Vincent G. Rinn Law Library

HeinOnline User Support Now Includes YouTube Channel

HeinOnline has developed multiple types of user support for subscribers to their products. The HeinOnline Weblog at www.heinonline.blogspot.com has relevant news, information about enhancements, content releases, tips, tricks and much more. Check out the HeinOnline Main Page on their wiki for a quick description of their offerings such as Training Guides, Collection Specific Help Pages , Frequently Asked Questions, Training Videos.

Training videos can be accessed from the "HeinOnline:Videos", wiki page and since April, also on HeinOnline's own  You Tube Channel. 

So if you can use some help with a search or additional information to take full advantage of the growing number of Hein Online products, be sure to explore the sites mentioned above.

Harvard Law Makes Scholarly Articles "Open Access"

"The Harvard University Law School  (HLS) faculty last month followed the lead of their colleagues in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) ( See previous blog post " Harvard Faculty To Make Articles Open Access") by voting unanimously to make their scholarly articles available online for free, making HLS the first law school to commit to a “mandatory open access policy” via an institutional repository."

( Source: SPARC Highlights Open Access,By Andrew Albanese, Library Journal, 6/15/2008 )

From the Harvard Law School News of May 7, 2008 :

"Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and available to other services such as Google Scholar. Authors can also legally distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and elsewhere can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not used for profit."

"This exciting development is something in which the whole Harvard Law School community can take great pride," said John Palfrey '01, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and newly appointed vice dean of library and information resources."

Consumer Tip: How to Block Cellphone Spam

If you haven’t gotten any spam text messages on your cell phone, you’re lucky. But it’s only a matter of time before you do. The spammers thinks that we are at their mercy. But a very useful article by David Pogue, the New York Times technology columnist, discloses some little known protective measures available from the mobile phone carriers. Check out his article, How to Block Cellphone Spam, for the details.

Latest OCLC/Google Agreement Should Improve Visibility of Libraries’ Holdings On Web

As Google has moved from web search into more diverse information services & applications (More Google Products) the library community has been working to become a part of some of these developments rather than standing on the sidelines. As what use to be considered library services, were being implimented by Google & other search engines on the web. Most recently the project receiving the most publicity has been the massive Google book scanning project with a growing number of large libraries.

But OCLC ( Online Computer Library Center, Inc.)  which provides services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend and preserve library materials in 112 countries,has also been active for sometime, in working with Google to  get their millions of records of library holdings, exposed and searchable on the web.

Before 2006, OCLC had implimented a function called “Open WorldCat”, with limited data subsets of its records, made available through Open WorldCat partner sites, such as Google, Yahoo!,  and others. ( See previous post : OCLC to Open WorldCat Searching to the World )  This function inserted “Find in a Library” results within  regular search engine results. But they could easily get lost among all the other search hits.

In July 2006, OCLC decided to make the entire contents of their bibliographic database freely available online with its own unique url (http://www.worldcat.org/ ). OCLC partnered with key search engines such as Google, Google Books, Yahoo! Search and Windows Live Search, that index WorldCat data for popular and unique works. These partners would provide links to WorldCat.org and/or other access to WorldCat-based information.

At present Google  has  a “Library catalogs” search option that searches OCLC’s WorldCat. But it is a bit tricky to get to. A user has to click on the general Google “Advanced Search” link, then on the “Google Book Search” link on the bottom of the page, and on the resulting page, clicking on the “Advanced Book Search” link, which finally brings one to a search page where the “Library catalogs” search can be selected !

This month OCLC took another important step to further make its resources available & searchable on the web with an agreement with Google to exchange data that will facilitate the discovery of library collections through Google search services. Google gets WorldCat-derived MARC records from OCLC member libraries who are  participating in the Google Book Search™ program. OCLC will get data & links for the Google digitized books that it can then add to the WorldCat database to represent the digitized collections of OCLC member libraries in WorldCat. Users should be able to find books in the Google scanned collection or in the holdings of  the WorldCat libraries .

Hopefully, under this new agreement, the access to OCLC WorlCat records will be more seamless and less convoluted than in the past.

Sharing Legal Docs - Do You Know Where Your Metadata Are ?

A May 19 posting from the Legal Profession Blog ( part of the Law Professors Blog Netrwork) entitled, “Cautionary Tale of Leaving the "Track Changes" Unaccepted. Or, I Never Metadata I Didn't Like", by Alan Childress, reminds legal practioners of the risks of not being aware of the metadata that is part of the documents that they may be distributing to others. While the “abject lesson” used as an example, is of a business plan submitted to a venture capital firm, the lesson applies with equal force to the myriad documents that  lawyers generate as part of their legal practice.

The posting includes a link to a previous  piece by Mr. Childress, “Lawyers Beware "Track Changes": That's Metadata You're Handing Over”, that directly addresses lawyers’ need to be aware of such metadata and the ethical implications of mishandling it.

In the past few years there have been some very insightful and useful articles on how to deal with and minimize the risks of application metadata. Here is a selection:

Metadata: What It Is & Why You Should Care
Susan J. Silvernail, Esq. , Marsh, Rickard & Bryan, P.C.
ALAJ Summer Seminar, August 11, 2007

Metadata:  Danger or delight?
By Sheila Blackford,  Oregon State Bar Bulletin,  MAY 2006

The Mysterious World of Metadata
By DennisKennedy ,  denniskennedy.com , October 24, 2005

Redacting with Confidence: How to Safely Publish - Sanitized Reports Converted From Word to PDF
National Security Agency , 12/13/2005

Adendum:

Another Ethics Ruling on Metadata
by Robert J. Ambrogi
legalblogwatch, June 18, 2008

MAC & PC Co-exist With “Boot Camp”

We’ve seen those rather amusing ( if you’re a Mac fan) television commercials with the casual, hip Mac dude and the uptight, suit-wearing PC geek, trading competitive banter. They seem to always be at adds. But Apple has made it possible to easily run the Windows operating system and the Mac Leopard operating system on the same Apple computer. The PC & Mac boys can safely  do their respective thing while sharing the same hard drive !

