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We have a monthly award-winning newsletter, The Network News, featuring interviews with work-family experts as well as literature updates in the field and international work-family news. Subscribe for free. You can grab our RSS feed, and find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. We update our Work and Family Blog at least three times a week; please get in touch if you have similar interests and would to guest blog.

Editor’s note: We think this is truly an outstanding website that provides continually updated information on topics of interest to almost everyone — researchers, policymakers, human resources professionals…and working parents. We are amazed — time and time again — by the high-quality resources created, maintained, curated, supervised, etc., by our readers. Do you work for an organization that offers high-quality, free content? We’re always looking for Resource of the Week contributors. Don’t hide your light under a bushel. Thousands and thousands of people read our content by blog, e-mail, Twitter, Facebook…

Today, via this article from the Newark Star-Ledger. we read about two courthouse law libraries closing in New Jersey.

Law libraries in Superior Courts in Morristown in Morris County and Newton in Sussex County are expected to be closed in about six months, said Morris-Sussex courts administrator Michael Arnold. The main reason is that the advent of the Internet has been supplanting law libraries, he said.

“Use of the libraries has diminished over the years because people can get a lot of what they need online,” Arnold said.

[Snip]

Norman Maranz, an attorney based in Whippany who has been practicing law for 45 years, still uses law libraries when he happens to be in courthouses and needs to do some research. Maranz recalled the heyday of law libraries as having generally been bustling spots in courthouses, where attorneys would often gather to do research or to wait for their cases to be called.

“They’re not as crowded as they used to be. With computers now, everything is online,” Maranz said as he did research in a narrow aisle of the law library in Superior Court in Morristown.

Much More in the Complete Article

Source: Newark Star-Ledger/NJ.com

The Judicial Branch is preparing to close six of the its 16 law libraries and has released specific dates for the closing of three courthouses, saying that budget cuts have forced the branch’s hand.

Chief Court Administrator Judge Barbara Quinn testified before the General Assembly’s Appropriations Committee on Wednesday that the state’s decision to cut $12.8 million from its budget for the next fiscal year goes “well beyond what is practical, sustainable or possible.”

Therefore, she noted to the committee, the branch is planning to close six law libraries, saving about $1 million a year.

Maintaining the 10 other libraries plus providing online research tools to judges and legal research clerks will still cost about $1.5 million, “none of which is budgeted this year,” Quinn said.

Source: Connecticut Law Tribune

We are delighted to announce (PDF) the public launch of the Berkman Center’s Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono (i.e., free!) initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics from across the country with online journalists and digital media creators who need legal help. Lawyers participating in OMLN will provide qualifying online publishers with pro bono and reduced fee legal assistance on a broad range of legal issues, including business formation and governance, copyright licensing and fair use, employment and freelancer agreements, access to government information, pre-publication review of content, and representation in litigation.

Source: Citizen Media Law Project (Berkman Center for Internet & Society)

Big Brother is watching. That is the message corporations routinely send their employees about using email.

But recent cases have shown that employees sometimes have more privacy rights than they might expect when it comes to the corporate email server. Legal experts say that courts in some instances are showing more consideration for employees who feel their employer has violated their privacy electronically.

Driving the change in how these cases are treated is a growing national concern about privacy issues in the age of the Internet, where acquiring someone else’s personal and financial information is easier than ever.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Confused by all the proposed changes to the Patriot Act ricocheting through the Capitol? The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) has put together a handy chart comparing the current law with the various amendments in the House and Senate.

The chart compares proposed amendments (.pdf) to National Security Letters (NSLs) and the so-called “lone wolf” provisions of the Patriot Act. The proposals have only been passed by the judiciary committees, and face further amendments before they hit the full House and Senate for votes.

+ Direct to the Amendments Chart (7 pages; PDF)

+ Access the Complete Wired Story
Much more on the proposed amendments.

Source: Threat Level (Wired)

Source: Wired

Here’s what ResoureShelf has to say.
———-

Yes, something new at Google Scholar (GS) to share. Its been a long time (see below for more on our last GS posting) since we posted about something new from GS.

