California Bar rejects scholars' request for data

According to an article in today's National Law Journal, the California bar has refused a request for data it collects regarding bar exam test-takers' race, gender and other details for research. The request came from by a group of legal scholars conducting research related to affirmative action admissions in law schools.

Blawgosphere and scholarship

An article today on Law dot com asks "Is the future of legal scholarship in the blogosphere?" The author, Margaret Schilt (faculty services librarian at the University of Chicago law library), takes a thoughtful look at law blogs written by legal scholars. One of her conclusions is that even if blogging will never replace traditional legal scholarship, blogs are where the scholarly dialogue increasingly takes place." She also suggests that law librarians need to figure out how to preserve this increasingly important online source of scholarship.

It's nice to know you're not alone.

The internet can connect us to others in similar situations, where we can learn from each other.
Just for 1L's, the law librarians at Lewis and Clark have pulled together a list of helpful tips and website links for the class of 2010.
Over at the Adjunct Professors Law Prawfs Blog, Mitchell Rubenstein has compiled a linked list of websites for Adjunct Professors.

wikipedia redux

I blogged a couple of weeks ago about a program called Wikiscanner that lets you find out who's editing Wikipedia. Well since that program came out there have been any number of shocking! shocking! revelations about people doing some vanity-editing of Wikipedia. Concurring Opinions blogged about law firms doing a little editing.

The CyberCemetery

Just heard about this one - CyberCemetery a website for defunct U.S. government agencies and commissions hosted by the University of North Texas and the GPO. It's a nice clean user interface, easy to use, you can search or browse without any trouble. It has links to the Wayback Machine, the Clinton administration webpages, and other collections of govt. info. Extra credit for the cool name.

budgeting for law publications, print and online

An exchange on the law-lib listserv yesterday caught my eye. A firm librarian from Akron sent out a general request for information that would help her draw up her 2008 library budget. She was trying to be realistic about the increase in cost of legal publications - she said she was using "the AALL price index for legal publications and did my own check by randomly selecting titles from our collection and comparing the prices for 2006 and 2007."

What was interesting was the response that her posting elicited from Ken Svengalis, who was a longtime law librarian of the RI state library and is now a consumer watchdog for legal publishing. He wrote a scathing indictment of the AALL's price index and the cozy relationship between the AALL and some legal publishers. He also provided a link to the powerpoint presentation he gave at the AALL conference in July that details the economics of the legal publishing business.

NASA imagery to go online

Cool digitization news: NASA is going to digitize EVERYTHING in its archives, which contain a 50-year collection of photos, videos, films and other material that's been gathered in manned and unmanned space missions. They've selected a professional, nonprofit digitization organization called Internet Archive to team with them and provide the digitization expertise. The two organizations are teaming through a non-exclusive Space Act agreement to help NASA consolidate and digitize its imagery archives using no NASA funds.
"We're dedicated to making all human knowledge available in the digital realm," said Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of Internet Archive. Laudable.

Almanac of Higher Education

The Chronicle of Higher Education's annual Almanac of Higher Education, which contains national and state-by-state data on colleges and universities, appears online today. You can browse the Almanac by topic, do a search, or choose a state from a dropdown menu.

2b2b

That's Too Busy To Blog, which is what it's been like in the Barco Law Library during the past 2 days of student orientation!
Library and Info. Science news reports that a emc2,a Web-Based School and Library Administration site is now available online. It's geared towards helping school libraries manage their resources, but the page that I like is the ISBN lookup page, which does just that.


Hat tip to Katie Nye for telling me about Altlaw.org, a search engine for federal caswlaw online. There's an article about it online in Information Week

Google Sky

There's a story in today's paper about a new feature on Google Earth that's called Google Sky - just as the name suggests, it lets you look at the sky, see images that show planets and constellations and provide information about the solar system. You can watch supernovas grow brighter and then fade, and zoom into a gas cloud to see a star being born.
What's especially cool is that the Pittsburgh branch of Google is responsible for developing Google Sky - they're located in that new building that's on the edge of Panther Hollow and the edge of the CMU campus.
If you'd like to check out Google Sky feature, you have to first download Google Earth if you haven't done so yet. Once Google Earth is installed you just click on "Switch to Sky" from the "view" drop-down menu or click the Sky button on the toolbar.