What makes this possible is a handy little program called Boot Camp that comes as part of the Mac OS. It safely & easily partions the hard drive to allow the installation of Windows in its own space. Each OS runs in native mode without the use of an emulator like Virtual PC. It will work with Windows XP & Vista and can also use standard Windows drivers. However, the operating systems cannot run simultaneously. Users have to run one at a time. This should minimize any further Mac dude/PC geek arguments ;-)

( Source: Smart Computing, June 2008, p. 38 )
Also see, Boot Camp. Run Windows on your Mac.

Harvard Faculty To Make Articles Open Access

A long article by Peter Suberin in the March 2, 2008 issue of the “SPARC Open Access Newsletter” discusses the recent Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences  vote (Tuesday Feb. 12) to give the University a worldwide license to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available and to exercise the copyright in the articles, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.

The fact that the mandate comes from the faculty and that it was unnanimous, is seen by the author as a strong rebuttal to the claims by the publishing lobby  “that the call for OA mandates is a sign that researchers oppose OA and must be coerced.” Rather he says “the Harvard vote decisively confirms Alma Swan's finding that the overwhelming majority of researchers do not resent OA mandates and would *willingly* comply with one from their funder or university.”

“Professor Stuart M. Shieber who proposed the legislation states, “This is a large and very important step for scholars throughout the country. It should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated.” 
(Source : Legislation designed to allow greater worldwide access, Harvard Gazette Online )

In an opinion piece about the faculty vote (The Case for Open Access) , Robert Darnton, the Director of the Harvard University Library, spoke about the negative effects of the present commercial publishing system on libraries & scholars.

“The spiraling cost of journals has inflicted severe damage on research libraries, creating a ripple effect: in order to purchase the journals, libraries have had to reduce their acquisitions of monographs; the reduced demand among libraries for monographs has forced university presses to cut back on the publication of them;and the near impossibility of publishing their dissertations has jeopardized the careers of a whole generation of scholars in many fields…” “The Harvard University Library will set up an Office for Scholarly Communication to make the open-access repository an instrument for access to research across all disciplines…”

While the Harvard decision has gotten the most press. Mr. Suberin points out that before Harvard there were at least 12 other institutional mandates and three departmental mandates in nine countries...

Computer Security Information From "US-CERT"

The Winter 2008 Rinn Law Library Newsletter included a section listing web sites (p.5-6) that were useful in protecting computer users in the digital world. Mark Giangrande, one of our reference librarians, has found an excellent US government web site that has additional guidance for the everyday user. The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) is a sub-unit of the Department of Homeland Security that was established in 2003 to protect the nation's Internet infrastructure, US-CERT coordinates defense against and responses to cyber attacks across the nation. In addition to sophisticated information for the government users, it also provides useful information for home and corporate users, or for people new to computer security.

Here are some of the links provided in this section:

• Protect Your Workplace
• Before You Connect a New Computer to the Internet
• Recovering from a Trojan Horse or Virus
• Home Network Security
• Home Computer Security
• Software License Agreements: Ignore at Your Own Risk

And Securing Your Web Browser - Includes step-by-step instructions with illustrations on how to make the settings needed to make your browser(s) less vulnerable and more secure while accessing the internet. Instructions are included for These browsers: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox ,Apple Safari.

                              

New Website and Second Life Presence to Support Work of International Criminal Court

Some of us may think that online web sites and  “alternative reality” sites created by young people will be filled with fantasy and not deal with serious life & death issues. But that is hardly the case with  the International Justice Center, which will be an online clearinghouse for public information and action in support of the International Criminal Court and related human rights concerns. The IJC will be based both in the virtual world of Second Life and on the web. [ Second Life requires registration, the website does not. ]

The International Justice Center is a project of Global Kids. Global Kids was founded in 1989 to “transform urban youth into successful students and global and community leaders by engaging them in socially dynamic, content-rich learning experiences”. It is supported by a grant from the Digital Media and Learning Initiative of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. It is an independent initiative and is not formally associated with the International Criminal Court.

The Center was launched on March 20, 2008 and involved the participation of ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo and former foreign minister of Canada Lloyd Axworthy. Some tentative plans for the Center in the near future may include the following:

•    Live Video from the ICC: As the first major trial at the ICC moves forward, we have the potential to host at the Center live viewings of trials and hearings over the next months.

•    Developing a tool that connects SMS text messaging to Second Life that can enable people in low-bandwidth environments to connect with people in virtual worlds via text chat. Some possibilities include holding online discussions with people in Uganda and the Congo to talk about the role of the ICC in their countries.

•    The Center could host workshops, lectures and classes on ICC-related subject matter, which would be conducted by experts from legal associations, non-profits and academia.

( Source: http://www.justicecenter.net/ )

Such an initiative like the International Justice Center should reshape our expectations,to seeing that tech-savvy “global kids” can certainly contribute in a  significant way to promoting global justice and human rights in the real world.

