big deal, "at least in the world of legal citation."

Open Access to Research and the Covid pandemic

 An interesting article on Slaw (Canada's online legal magazine) by John Willinsky discusses growth in the Open Access movement during the past year. 

It is influencing the opening of scholarly publishing, more generally...After an initial start with two publishers, there are now, one year later, nine publishers moving away from selling traditional subscriptions to research libraries to having those same libraries pay much the same price to make this research publicly available. The growth of this model over the course of this extraordinary year has meant that what is now available to readers everywhere includes research reviews in areas of public health and cancer biology, as well as research in anthropology, water, mathematics, political economy and other areas.

And what's more, the article says, "Librarians are making clear the serious consideration that some are giving to moving research and scholarship to open access." The author has embarked on an interesting project to develop usage statistics for open access articles. 

Coronavirus Regulations State-By-State

 Law360 has an article titled "Coronavirus Regulations: a State-by-State Review." The article has an interactive map of the United States (powered by LexisNexis state-net) that lets you click on any of the states or territories of the US to view legislative, regulatory, and executive order information with a link to full text reports for each measure. The site tracks federal, state, and local government activity related to coronavirus, including pending bills, new regulations, and executive orders. 

2021 NELLCO Symposium for Law Libraries begins this Wednesday

 The 2021 NELLCO Symposium: Uncertainty - Living with Reality. Finding Opportunity. is scheduled to begin this Wednesday, with a host of interesting sessions spread out over 6 days March 17-19 and 24-26. Registration is free. The Symposium will be conducted on Zoom. Some of the sessions: 
3/17 from 1-2 pm,  Best Practices for Negotiating with Vendors
3/17 from 4-5 pm, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging in Collections & Acquisitions
3/18 from 1-2:30 pm, Back to Normal? Law Libraries After the Pandemic
3/24 from 2:45 - 3:30 pm, The Fight for the Right to Loan: Digital access, lending, and preservation in crisis
Plus lots more interesting sessions, and presentations from law library vendors like Fastcase, Bloomsbury, PLI Plus, vLex, and others. 
The full program is available here. Register here. 

LexisNexis Launches Law360 Pulse

 LexisNexis has introduced "Law360 Pulse: a comprehensive business of law news service." Law360 Pulse is a news service that combines the journalism and research of Law360 (which was acquired by LexisNexis a few years ago) with data and analytics from Lexis. Pulse complements Law360’s legal news coverage, offering single source for comprehensive legal news. LexisNexis is offering legal professionals complimentary access to Law360 Pulse for a limited time. And the good news for us is that law school faculty and students have complimentary access to Law360 Pulse.

Casemaker & Fastcase merge

 Casemaker and Fastcase have announced that the two companies are merging to create "a powerful alternative for legal information." According to the joint announcement of the merger, "The two companies will combine their teams and technologies to innovate research, analytics, and workflow offerings that empower lawyers with powerful digital solutions for their clients."  Both products have been popular lower-cost alternatives with Bar associations, and have over one million subscribers. Ed Walters, who is one of Fastcase's co-founders and current CEO, is quoted as saying "With the hard-won editorial and production expertise of Casemaker, we’re now ready to accelerate our climb, rewarding all our bar partners who believed in our companies as strong alternatives.”  

For law school subscribers (Pitt Law's Barco Law Library is a subscriber), the announcements says that "Fastcase and Casemaker access for law school students will remain in its current state until a unified law school student plan is finalized. All changes and improvements will be made in the best interest of law school students who will eventually be bridging into practice, and the newly combined Fastcase and Casemaker team wish to be the preferred legal technology provider for those future attorneys."

Free Wi-Fi for schoolchildren - broadcast from top of Cathedral of Learning

"We need to bridge Pittsburgh’s Digital Divide. By creating a community-based, non-profit Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP),...(we) will provide Internet to the homes of Pittsburghers who need it most."
That's the message from Meta Mesh, one of four community partners along with Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh and the Keystone Initiative for Network-based Research (KINBER) who have formed Every1online, a program to provide high-speed internet for school-aged children in the area. And the source of the signal: the top of Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning.
A story published on TribLive  describing this interesting project in detail says,

'“It’s a perfect tower,” said Sam Garfinkel, development coordinator at Meta Mesh, a nonprofit internet service provider. The Cathedral of Learning is, after all, the highest educational structure on the Western Hemisphere, standing more than 500 feet tall with 42 stories.'