Let’s do this one step at a time.

When you visit the Google Scholar Home Page you’ll see three radio buttons/boxes directly below the search box.

The one on the left limits you search to only articles, directly next to it you can toggle on or off access to patents. So, we now know patent content is now part of the Google Scholar database. Of course, you could argue how “scholarly” patent material is (but we can save that discussion for another day). It’s likely people want them included in with Google Scholar results so Google is listening. That said, it does seem a bit odd since Google has a separate patent search interface. But, it’s important to put the content where people want it. Also, they’ve grouped patents with articles (e.g. scholarly articles, what you would expect from GS) and not with legal opinions and journals. I would have guessed they would have grouped all of the legal materials in one group.

Of course, if you don’t want patent content in your results, it’s very easy, just don’t select the button.

At the top of a search results page you’ll now see three drop down boxes. What do they offer?

++ An Option to Refine Your Results to:
+ Articles and Patents
+ Articles Excluding Patents
+ Legal Opinions and Journals
+ Only Federal Cases
+ Only California Cases

++ Drop Down Two
+ Limit by Date; From 1990-the Present (On the advance search page, you can select any date range)

++ Drop Down Three
+ Include Citations
+ At least summaries

Now, to the legal search options. It looks as if Google is a new source for material from the U.S. District Courts, the U.S. Court of Appeals, U.S. Supreme Court and courts from all fifty states. You’ll find published opinions. What we’re going to try and find out is if the legal journals are new to Google Scholar or they now have a new way to limit to them. Here’s a legal document/journal search for the phrase “Sony Music.”

UPDATE: There is no way to search content from all 50 states (and DC) at one time without checking each “state” box on the advanced search page.

UPDATE: As of 11/17 most of the state material comes primarily from a state’s Supreme Court (or High Court) and goes back to somewhere in the 1950 range. In other words, we had trouble finding material from state trial and appellate courts.

Result #1 is, “Snyder v. Sony Music.” Click the title and read the opinion. Another feature either from the results page or via a tab above the court opinion allows you to see how the case has been cited.

Thee sections are on the page:

+ How this document has been cited
You’ll see an quote next to where the actual site was found. When you click, you’ll see the text highlighted directly next to the site.
+ Cited by
+ and Related documents (No word on what makes a document related or who/what makes the call. We’re betting it’s an algorithm.

In terms of legal journals, they’re mixed in with the rest of the material. Check out result #1 on this results page. Click to read the article from the Journal of High Technology Law and you have to login to your LexisNexis account or pay $12.50. Here’s another article and this time you need to have a HeinOnline subscription. The actual result lists two versions and they both are from HeinOnline. We browsed about 100 entries from five searches and only found one free article, in this case from a government organization. if free articles are in the database, it will take more test searches to find them. One thing that we did notice is that their is a lot of content from journals published by Sage.

Of course, the Google Scholar Advanced Search Interface Has Been Updated
1) The search by collection area has been expanded to include the patent option.
2) You can limit your search for opinions to one or more of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
3) You can search by date range (no limits)
4) To access state cases you have to use the advanced interface (except California, which has a drop down refinement on results pages)

Much More After a Click

Are They Competitors as of Today? What About Next Year?

So, look out LexisNexis, Westlaw, etc.? No, they still offer a LOT of search functionality Google doesn’t provide (understatement) as of today and they update their databases with new opinions, head notes, etc. many times a day.

Plus, Justia (a free service) does a great job of providing free access and RSS alerts to court dockets and some filings for free. For example, here’s a page linking to available documents Google Book Search case back to 2005. These pages have the same look and feel of Pacer but it’s free. Features Google doesn’t offer as of today. Justia also provides free access to U.S. District Court opinions and U.S. Federal Court Appeals Opinions. Another plus are Justia’s clean, crisp, and easy to use interfaces.