Addendum :  "Second Life" Instructions

GAO Legislative History Collection On WestLaw

The staff of the law library at the Government Accountability Office (GAO,formerly the Government Accounting Office) have been compiling complete federal legislative histories from 1915 onward to aid in providing reference service to their users. This is a massive collection with most of the relevant documents included. In 1990 the GAO contracted with the REMAC Information Corporation to microfiche their existing collection. The agreement, was originally made because of the need to preserve the histories. It enabled REMAC to market the product to the public after providing a master copy to the GAO. REMAC's involvement was the result of a competitive bid and was at no cost to the government. ( Source: Information Today, December 1, 1990 )

One can get an idea of the size of this collection from the description of the original REMAC publication from the online WorldCat online catalog, which indicates that the collection from 1921 - 1980 is comprised of approximately 56,000 microfiche cards ! ( OCLC accession no. : 173660137 )

Currently, the GAO has contracted exclusively  with Thomson West to scan their collection to produce PDF files of the documents contained. One would assume that the contract allows GAO in-house use of the scanned collection and allows Thomson to market it as a product through their WestLaw,legal research service. The description of the database states :

“The FED-LH  database contains the U.S. Government Accountability Office's collection of legislative history documents compiled for most U.S. Public Laws enacted from 1915 to 1995 (rolling release). A document is a listing of materials comprising the compiled legislative history for a Public Law. Each document contains identifying information for the Public Law followed by a list of PDF documents broken down into three categories - Congressional Materials, Hearings, and Presidential Documents. Legislative history materials include the Public Law, Reports, Committee Prints, Congressional Record entries, Bills and Resolutions, Hearing prints, Presidential signing statements, Presidential messages, and other miscellaneous documents.” “Use either the Terms and Connectors full text searching, Natural Language, or streamline your search using the citation search template.”

For those with access to WestLaw, this collection provides an amazingly complete location to research federal legislative history with links to the relevant documents. However, a recent March 24  posting on the Law Libraian Blog, “Controversy Over GAO Legislative Histories on Westlaw Heating Up”, seems to raise some question regarding the private marketing of what is a government-produced collection of legal information. Although as mentioned above, that was arrangement with the original microfiche project in the 90’s.

FastCase Inc. Enters Rich Public Legal Portal Arena

FastCase, the commercial company from whom the Public.Resource.Org     developers acquired the huge volume of court cases mentioned in the previous post, [ PreCYdent  got their Federal Reporter materials by scanning. See Comment below ] , has also created its own public access collection called, "The Public Library of Law". It is a free law library that assembles law available for free scattered across many different sites -- all in one place. It contains cases from the U.S. Supreme Court and Courts of Appeal,Cases from all 50 states back to 1997,Federal statutory law and codes from all 50 states,Regulations, court rules, constitutions, and more.

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With this new entry, it can be useful to remind our users of the many other major online legal research portals that are currently available on the web.It is truly a wealth of publicly available information :

Findlaw is sponsored by Thomson West (the owner of the Westlaw database).

Lexisone is sponsored by the owner of the LexisNexis service.

The Legal Information Institute (LII) is a research and electronic publishing activity of the Cornell Law School.

Also from LII above is Wex, a collaboratively built, freely available legal dictionary and encyclopedia.

Villanova Legal Express is a site provided by the Villanova Law Library.

WashLaw prepared by the Washburn University School of Law Library,has extensive Links to Legal Research on the web.

Justia is a legal media and technology company focused on making legal information, resources and services easy to find on the Internet.

AltLaw provides the first free, full-text searchable database of Supreme Court and Federal Appellate case reports.Full text search of the last few decades of appellate and Supreme Court opinions.

The Library of Congress Guide to Law Online prepared by the Law Library of Congress Public Services Division, is an annotated guide to sources of information on government and law available online. It includes selected links to useful and reliable sites for legal information.

A great overview of the federal jurisdiction and its related legal documents can be found in LLRX  Guide to the U.S. Federal Legal System, Web-Based Publicly Accessible Sources.

GPO Access. The U.S. Government Printing Office disseminates official information from all three branches of the Federal Government.

NOLOpedia is a free legal information resource provided by the NOLO Press publisher.

Video: How to Use PreCYdent the new Public Legal Search Engine

Robert Ambrogi's LawSites has provided a link to a video of the project's CTO, Antonio Tomarchio, showing how to use  PreCYdent  and comparing it against a commercial legal research tool. The 25 year old, Mr. Tomarchio is Italian and his presentation while very informative & instructive, can seem like Father Guido Sarducci from the old Saturday Night Live show, delivering one of his sermons. It’s as much a “talking hands” as a “talking heads” video presentation While the new search engine is innovative & apparently powerful, in fairness, it is only compared to the ”natural language” mode of Westlaw. A test against the commercial service with all its searching enhancements, might be less favorable to PreCydent.

Mr. Tamarchio points out that in addition to federal cases, PreCydent will also have access to some state cases from 1999. The site will have parallel vendor-neutral citations, as recommended by the AALL ( American Association of Law libraries).  Also planned is a GPO section with links to congressional & agency materials to be found there. Several other enhancement are enumerated.

Mr. Tamarchio’s is very much an evangelist for free public access to US  government-produced legal information and even sees a role for such a universaly accessible service in possibly helping to spread American legal ideals in the world! The developers of Public.Resource.Org  and PreCYdent,  “make no small plans”. It is good to have Mr. Tamarchio recognized in these ventures since he is probably responsible for much of the technical mathematics underlying the new search engine. View the video with the minor caveats mentioned above.

Landmark Online Public Release of Federal Cases

Two previous postings on this blog in Oct. 2007, alerted readers about two important projects directed to making federal case law publicly accessible & searchable. “Activist Carl Malamud Challenges Westlaw With Online Project” and “AltLaw.org To Provide U.S. Supreme Court & Appellate Decisions”  .