Google and govdocs

A govdocs librarian from the University of Wisconsin Memorial Library gives an update of the govdocs arm of Google Books, the giant, ambitious Google digitization project. Wisconsin is one of the libraries involved in the Google Books partnership, and she reports that they are in the early stages of sending government document volumes to Google - currently, Wisconsin state documents. She adds this reminder: "One thing to keep in mind: Google is interested in digitizing a lot of content. Google’s primary mission is to "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful." Their ultimate goal is comprehensiveness; they are not focused on building a complete collection of government documents organized as government documents, or any other type of material as a particular collection."

Inmates with laptops

New Jersey inmates are the first in the country to have access to laptop computers that they can use in their cells to do legal research. The Bergen County Jail is rolling out 80 laptops for use by the jail's 1,000 inmates according to a report in the North Jersey Record.
The laptops will allow the prisoners to use Westlaw for legal research. Prison officials say that this addresses a safety issue - every time inmates are allowed to go to the jail library to use Westlaw there is a risk. "There's a risk each time you open a cell door," said Bergen Sheriff Leo P. McGuire, "and our library was getting too busy."
The extra-rugged 3 lb. laptops are manufactured by Psion Teklogix of Canada.

new Google maps feature

Today Google Maps rolled out a new embedding feature. It gives you code so you can embed a Google map into your blog, website, etc. Let's see how well it works, here's a map I made of the Barco Law Building.



View Larger Map

comment: hmmm. I had zoomed in on the map much more closely than the embedded map displays.

#27: Al Gore has always been running for President

That comes right after #26, Katie Couric has always had screen cred.
If it's schooltime, then it's also time for Beloit College to publish this year's Mindset List - a snapshot of the mindset of the incoming college freshman class. This year's list is for the class of 2011; but you can see the Mindset List for our own 1L's (or at least the one's who are coming straight from college) by looking at the class of 2007 (Paul Newman has always made salad dressing, Computers have always fit in their backpacks.)

"internet gadfly" challenges Westlaw, Lexis

Carl Malamud, the founder of of Public.Resource.Org, believes that public domain information should be free. In the New York Times Sunday edition there was a story about
Public Resource's latest project: a database that will contain all of US caselaw - more than 10 million pages - that will be freely available online. The project website just went live yesterday.
This is just one of Public Resource's ambitious project, an organization whose purposes are "to create, architect, design, implement, operate and maintain public works projects on the Internet for Educational, Charitable, and Scientific Purposes to the benefit of the general public and the public interest; to increase and diffuse knowledge about the Internet in its broadest sense; to promote and facilitate the expansion, development, and growth of the public infrastructure of the Internet by any means consistent with the public interest through other activities, including, but not limited to, publications, meetings, conferences, training, educational seminars, and the issuance of grants and other financial support to educational institutions, foundations and other organizations.
You can read more about the project on the OReilly Radar blog; the posting includes a letter from Mr. Malamud to Thomson West asking them to explain what information they consider to be proprietary versus public domain.

Quote of the Day

Philanthropist Brooke Astor died last Monday at the age of 105. A patron and trustee of the New York Public Library, she is quoted in the Sunday New York Times : For her 100th birthday luncheon, when she was asked whom she wanted as guests, she replied without hesitation: “One hundred librarians.”

legal research engine

Cornell Law Library has just announced its new website, which includes a legal research engine ("Easy access to authoritative legal research guides on every subject.")- and all sorts of other interesting stuff. Check it out!

Throwing away the books

Genie Tyburski of The Virtual Chase has written an article that asks "Can we throw away the books yet?" Her answer is a qualified "No".
I recommend you read this whole thoughtful article to see why.
Genie is a professional legal researcher who has worked in law libraries for more than 20 years. She writes for trade journals and newsletters, including Law Office Computing, Law Practice Magazine and The CyberSkeptic's Guide to Internet Research and she is editor of Introduction to Online Legal, Regulatory & Intellectual Property Research.

Lawyers Without Borders Seeks Book Donations

Lawyers Without Borders requests donations of law books for law libraries serving courts and lawyers in Albania and Liberia. English-language major treatises, hornbooks, and other publications focusing on American law and legal institutions are sought for the law library of the Supreme Court of Albania. Donations of books for Liberia will go to the University of Liberia Louis Arthur Grimes Law School, as well as judges, students, and lawyers in Liberia. They are particularly looking for complete sets of the AmJur series: any edition of AmJur, AmJur Forms, and AmJur Trials. Specifics about where to send donations can be found on the LWOB website.

Ingmar Bergman

The great Swedish filmmaker died July 30. This brief video from Slate showcases some of his lesser known work.