Zotero bibliographies in Bluebook format

New! ZoteroBib is a new free, tool from the makers of Zotero. It’s like EasyBib but quicker, more powerful, and sans the obnoxious ads. As you’re researching, just enter in your url, isbn, doi, etc., and click cite. It automatically grabs the citation and adds it to your list in just one click. Like Zotero, it supports Bluebook and many other citation styles. And ZoteroBib works on any device.

hat tip: Karen Shephard and Bonnie Shucha

smartphone travel tips

If you're travelling this summer, the NY Times has a helpful article about what you need to do before you leave to prepare for travelling with a smartphone. They include a checklist. 

Graduate access to Lexis and Westlaw

Here is the information for students who are graduating.
LexisNexis Graduate program
Lexis has created this program for recent law school graduates, who can sign in as usual with their Lexis IDs and passwords. On July 1, graduates will see changes on the LexisNexis Law School Home Page. Graduates have:
 • Access to the top legal news from around the web and Law360®
• Career tips to help  build your resume, interview smarter, and network
• Resources to sharpen research skills and start a practice
• A valuable graduate gift to help  start their careers.
Graduates have free access to Lexis Advance through December 31, 2018.
 BTW—Be sure to redeem  LexisNexis Rewards points before they expire on June 30, 2018.
And please note, there is a way to redeem your Lexis points and use them towards your hotel for the bar exam should you choose to.

Westlaw
Graduates have access to Thomson Reuters products, including Westlaw and Practical Law, for six-months after graduation.  “Grad Elite” access gives  60-hours of usage on these products per month to gain understanding and build confidence in  research skills. While it can't be used in situations where you are billing a client, Thomson Reuters encourages grads to use these tools to build  knowledge of the law and prepare for the bar exam. In addition, graduates get access to job searching databases on Westlaw and TWEN for 18-months after graduation for 1-hour a month. Students must extend access by logging into http://www.lawschool.westlaw.com .

New Law Deans

Tax Prof Blog reports that there have been 18 new Deans of law schools appointed recently, and that 61% of them are women, including Pitt Law's Amy Wildermuth. The numbers come from the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar.

Visualizing census data: upcoming workshop

On Friday, May 11, Andrew Batt of the UCONN-based State Data Center will lead a streaming workshop on visualizing Census data (both American Community Survey data and National Historical Geographic Information System data) with the Tableau Public software app. Tableau Public is free for PC or Mac. The streaming service is being offered through FDLP Academy. You can access login 15 minutes before the webinar starts (appx. 10:15am EST) at this link. The workshop is expected to run for about 90 minutes. You can see some of the visualizations that the presenter has created for Connecticut here.

New database in HeinOnline: McGill Air and Space Law

Our HeinOnline subscription contains a new database: McGill Institute of Air and Space Law Publications. It includes complete coverage of the Annals of Air and Space Law, nearly 50 titles and 50,000 pages. The McGill Institute and Centre of Air and Space Law is a leading authority on air and space law: the Institute of Air and Space Law (IASL) is the world’s premier academic setting for teaching and research in the dual disciplines of international air law and space law, and the Centre for Research in Air and Space Law (CRASL) publishes leading literature in both disciplines including the Annals of Air and Space Law (founded in 1976), treatises, monographs, and occasional papers. The Annals, which began publication in 1976, is devoted to fostering the free exchange of ideas and information pertaining to the law applicable to aerospace activities. The Annals publishes original articles, drafted in English or French, covering the entire spectrum of domestic and international air law and the law of space applications. The contributors are academics and leading practitioners from all parts of the world.

Federal Register digitized in entirety by GPO

The Government Publishing Office and the National Archives' Office of the Federal Register announced that they have digitized every issue of the Federal Register back to its beginning in 1936, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued the first document, an Executive Order.  The complete digitized set is available at the govinfo website.
The announcement included some highlights from the early issues of the Federal Register:

•  The first Executive Order published in the Federal Register on March 14, 1936, enlarged the Cape Romain Migratory Bird Refuge in South Carolina. 
• The first war related Presidential proclamations following the Declaration of War on Japan was published in the December 10, 1941 Federal Register issue. 
• The August 25, 1958 issue contains the Executive Order outlining changes to the flag following the admittance of Hawaii as a state.

ABA announces major restructuring

The ABA journal has an article titled "Massive restructuring at the ABA will rehouse entities under 9 centers" that outlines the soon-to-be effected changes in how the organization is structured. The ABA website still reflects the "old" structure: click on "ABA Groups" and you see a list of links to commissions, committees, task forces etc. But Executive Director Jack Rives says:

“Our current structure of divisions, committees, commissions, task forces, working groups, and other creatively named entities makes the Association extraordinarily difficult to access and costly to manage,” Rives wrote. “Our organization’s complexity has also impeded effective resource allocation. We must live within our means; we must prioritize; we must focus our resources on the programs and issues that matter most to our members, the profession and society.”