Last month on February 11, Carl Malamud’s non-profit project, Public.Resource.Org and Creative Commons, published the equivalent of 1,858 volumes of case law in book form of federal case law online which included all U.S. Supreme Court cases and all federal circuit decisions since 1950. Generous donations made the purchase of these cases possible  from FastCase, Inc. William S. Hein & Co. has contributed high-quality scans of the 30 volumes of the Federal Cases, which are the earliest records of the courts before the Federal Reporter was created. Justia, Inc. has contributed over 50,000 “PACER” documents, which include the current decisions of district courts.The cases provided by Public Resource can be distributed and  reused by other interested parties. Mr.Malamud would like to encourage other devolpers to develop new tools for searching all this content. ( Source: Press Release : 1.8 Million Pages of U.S. Case Law Available Now for Developers )

It already appears that he has some takers. AltLaw which had already deveoped basic search capability for its repository of cases, will be adding the cases from Public Resource.Law. ( Source: “Case Law Libre – Public.Resource.Org publishes federal decisions” By Robert Ambrogi , Law Technology News, March 2008, p.50 )

Professor Thomas A. Smith from the University of San Diego Law School with the  help of Antonio Tomarchio, a visiting student from the Politecnico di Milano, has developed a sophisticated search engine called PreCYdent , to apply  to  collection of cases that takes advantage of an algorithm based on mining the network that legal citations must form ( ala the Google model). It will be a search engine built around the mining of the information latent in the Web of Law. This new search engine now in Beta, can also be applied to the newly available caselaw, potentially providing public users with  very powerful searching capabilities.          ( Source: Law Prof as Toolmaker: An Interview with PreCYdent's Thomas A. Smith ,  Law librarian Blog, January 29, 2008 )

Disk Encryption, Not As Secure As We Thought

This 32 page booklet available through PGP Corporation ( major encryption software company) may need to be re-written as the result of a recent research study from the  Center For Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. The paper is titled "Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys." Judging from the terms used in the report and the the graphs and formulas, it’s written for other computer techies. Yet its impact could affect businesses & institutions of all types that have come to rely on various data encryption products to protect their confidential & sensative information.

In a c|net .com story, “Disk encryption may not be secure enough, new research finds”, author Declan McCullagh , states, “In a paper (PDF) published Thursday that could prompt a rethinking of how to protect sensitive data, the researchers describe how they can extract the contents of a computer's memory and discover the secret encryption key used to scramble files.”  He elaborates further, “The reason I say this research could prompt a rethinking of how to protect data is that many of us who use encrypted file-systems believe that if our computers are lost or stolen, our data will be secure. But if a thief (or nosy border guard, or FBI agent) nabs my laptop locked with a screen saver or in sleep mode with the RAM intact, the paper shows that encryption provides no protection.”

“By demonstrating the limits of off-the-shelf encryption products, what the research published on Thursday may do is shift the debate from academic arguments to how to protect users in real-world situations.”

[ For the most recent version of this paper, answers to frequently asked questions, and videos of demonstration attacks, visit http://citp.princeton.edu/memory ]

Lawyers Playing Catch-up in Use of Technology ?

Interesting article about the rate of adoption of technology by the legal profession from LexisONE site and Boston Globe site.

The legal profession seems to have resisted  the use  of technology much longer than many other fields. But some key factors have accelerated use of technology in recent years, such as the requirements of electronic discovery, the data collection requirements under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, managing ever more complicated cases and keeping up with the technology used by corporate clients.

Amazing Database Of Federal Data - For Lawyers Too

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse and the TRACFED Data Warehouse
by LINDA ROBERGE,SUSAN LONG,DAVID BURNHAM & PATRICIA HASSETT,

Trends in Law Library Management and Technology, v.17, p.61-73

"Lawyers are “word” people. They read and author complaints motions, opinions, etc.—text documents all. But they, along with other “word” professionals, are recognizing the value of numerical information, especially once- dreaded statistics.

In this paper we discuss an information delivery system that goes beyond searchable Full-text databases and look at a data warehouse and data mining application,TRACFED. This state-of-the-art technology, and the information lawyers are able to generate using it, promises to redefine some of the best-practice standards of the legal profession.

Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, better known as TRAC and described at the end of this paper, is a not-for-profit, non-partisan research center at Syracuse University. The center has developed TRACFED which makes it possible to produce useful information about federal government activities from previously inaccessible data. For years, investigative reporters public intetest groups, Congressional committees and others have used TRAC’s data warehouse. And now lawyers are discovering the power of TRACFED as well."
TRAC’s Websites (URL, internet address):

TRAC (trac.syr.edu) is a free public web site that provides easy access to TRAC's published reports, spotlights, and other information, mostly about federal enforcement issues.

TRACFED (tracfed.syr.edu) is a subscription site offering direct dynamic access to a wide range of federal data concerning enforcement, staffing, spending, and other matters.

Significance Of Recent NIH Research Deposit Law

In late December, a small part of the huge “Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008”,   required authors of NIH-funded  (National Institutes of Health) research,  to deposit a digital copy of their results within 12 months for inclusion in  PubMed Central, a public database managed by NIH and NLM ( National Library of Medicine).

The briefness of the requirement belies the three years of very contested lobbying that took place between the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) & its allies and the The Association of American Publishers (AAP) around this provision. Even after its passage, the publishers continue to fight the application of the law.