EEOC's New COVID-19 Guidance

General Counsel News has a link to an article in the HR Daily Advisor that gives a a helpful summary of newly updated guidance from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission addressing common questions about federal employment laws and COVID-19. The article points out that the new EEOC guidance, available here, pulls together information from other agency resources, modified two existing questions and answers, and added 18 new ones. It addresses question about COVID-19 testing and inquiries in the workplace; confidentiality of medical information and reasonable accommodations for COVID-19. From the article:

"The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted employers’ normal operations in virtually every way, but it’s important for you to stay abreast of the EEOC’s guidance on employment laws during this challenging time. The agency’s recent update clarified:
You may conduct coronavirus screening tests and inquiries to all employees returning to the workplace, but you must have a reasonable belief that an individual has COVID-19 or its symptoms if you wish to conduct a test or make inquiries to the person.
To the extent possible, you must keep confidential all medical information about employees, including COVID-19 details.
Finally, if employees request a reasonable accommodation, you must engage in the interactive process by discussing what they need and the reasons why."

New Westlaw news: Today

Westlaw has launched a new "news" product called "Westlaw Today." This news is different from the news you get if you click on "News" on your Westlaw home page, which provides the latest news from Reuters and links out to various news outlets.
Westlaw Today is available to our users from the Westlaw Edge main page by going to the dropdown menu in the upper lefthand corner of the page where is says Thomson Reuters Westlaw Edge. The Today homepage provides the latest legal news, attorney analysis, and most viewed articles. According to the website, Westlaw Today provides a matter of fact approach to news with content from a variety of sources, including articles from CQ Roll Call, The Hill and more. There is also a tab that allows you to focus your news by thirty different defined practice areas.

LLoC to preserve govdocs for GPO

The Federal Depository Library Program reports that the Law Library of Congress has signed a Preservation Steward agreement with the U.S. Government Publishing Office. The agreement states that the LLoC will preserve its collection of the daily Congressional Record and Federal Register, published by GPO.

To help libraries meet the needs of efficient Government document stewardship in the digital era, GPO has established Preservation Stewards to support continued public access to historic U.S. Government documents in print format. Preservation Stewards contribute significantly to the effort to preserve printed documents, and GPO welcomes all libraries that wish to participate as Preservation Stewards... This agreement comes in addition to the Library of Congress’ 2017 Preservation Steward agreement with GPO to preserve Congressional Hearings. The Library of Congress and GPO also have a digital access partnership to provide permanent public access to digital publications within the scope of the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) available through the Library of Congress website.

Yay Teams

Pitt IT has reaffirmed that Pitt is migrating all Skype users to Microsoft Teams this Saturday.  And according to various online news sources, Microsoft has been working hard to make Teams the best WFH app for all sorts of situations.  Examples of new features on Teams:  

Endgadget reports on the upcoming “virtual commute” feature, whose goal is “to create a boundary between work and life.” It is designed to help people mark the start and end of the workday (Half of the chat volume on Teams occurred between 5 p.m. and midnight in the past six months, up 48% from the months before the pandemic). According to Endgadget, “Microsoft says this is an attempt to promote employee wellness.” 

“Teams Together” mode looks custom made for university teaching. According to Computerworld,   Instead of the BradyBunch-like gallery view that we’ve gotten used to, Together makes the group in the meeting look like they’re sitting together in a room or an auditorium.  

And Crayon has the information on how to add virtual and custom backgrounds in MS Teams. You can also blur your background on Teams (to protect your privacy or hide a mess 😊).  

Finally, there are lots of keyboard shortcuts on Teams; just open your Teams app and hit the “Control” key and the “.” key on your keyboard at the same time to pull up the list.