The new structure has nine centers organized around the four goals of the ABA: serving members; improving the profession; eliminating bias and enhancing diversity; and advancing the rule of law. The restructuring will help the ABA operate more efficiently and cheaply; staff cuts will occur by the end of April.

Court says PACER fees misused

The United States District Court for the District of Columbia has issued an opinion in the class action case National Veterans Legal Services Program, et. al., v United States (docket available here). In her opinion, Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle said that the federal judiciary misused millions of dollars in PACER fees to fund programs that are not allowed. However, she wrote that "the Court rejects the parties’ polar opposite views of the statute." She rejected the plaintiffs' reasoning that PACER fees can only be used to cover the "marginal cost" of running PACER, but also rejected the government's "other extreme" reasoning that the E-Government Act allows PACER fees to fund any dissemination of information through electronic means. Under her reasoning, the federal judiciary must return approximately $200 million to people who paid PACER fees from 2010-2016.
The Freedom to Tinker blog has an extensive discussion of the decision:

"The law says that the Judiciary “may, only to the extent necessary, prescribe reasonable fees… to reimburse expenses incurred in providing these services.” The lawsuit centered on the meaning of terms like “only to the extent necessary” and “these services.” During the litigation, the Judiciary provided a spreadsheet showing how PACER fees were spent across different categories (categories invented by the Judiciary). About a quarter of these fees were spent on things that related to public access tangentially at best (for example, “courtroom technologies”). The judge decided that these were illegal. About 15% of fees were under a different heading: “Public Access Services.” The plaintiffs did not allege that these were illegal even though ~$25m per year seems an awful lot for serving digital documents to the public. Only the middle set of categories—about $100m per year—was seriously in dispute."

CRS Reports to be made available to the public

The GPO reports that a provision called "Equal Access to Congressional Research Service Reports" is included in the Consolidated Appropriations Ace of 2018. The provision makes all non-confidential Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports freely available online to individuals, schools and universities, researchers, and libraries. According to the GPO announcement, "The Librarian of Congress, in consultation with the CRS Director, shall establish and maintain a public website containing CRS Reports and an index of all CRS Reports contained on the website." This is big news for librarians, as distribution of CRS reports was historically limited to members of Congress, and were outside the scope of the Federal Depository Library Program. According to GPO, "Once CRS Reports begin to be publicly-disseminated, these reports will be in scope of the FDLP. These reports will then be cataloged and made available via the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) with links to the CRS website."
Vermont Business Magazine has more information on the provision which was sponsored by Vt. Senator Patrick Leahy, and which has been an issue that Leahy and Sen. John McCain of Arizona have worked on for 15 years.

More on "The FDLP Moderization Act of 2018"

The Government Publishing Office today published the GPO Statement on H.R. 5305, The FDLP Modernization Act of 2018." The statement says that "The GPO is pleased to support the FDLP Modernization Act of 2018. We appreciate the consultation the Committee engaged in with us as well as with other key stakeholders during its development. The bill affirms the principle that the free flow of Government information is fundamental to the health of our democracy, and acknowledges the important role Federal depository libraries play in ensuring free public access to that information."
On the other hand, the Free Gov Info blog has some misgivings about the bill that are summarized here under the heading "Loopholes.":
1. Fugitives
2. Agency Websites and
3. A Digital FDLP.
Free Gov Info suggests that Congress can make the bill even better; the meeting to discuss the bill is scheduled for Thursday April 12 at 11 am.

Title 44 big news

The announcement came from the Government Printing Publishing Office (GPO) today:  On March 15, 2018, the U.S. House of Representatives filed H.R. 5305 IH, the FDLP Modernization Act of 2018, the amend Title 44, U.S. Code. They included a link to the FDLP's Title 44 Revision Page which has links to the Depository Library Council's Title 44 recomndations, Congressional testimony, and other related resources.
As you may know, concerned gov docs librarians have been writing about the proposed amendation of Title 44 for several months. Two of the best-known gov docs librarians, both named James Jacobs, have published an article in Library Journal discussion their concerns. They also encourage interested readers to check out a special issue of Against the Grain titled Ensuring Access to Government Information to read up on the issues involved.

Pennsylvania congressional redistricting

There's an excellent blogpost titled "Exploring Pennsylvania's Gerrymandered Congressional Districts" that provides very detailed, granular geospatial data to illustrate the congressional district issue in Pennsylvania. The blog is hosted by Azavea, a Philadelphia-based company that makes "geographic data more valuable by creating beautiful and scalable web and mobile applications, and by creating analytics that uncover insights in your data."

hat tip: Pat Roncevich, our Pitt Law geospatial expert

Friday fun...

If you're bored there's a fun online game called "Click That 'Hood Pittsburgh" - it tests your knowledge of where all the neighborhoods in the 'burgh are located.

FDLP webinars in March

Webinar: Federal Government Databases and Websites: A Surprising Source of State and Local Data March 14, 2018 2:00 pm EDT According to the GPO and FDLP, his webinar will present an "exciting variety of state and local resources" which can be found by searching Federal Government websites. Resources range from health and nutrition to science and education as well as legislative and judicial information. Websites that provide a surprising wealth of state and local resources include usa.gov, the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP), science.gov, ERIC, and PubMed. Participants will learn strategies for searching for state and local resources using Federal Government databases and websites. Register here to attend the live training webinar.