While the publishers claim that such a requirement undemines scientific publishing, it is more accurate to view the commercial publishers as desparately clinging to an economic model that has actually  become a restraint on scholarly communication and the advancement of science. This situation was clearly evident as far back as 1999 in a paper by the California Institute of Technology which stated that,

“Despite widespread acceptance of the web by the academic and research community, the incorporation of advanced network technology into a new paradigm for scholarly communication by the publishers of print journals has not materialized. Nor have journal publishers used the lower cost of distribution on the web to make online versions of journals available at lower prices than print versions. It is becoming increasingly clear to the scholarly community that we must envision and develop for ourselves a new, affordable model for disseminating and preserving results, that synthesizes digital technology and the ongoing needs of scholars.”

In a January 2008 interview in Library Journal, Ms. Heather Joseph, the executive director of SPARC,speaks to the NIH initiative being part of this process, “…This policy represents a sea change in the parameters of the scholarly communications marketplace….”, and  “…the NIH was clear that one of its ultimate goals for the policy is to ensure that its research results are readily available not only to this generation of researchers, but to future generations as well….” In the interview she also rebuts many of the claims being made by the publisher’s groups against the new NIH deposit requirement.

The developments around the NIH requirement should probably be follwed by all members of the scholarly community to see whether a new model in scholarly communication is allowed to develop or whether traditional publishers will continue to resist based on their narrow, restrictive and self-aggrandizing economic model.

Afgan Student Sentenced to Death For Sharing Printouts Questioning Islam

A story about a trial in Afghanistan posted today on cnet News.com, indicates what a long way to go projects like our own IHRLI/ISISC Provincial Justice Initiative ( International Human Right Law Institute/International Institute of higher Studies in Criminal Sciences), have to go in the reform of the justice sector in that country. According to the article, “A 23-year-old Afghani journalism student is facing a death sentence in his home country for distributing articles allegedly critical of Islam that he had printed from a Web site, according to various news reports.” The student has been held since October and reportedly had no lawyer at the closed-door, three-judge session that resulted in the death sentence.

The legal basis claimed for the alleged crime is "judicial discretion" that finds  the student to have been, "insulting Islam and Prophet Mohammad." Besides the very questionalble legal basis for this decision, it is even of more concern that this happened in the capital city Kabul. This is said to be one of the areas that has had the majority of attention and resources dedicated to justice sector reform projects.

Apparently calls for the intervention of President Karzai have yield no results. One might expect this kind of trial in the more distant and isolated provinces where Taliban exerts greater influence. But to have it happen in Kabul shows how difficult it can be trying to develop a “justice sector” in a society where religion and the state are perceived as being conjoint.

Also see:

Shock at death sentence passed on young journalist for blasphemy
Reporters Without Borders

Open-Source Search Engine, Wikia Search, Debuts

Yesterday, a new search engine was launched by Jim Wales the founder of Wikipedia. He wanted to develop a new model for search engines since as he says, “ I think we should be concerned about secret…proprietary software, a small amount of companies controlling a huge amount of flow”. His new entry is called Wikia Search. It is hosted by Wikia which is a for-profit company that Mr. Wales formed in 2004. Revenue is expected to come from ads sold to appear alongside the search results.

The search engine is to be based on open-source software, with the computer code underlying the service to be made publicly available. A basic feature of the new service is to have user input and feedback shape the way the search engine works. Volunteers can improve the software itself, users can evaluate & rate the quality of the search results which then gets used to improve future search results.

But just like the growth of Wikipedia, it can take a lot of time to have these processes accumulate to develop a robust service. It took Wikipedia over six years to become the number eight website on the internet. Mr. Wales estimates that it may take as long as two years for Wikia Search to be close to the level of the heavy hitters like Google, Yahoo or MicroSoft Live Search .

Since user participation and input are so crucial to this kind of development, it looks like Mr. Wales is encouraging people by offering a “ social networking environment”, with such featues as Facebook-like profiles and wikis to facilitate networking options for those who register. So the “launch” of this new search engine might more realistically be seen as an invitation to help build a search engine. Only time will tell whether Mr. Wales will get enough participation over the next couple of years to achive a new search engine model that can challenge the likes of Google.

Sources:

Wikia Wants to Shake Up Search 
by Brian Burnsed , Business Week

New Wikia Search Engine Now Live
Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service, PCWorld

The Bluebook Online From Cornell

From Scout Report:

Basic Legal Citation
http://www.law.cornell.edu/citation/

For law students, learning about the world of legal citations is key. For many years, the standard reference work on legal citation was a manual known as "The Bluebook". This work has been revised numerous times over the years,and this online version appeared in May 2007. It is offered here as a public service, by the Legal Information Institute (LII) at Cornell University's Law School, and it will be helpful for those looking for a quick online reference work. It is worth noting that this particular introduction is focused on the forms of citation used in processional practice rather that those used in journal publication. Visitors can search through the contents at their leisure, and they can also jump around to sections that coverthe use of underlining, italics, and citation principles.

IICLE Smartbooks Available Online

The DePaul University Law school users can now  access  the IICLE Smartbooks collection online. It has been added to the law library database list and can  be accessed at :
http://www.law.depaul.edu/library/research/database_list.asp#I

SmartBooks is IICLE's subscriber-based online publications library of Illinois-specific practice guidance for legal professionals. Our practice handbooks, QuickGuides, Flash Points, and select course materials written by Illinois' leading attorneys, are a searchable, easy-to-use online legal research tool. No special software is needed. You can access SmartBooks® from any computer with an Internet connection 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. ( Source : https://www.iicle.com/smartbooks/info.asp  )

Users can select indivudual IICLE handbook titles. Browse through chapters including "Index/Table of Cases". The  “Browse section” links on each page, can be used to move forward or backward through a section. Users can print a single page or download an entire chapter in PDf format to print. Also any forms accompanying a handbook, can be downloaded  & printed.