Plus,

+ We know Google has opinions from 50 states. Just how content do they have for each state? When does the collection start and stop. How often is the database updated? Having the info would save users time, something Google frequently says it wants to do for its users.

+ How often is the database updated? Hourly? Daily? Monthly? If an opinion is published and released on Tuesday morning will it be in GS database by the end of the week?

+ Who is providing all of this content or has Google built their own system to compile and get the documents online?

+ We’ve asked this Google Scholar started, how about a list of the partners you work with and a list of journals, with start and stop dates, for each title? We realize that some of Google Scholar’s content comes via a web crawl but data feeds from publishers are provided. How about a list of them and each journal available. If you go to any of the big info vendors the’re more than happy to provide this info. Again, it saves the searcher time and aggravation. They can look elsewhere instead of searching for something that’a quite possibly not in the database in the first place.

+ Finally, we were unable to find any documentation for these new features. However, this service is very new so we’ll hope that Google has something online very soon.

Is this Google breaking out into a new area? Like most things Google, we will have to wait and see. We will be on the lookout for more new features.

Google Scholar continues not to show advertising.

Finally,

Our most recent post about Google Scholar was this October, 2009 article by Peter Jacso from LJ titled, “Google Scholar’s Ghost Authors, Lost Authors, and Other Problems.”

We just went back through the ResourceShelf archives and its been some time since we posted about something new or updated regarding Google Scholar.

The last item we could find was an announcement that Google Scholar had just hit the 1,200 library mark with their Library Links program. Here’s the post from Google Librarian Central from June 7, 2007 Unfortunately, a primary info point for changes, updates, interviews etc. about Google Scholar was the Google’s Librarian Central blog but it has not been updated since the Summer of 2008.

From the Announcement:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL.net), and other international copyright experts joined together today to launch Copyright Watch — a public website created to centralize resources on national copyright laws at www.copyright-watch.org.

[Snip]

Copyright Watch is the first comprehensive and up-to-date online repository of national copyright laws. To find links to national and regional copyright laws, users can choose a continent or search using a country name. The site will be updated over time to include proposed amendments to laws, as well as commentary and context from national copyright experts. Copyright Watch will help document how legislators around the world are coping with the challenges of new technology and new business models.

Access Copyright Watch

See Also: Keeping a Global Eye on Copyright Law

Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
Hat Tip: Library Stuff

From the Article:

Handling congressional papers is no easy task. While presidential libraries maintain a relatively static collection, the Center for Legislative Archives’ holdings increase every time Congress passes a bill, discusses proposed legislation, confirms a presidential appointee, or does anything at all.

When the House closes its congressional sessions every two years, all the House’s related documents—paper or otherwise—are organized, held on site for four years, and then shipped to the National Archives Building for storage.

The Senate delivers the boxes in accessions sporadically. “Accessions can vary from a box to 300 boxes” explains Matt Fulghum, the Center’s assistant director, adding that the Center receives “four or five hundred accessions in one year.”

More than 13 million pages will arrive this year, says Richard Hunt, the Center’s director. “From the 1980s up to the present, our holdings of House and Senate records have been doubling every 10 to 15 years,” a nearly incomprehensible amount considering the Center currently has a half-billion documents to track, enough to circle the globe three times, if one laid the pages end-to-end.

As if organizing and storing these documents weren’t difficult enough, the Center’s team has 24 hours to fill requests from committees. They made 187 of these loans—totaling more than 1 million pages—in fiscal year 2008 alone. And that’s not all.