They are offering a second webinar of interest to librarians: "Digital Content Contributors: Increasing Access to Digitized Content." This one will be held on March 13 at 2 pm. The description: Digitizing parts of your depository collection or considering starting a digitization project? Join us as members of the GPO Partnership Team share information on how your digitized content can be widely accessible through GPO’s govinfo. During the webinar, learn more about the Digital Content Contributor partnerships, how GPO makes decisions on priorities for ingest of content into govinfo, as well as tips on how to package your content for ingest. Register here.
And if you aren't able to attend a webinar the FDLP has all of their webinars and webcasts archived and available on their website.

Congressional Data Challenge

The Library of Congress has announced it is sponsoring the "legislative data challenge" to advance the discovery, use, and exploration of the collection of legislative information it has available on Congress.gov. From the announcement:

"The Library is inviting submitters to use a variety of Congressional publications and data sets available on Congress.gov to create new meaning or tools to help members of Congress and the public explore it in new ways. This could take the form of interactive visualizations, mobile or desktop applications, a website, or other digital creation. Submissions must be entered at Challenge.gov by April 2, 2018; please see the challenge rules for more information. Per the challenge requirements, submitters must use at least one congressional data set from Congress.gov. Submitters may access the data directly from Congress.gov or though GPO’s govinfo, which, in partnership with the Library of Congress, the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Office of the Secretary of the Senate, hosts bulk data from Congress.gov for download."

FDsys to retire

The GPO has announced that in December 2018, GPO plans to retire FDsys, and govinfo will take its place as GPO’s source for official Government information. FDsys has been the GPO's online portal to information since 2009; the more modern and mobile-friendly govinfo debuted in 2016.
 While FDsys will remain available until its "retirement", users are encouraged to transition to govinfo. Immediately before FDsys is retired, redirects from FDsys to govinfo will be enabled, but GPO advises that users should prepare for the FDsys retirement by proactively updating their systems and links to point to govinfo instead of FDsys. govinfo offers many enhancements over FDsys including:
• Optimization for display on mobile devices
• More relevant and precise search results
• Integrated social media sharing
• New Related Documents feature
• Curated content and new ways to browse
• Developer tools and data feeds
• Expanded help and resources
There's more information about the transition on the govinfo website. 

Changes to BloombergBNA Labor & Employment And Benefits News

Bloomberg Law has announced that effective January 16, 2018, your Bloomberg BNA Premier labor, employment, and benefits news products will be available on an improved news delivery portal. This updated news portal comes with a host of new features and functionality, including: delivery of timely and concise news, custom alerts for monitoring developments, a better mobile experience, and more. Several of the news publications will be combined on the updated news services but Bloomberg promises that w "will continue to benefit from the same breadth and depth of coverage that have been the hallmark of all of our labor and employment news services."
A few changes:
• Labor Relations Week™ will be renamed Labor Relations News.
• Construction Labor Report™ will be renamed Construction Labor News.
• Pension & Benefits Daily™ and BNA Pension & Benefits Reporter™ will cease publication as stand-alones and combine to become Benefits & Executive Compensation News.
• BNA’s Employment Discrimination Report™, Workplace Law Report™, and Workplace Immigration Report™ will cease publication as stand-alones and combine to become Employment Law News.

CALI QuizWright

Our friend Elmer Masters from Computer Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) has just published an article on CALI Spotlight called Zero to Quiz in 5 Minutes: Getting Started With CALI QuizWright in 5 Quick Steps. QuizWright is CALI's new web-based formative assessment tool and is available now through the CALI website. Anyone with faculty-level access to CALI can use QuizWright. After logging in at www.cali.org go to the dropdown menu called your "CALI Dashboard" in the upper right and select QuizWright from the menu. The site says that "QuizWright is a web app that lets law faculty write individual Multiple Choice, True/False, and Yes/No questions, saves the questions in a personal question bank, allows law faculty to bundle the questions into quizzes, uses CALI AutoPublish to instantly and securely publish the quizzes to the CALI website and lets students take the quizzes as formative assessments, either live in class or as homework, right on the CALI website, where most students already have an account. Faculty can view the basic results or access advanced analytic reporting from an online dashboard. Download of results to Excel for further analysis is available."

Digitized Historical Congressional Record now complete

The Government Publishing Office (GPO) today announced that with the release of the years 1873-1890 they have completed the digitization project of the Historical Congressional Record. These documents are freely available to the public on the GPO's govinfo website. The Library of Congress collaborated with the GPO on this project. The LOC created the digital images of the pages and the GPO devised the metadata for the project, so that the collection is accessible and searchable "across a wide variety of digital platforms."
The first date for which the Congressional Record is available is Tuesday, March 4, 1873, when the Senate held a "special session" for the second inauguration of Ulysses S. Grant as President of the United States.