A Search can be executed in ten practice areas or in any single handbook. Search functions include :

• All Words ( AND ), Any Words ( OR ), Exact Phrase ( “ word(s)” ).

• Use the wildcard (*) to return results that include any other character or characters in a in place of the wildcard.

• Check the "Include forms of the word" box to return forms of words, e.g. child, children, childlike.

• Proximity of the search terms will be reflected in the ranking of the search results. Documents in which the search words occur closer together will appear higher on the list of results.

Links to free resources include :

Free FlashPointsSM: Monthly practice updates e-mailed directly to you every month! Choose from 12 practice areas authored by field experts.

Free Online Articles: Written by topic experts covering new developments and popular trends.

Extensive listings of CLE (Continuing Legal Education) courses, for purchase, in various formats are also listed on the IICLE website :

• Live Courses – With expert instructors in Chicago downtown, Chicago suburbs & downstate Illinois.

• Webcasts - Watch courses LIVE over the Internet with IICLE's Web Cast courses. Get the practice guidance you need without leaving the comfort and convenience of your home or office.

• SmartCourses - cost-effective online SmartCourses in the practice areas that meet your needs, and you'll have access to them for 90 days, so you can learn at your own pace when it's convenient for you.

Illinois Legal Aid Online Video Library – Valuable Instructional Resources

Their re-designed website incorporates cutting-edge technology not used by other non-commercial providers of online legal resources. These include webcast training and education classes. The website provides support & training resources for legal aid and pro-bono attorneys. But these online webcasts  can be accessed by any user with a broadband internet connection. Law students taking courses in trial advocacy, could probably find these tutorials to be a valuable addition to their coursework.

Users can search for appropriate webcasts in any of these areas of law :

Arts & Entertainment,    Children,    Civil Practice,   Civil Rights,   Consumer Law,
Criminal Law,   Disability,   Economic Development,  Education Arts & Entertainment, Children,   Civil Practice,   Civil Rights,   Consumer Law,   Criminal Law,   Disability, Economic Development,   Education

For a sampling of some of the webcasts offered click here.

ILLINOIS SUPREME COURT WILL POST ORAL ARGUMENTS ON WEB

From press release from the Court:

The Illinois Supreme Court announced Friday that it will begin publishing video and audio recordings of oral arguments on its website (www.state.il.us/court), beginning with the January 2008 Supreme Court term.

The arguments are anticipated to be available on the website no later than the day following the hearing.

Audio files will be in an MP3 format and the video files will be formatted in a Windows Media format, which are compatible with most computers using standard personal computer software. A podcast feed will be offered to receive the most recent postings of audio files.

“I’m very excited about this new technology,” said Chief Justice Robert R. Thomas. “It will provide the parties with a record of their appearance before the Court, and it will help the public better understand what we do.”

Also see news story regarding announcement:

Supreme Court Web Site to Feature Audio, Video of Arguments
By ADRIANA COLINDRES, STATE CAPITOL BUREAU
Springfield State Journal-Register

Two Research Aids For Using PACER

Using the U.S. Party/Case Index on the federal courts PACER service.
A 7.5-minute screencast on using this nationwide index of federal case information. From The Virtual Chase website sponsored by the law firm Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll, LLP

Also see blog posting “Justia Launches Free Searchable Database of Federal Civil District Court Opinions”. This online system, in effect, provides a seaching front-end to the district court cases to be found on the PACER site. It provides searching by by venue, type of lawsuit and judge. Which supplements what is possible on PACER itself.

FDLP LIBRARIES OFFER FREE ACCESS TO COURT E-RECORDS

For the first time, the U.S.court system is providing free access to its online court records at select libraries. Lawyers say that waived fees for the system known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER, which typically costs 8 cents per search, will empower citizens who choose to represent themselves in court.

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The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) and the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP) have entered into a two-year pilot project with the Administrative Office of the U. S. Courts (AOUSC) to provide access to its PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) service.

The PACER system can provide remote access to case and docket information from the Federal Courts via the Internet. Records include information from the Appellate, District and Bankruptcy Courts. Users of PACER are able to access information about a case including the names of all the parties, judges and attorneys involved in the case, case history and status as well as many of the documents submitted by the parties to
the court.

Seventeen depositories, representing diverse types and sizes of libraries as well as different geographic locations, were selected to take part in the PACER pilot. With these libraries promoting the PACER service to the public, we anticipate the pilot will determine that Federal depository library access to PACER expands usage to those who currently do not have it available to them or would be inhibited by  going to a court house to use the service.

The Federal depository libraries participating in the PACER pilot are:

    * Alaska State Court Law Library (Alaska)
    * Sacramento County Public Law Library, (California)
    * San Bernardino County Law Library (California)
    * Library of Congress/Law Library of Congress (District of
Columbia)
    * Nova Southeastern University Law Library (Florida)
    * 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Library (Illinois)
    * Northern Kentucky University Steely Library/Chase Law Library
(Kentucky)
    * Portland Public Library (Maine)
    * University of Michigan Law School Library (Michigan)
    * Wayne State University Arthur Neef Law Library, (Michigan)
    * Rutgers University, Newark Law Library (New Jersey)
    * New Mexico Supreme Court Law Library (New Mexico)
    * Fordham University School of Law Leo T. Kissam Memorial
Library (New York)
    * State Library of Ohio (Ohio)
    * Rogers State University Stratton Taylor Library (Oklahoma)
    * University of Tennessee College of Law Joel A. Katz Law
Library (Tennessee)
    * Lee College Library (Texas)

Selection of International Research Databases

Cheryl LaGuardia,Research Librarian at Harvard University,recently posted an item on the Library Journal Blog about a new freely accessible international database with  full-text materials ranging from international relations and area studies to international business, security and military studies, and key information on human rights. The resource is called FIRST which stands for  Facts on International Relations and Security Trends .