Much More in the Full Text Article

Source: Prologue (National Archives and Records Administration)

See Also: Center for Legislative Archives Web Page

Chapters Include:

+ Cover

+ Preface by Ruth Hill

+ Acknowledgments by June Kim

+ Chapter 1: Introduction by Karla Castetter

+ Chapter 2: How to Read a Legal Citation by David McFadden

+ Chapter 3: Basic Legal Research Techniques by Joan Allen-Hart

+ Chapter 4: Legal Reference vs. Legal Advice by Joan Allen-Hart

+ Chapter 5: California Law by Laura A. Cadra

+ Chapter 6: Bibliography of California Resources by Patrick Meyer

+ Chapter 7: Federal Law by Karla Castetter

+ Chapter 8: Bibliography of Federal Law Resources by June Kim

+ Chapter 9: Assisting Self-Represented Litigants by Laura A. Cadra & June Kim

+ Chapter 10: Bibliography of Self-Help Resources by Lisa Schultz

+ Chapter 11: Availability, Accessibility and Maintenance of Legal Collections by Joan Allen-Hart

+ Chapter 12: Major Law Publishers by Jennifer Lentz

Appendices
+ Appendix A: Glossary of Legal Terms by June Kim
+ Appendix B: California County Law Libraries by Esther Eastman
+ Appendix C: California Law Schools by Karla Castetter

Source: Southern California Association of Law Libraries

Government records are fundamental to understanding official policies and the decision-making processes of our leaders. They can be vital resources for a journalist following a breaking news story about government misconduct, a military veteran’s family seeking information about benefits, or a student writing a history paper. Government documents provide first-hand, real-time accounts of events as they unfolded, generally without the editorial filter that characterizes secondary sources like books and news articles.

This guide, Effective FOIA Requesting for Everyone: A National Security Archive Guide, provides a comprehensive overview of how to obtain documents from federal executive branch agencies. It focuses primarily on the Freedom of Information Act process. But it also briefly treats other means of accessing government records, including through publicly available sources and through the Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) process for obtaining previously classified records.

Access the Guide By Chapters (PDF) or Download the Complete Guide at One Time (122 pages; PDF)

Source: National Security Archive
Hat Tip: David D. and Net-Gold

Should an investigator or attorney “friend” a prosecution witness in order to find impeachment evidence? Are there legal or ethical bars to surreptitiously gathering data from social network profiles? Should the intent of the user have any bearing on the formulation of law related to access? These and more questions were stirred up in the mix of case studies presented at the (first, annual?) symposium, Social Networks: Friends or Foes? Confronting Online Legal and Ethical Issues in the Age of Social Networking, sponsored by UC Berkeley School of Law. Yeah, a long title but, hey, these folks are academics. And the case studies constituted just the first panel (”Problems Unique to Social Networking and the Law”) of an extraordinary assemblage of academic, government, activist, policy and practicing lawyers rounding out the 5-panel day.

Much of the discussion concerned access to profile content, – the difference between civil and criminal (where there’s the familiar prosecution/defense imbalance) cases – whether certain information should be private even if it can be viewed by unintended parties. For example, should employers be able to view deleted personal information? No one mentioned the issue of whether schools have a legal right to compel students to turn over their user names/passwords (See: “Area School Wants Access To Students’ Social Networking”). There may be instances when a legal requirement for disclosure would apply. Lauren Gelman, Executive Director, Stanford Law, Center for Internet and Society, raised the question of whether evidence in the online sites could be used, say, in divorce cases, to support evidence gathered by other means. The Deputy General Counsel for Facebook took the position that user’s profile content is private, begging the audience to sue the company to settle issues of access.

See: Social Networks: Friends or Foes

Source: PI Buzz

LC’s Matt Raymond reports that:

1) The Law Library of Congress now has a Twitter feed. You can find it at: http://twitter.com/lawlibcongress.

2) The “Books and Beyond” series in the Center for the Book now has a Facebook page. Matt calls it, “essentially an online book club.”

Source: Library of Congress

ChoicePoint, Inc., one of the nation’s largest data brokers, has agreed to strengthened data security requirements to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that the company failed to implement a comprehensive information security program protecting consumers’ sensitive information, as required by a previous court order. This failure left the door open to a data breach in 2008 that compromised the personal information of 13,750 people and put them at risk of identify theft. ChoicePoint has now agreed to a modified court order that expands its data security assessment and reporting duties and requires the company to pay $275,000.