FIRST is a joint project of the International Relations and Security Network (ISN) and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Data is also provided by many project partners and cooperators.

Upon exploring the SIPRI website several other specialized databases were discovered that should also be very useful to researchers and scholars of various international issues :

Multilateral Peace Operations Database
Contains information on all UN and non-UN peace operations from 2000 - present.

SIPRI data on military expenditure
The database, which covers approximately 165 countries, contains time series on military expenditure for the period since 1988 in (a) local currency, at current prices; (b) constant (2005) US dollars (millions); and (c) as a share (%) of gross domestic product (GDP).

SIPRI data on arms transfers
The SIPRI Arms Transfers Database contains information on all transfers of seven categories of major conventional weapons from 1950 to the present day.

SIPRI data on arms production
The SIPRI arms industry database contains financial data and employment data for arms-producing companies. Data on the arms sales and employment of the 100 largest arms-producing companies are presented annually in the SIPRI Top 100.

Database on national export control systems
Summary information about the export control system of a particular country.

LC Working Group On Bibliographic Control Draft Report

LC Working Group On Bibliographic Control Draft Report

Background:

The Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control was appointed by Dr. Deanna Marcum, LC’s Associate Librarian for Library Services, to address changes in how libraries must do their work in the digital information era. Specific charges to the committee were:

• Present findings on how bibliographic control and other descriptive practices can effectively support management of and access to library materials in the evolving information and technology environment;

• Recommend ways in which the library community can collectively move toward achieving this vision;

• Advise the Library of Congress on its role and priorities.

The committee has held five meetings thoughout the country to gather feedback and input for the final report. See http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/  for links to details of each meeting.

About the Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control:

The Working Group envisions the future of bibliographic control as collaborative, decentralized, international in scope, and Web-based. The realization of this future will occur in cooperation with the private sector, and with the active collaboration of library users. Data will be gathered from multiple sources; change will happen quickly; and bibliographic control will be dynamic, not static. The underlying technology that makes this future possible and necessary – the World Wide Web – is now almost two decades old. Libraries must continue the transition to this future without delay in order to retain their relevance as information providers.

Read Draft Final Report of the Working Group [PDF, 315 KB

The period for public comment on the report is open until December 15, 2007.  Comments can be submitted via the Web site at http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/contact/.  Electronic submission of comments is encouraged.

Law Library Online Reference Service

Law Library Launches New Online Reference Service!

The law library now offers an online reference service for your convenience. The system allows you to send a reference question by email using a web based form. We anticipate being able to respond within one business day. We also have a collection of FAQ's posted as well.

To access the forms, visit: http://www.law.depaul.edu/library/ and follow the ONLINE REFERENCE link.

Additional Website For Discounted Software Purchases

In addition to the E-academy website for DePaul that allows student, faculty & staff to buy discounted computer software online, there is also www.CampusEstore.com . DePaul participates in both programs.

Institutions participating in Illinois

 

Who can order from JourneyEd?

College Students:
Matriculating college, university and career school students qualify.

K-12 Students:
If your school participates in the Microsoft Student Select program, you may purchase Microsoft software. All other K-12 students can order all of the software we offer with the exception of Microsoft software.(Graduating seniors who can show proof of college acceptance may order Microsoft software.)

Faculty/Staff:
K-12 as well as all post-secondary faculty and staff members can order software from Journey at the same student educational pricing.

Schools:
To place school orders, fax a school Purchase Order to (972) 481-2100 or call our School Sales Department at (800) 874-9001.

Non Academic Customer:
Customers not affiliated with an educational institution may purchase any of our non-academic products. To determine which products are non-academic the product order code will end in a "N". Any order received for educational products will be canceled unless academic verification is received.

Proof of Academic Status

You will need to provide proof of your academic status. No order will be shipped until a valid academic ID is received. You can place your order at anytime. We will place your order on "hold" until we receive your valid academic ID. Upon receipt of your academic ID, we will ship out your order.

Acceptable Forms of Academic Proof:

(Any one of the following)
• Dated Student ID Card
• Dated Faculty ID Card
• Dated, current class schedule
• Letter from school on school letterhead
• Recent faculty/staff payment stub (please black out salary information)

How to Send Your Academic Proof:

• FAX: to (972) 481-2150
• EMAIL: Send to proof@journeyed.com (Attach proof to email. Attachment must be 300KB's or smaller. Larger sized emails will not be accepted.)
• MAIL: Journey, 13755 Hutton Drive, Suite 500, Dallas, TX 75234

New Metasearch Engine for Worldwide News

A new meta search engine for worldwide news has been devised by Clement Yu, a computer science professor at University of Illinois Chicago. The new entrant to  the crowded search engine arena claims to find news stories that other search engines may miss or not provide in a timely fashion.  Allinonenews.com directs users queries to some 1,800 news search engines based in 200 countries and territories. ( Source: Illiniois Alumni Magazine, Nov/Dec  2007 )

“AllInOneNews is implemented based on metasearch technology. Unlike other news search systems on the web that crawl the sites of news sources to collect news items in advance and then search these items on a local server, AllInOneNews passes each user query to the search engines of other news sources, collects their search results and merges them into a single ranked list for presentation to the user.

Metasearch technology for news search generally has the following advantages over the crawling based search technology:

a. It can retrieve the latest news and breaking news in a timelier manner because it does not have the delay caused by crawling schedules.
b. It can retrieve more relevant information as it has the ability to merge the best results from multiple news sources.”

( Source: About Allinonenews )

DOJ Wants Criminal Plea Agreements Off Of PACER

While the Judicial Conference is including more information such as court transcripts to the PACER service, developments in the use of some files available online, have prompted calls for removal of certain information from PACER. At the end of September, Robert Ambrogi had a posting on his “lawsites” blog re. the solicitation of comments by the Judicial Conference about the DOJ request to remove criminal plea bargain information from the PACER service. He thinks the “DOJ's proposal reflects a dangerous trend among government officials to restrict public access to government information.”

Given past administration conduct in limiting public access to government information, one could also have a similar impression. However, when one examines the issues and actors affected by the the unexpected use of  this particular information, the situation becomes more complex and more difficult to assess.

“The Department of Justice has asked the Judicial Conference to restrict public Internet access to a specific type of document: plea agreements in criminal cases, which may disclose the fact that the defendant in the case is cooperating or has cooperated with law enforcement investigations.” This would include docket notations since it is argued that sealing plea agreements is not sufficient because persons with a PACER account and  familiarity with the criminal docketing system, could tell which defendants are cooperating with the government. However, this would entail removing all plea agreements whether they involved cooperating witnesses or not. The plea agreements and documents would still be available for public inspection at the courthouse, however.

Two news stories serve to document the dangerous uses that some websites such as “WhosaRat.com”  have used the PACER information for. The intent appears not to be the purported “resource for criminal defendants”. But rather a tool for identifying undecover agents and defendant cooperating with the government, as a result of a plea bargain, which can obviously lead to damaging results for these individuals.
Judges fear dangers of online 'rat' database”, By Matt Apuzzo, Associated Press
'Who's a Rat': Intimidation or Information?  By Theresa Cook and Jason Ryan, ABC NEWS

Protecting these persons is an important objective but so is the public’s right to access the decisions in court cases. Since violation of plea agreements by the government is not an uncommon occurrence ( Judge complains of federal prosecutors making "illusory" promises in plea agreements ) one might ask how will the public know when that happens if we do not have effective access to the records of the terms of these agreements ?  If proposals for public charging and plea-bargaining guidelines are ever instituted,( More intriguing plea bargaining scholarship ) how would the public would know if they were being followed, without uncomplicated access to a collection of these plea agreements?

It looks like a tough call for the Judicial Conference in another instance of  advancing technology qualitatively changing the environment for carrying out criminal justice.

Pilot Project To Get PACER Service at Depository Libraries

The Government Printing office has been exploring the possibility of offering the U.S. Courts’ online service, PACER, to federal depository libraries for no fee access. In September The Judicial Conference of the United States approved the creation of a pilot project with 15 such libraries to evaluate the feasibility of providing such a service through the Federal Depository Library Program. Sometime in the near future a decision will be made about whether to expand the service to all approximately 1300 federal depository libraries.
( See : Update on Getting PACER Into FDLP )

The Judicial Conference also voted to make transcripts of federal district and bankruptcy court proceedings available online through the Judiciary's Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system. Under the new policy, transcripts created by court reporters or transcribers will be available for inspection and copying in a clerk of court’s office and for download from PACER 90 days after they are delivered to the clerk. Individuals will be able to view, download, or print a copy of a transcript from PACER for eight cents per page.

This second development could considerably enhance the value of the access to PACER court documents at depository libraries. They will have to await the evaluation of the pilot project to see if this important source of judicial documents becomes available at depository libraries.

Activist Carl Malamud Challenges Westlaw With Online Project

The previous blog postings decribe projects to make federal court decisions available and searchable online for free public access. These fairly recent initiatives, at best, cover about ten years worth of court opinions. While over time, these sites will be adding additional future cases, there is also an initiative to go back in time  with these objectives :

1. The short-term goal is the creation of an unencumbered full-text repository of the Federal Reporter, the Federal Supplement, and the Federal Appendix.

2. The medium-term goal is the creation of an unencumbered full-text repository of all state and federal cases and codes.

These are ambitious goals indeed. But the project developer, Carl Malamud, an activist who founded public.resource.org , in March, 2007, is a veteran of past campaigns to get government agencies to make public information freely accesible  to the public by creating demonstration projects and lobbying hard to get agency cooperation. Examples include: SEC   Edgar database, video of congressional proceedings, Smithsonian Institution image collection

For access to those very old court decisions, Mr. malamud, is using a resource that most users and many law librarians assumed was no longer useful : the original microformat cards of the early West federal reporters. These were "ultrafiche" version of the Federal Reporter, which West published before the advent of online database versions. An ultrafiche presents up to 1000 pages on a 4 by 6 inch transparency . Some older users may remember these microformat cards, with their tiny images that required a specially powerful lense to use. Mr. Malamud is scanning the content of these these cards and using software to digitize it for posting on the internet.

The project has only recently been launched. But Mr. Malamud will use the growing collection to put pressure on other actors to make what some consider proprietary content available for public access and use. He “…wrote in a letter to West Publishing that accompanies the first data release on his site, asking for clarification about what information West considers proprietary versus public domain:

"In looking through the court decisions of a decade ago where West and your commercial competitors fought over the right to re-publish case law, it seems fairly clear that a large part of the publication stream is tightly interwoven into the very substance of the operation of the courts, with West serving as the either contractual or de-facto sole vendor reporting on behalf of the court."

Carl's letter goes on to ask West to release the full text of the Federal Reporter, Federal Supplement, and Federal Appendix. He says: You have already received rich rewards for the initial publication of these documents, and releasing this data back into the public domain would significantly grow your market and thus be an investment in your future.”

Well, good luck to Mr. Malamud. He’ll need it !&