In April 2008, ChoicePoint (now a subsidiary of Reed Elsevier, Inc.) turned off a key electronic security tool used to monitor access to one of its databases, and for four months failed to detect that the security tool was off, according to the FTC. During that period, an unknown person conducted unauthorized searches of a ChoicePoint database containing sensitive consumer information, including Social Security numbers. The searches continued for 30 days. After discovering the breach, the company brought the matter to the FTC’s attention.

The FTC alleged that if the security software tool had been working, ChoicePoint likely would have detected the intrusions much earlier and minimized the extent of the breach. The FTC also alleged that ChoicePoint’s conduct violated a 2006 court order mandating that the company institute a comprehensive information security program reasonably designed to protect consumers’ sensitive personal information.

+ United States of America (for the Federal Trade Commission) v. ChoicePoint Inc.

Source: Federal Trade Commission

Now, Mr. Malamud is involved a new project, Law.gov.

He explains what it’s all about in a new O’Reilly Radar blog post. He even mentions a role for librarians in the post.

Public.Resource.Org is very pleased to announce that we’re going to be working with a distinguished group of colleagues from across the country to create a solid business plan, technical specs, and enabling legislation for the federal government to create Law.Gov. We envision Law.Gov as a distributed, open source, authenticated registry and repository of all primary legal materials in the United States. More details on the effort are available on our Law.Gov page.

[Snip]

The idea for Law.Gov seems to be getting a good reception in Washington, D.C. Senator Lieberman, writing on behalf of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the committee responsible for the E-Government Act, has already accepted our request to submit our report to the Committee. Additional formal requests to submit the completed report are outstanding.

[Snip]

Law.Gov is a big challenge for the legal world, and some of the best thinkers in that world have joined us as co-conveners…[Our emphasis] There are challenges for librarians as well, such as compiling a full listing of all materials that should be in the repository.

[Snip]

The factor that made this coalesce was the recent Government 2.0 Summit put on by Tim O’Reilly. I gave a talk at that summit about the need to put primary legal materials on-line, and it was gratifying to hear the Deputy CTO of the United States, in his closing keynote, highlight that as one of the issues which he thought the White House should help make real through their “moral authority and convening power.”

Much More in the Complete Article

Source: O’Reilly Radar

Metadata is loosely defined as “data about data.” More specifically, the term refers to the embedded stratum of data in electronics file that may include such information as who authored a document, when it was created, what software was used, any comments embedded within the content, and even a record of changes made to the document.

While metadata is often harmless, it can potentially include sensitive, confidential, or privileged information. As such, it presents a serious concern for attorneys charged with maintaining confidentiality — both their own and their clients. Professional responsibility committees at several bar associations around the country have weighed in on attorneys’ ethical responsibilities regarding metadata, but there is no clear consensus on the major metadata issues. To help track current views on metadata and ethics, we’ve assembled the following chart.

Source: American Bar Association Legal Technology Resource Center

LexisNexis today announced the availability of transparent semantic search technology for its full complement of intellectual property (IP) research products – enabling users to find the most precise and relevant patent search results.

Through a development alliance with Dallas-based Pure Discovery, LexisNexis has become the first provider of legal information services to integrate the power of semantic search technology with familiar Boolean search technology, giving the user greater control over the patent research process via a simple, streamlined user interface that matches their typical daily workflow.

[Snip]

The new semantic search solution from LexisNexis and Pure Discovery, however, overcomes such challenges to accomplish four breakthrough objectives in online search:

Transparency: Each query is enhanced by the machine intelligence and shown to the user for their complete understanding and engagement. Increased control: Not only is the semantic search transparent, but users are in control with the ability to add, delete, increase or decrease the importance of all query words (concepts) in a unique visual query interface called a “querycloud.”

Fully federated: While LexisNexis maintains one of the largest full-text patent and non-patent literature databases in the world, its semantic search platform can associate semantic searches to virtually any index, whether it resides internally or on the web.

Scalability: The LexisNexis index includes semantic intelligence from more than 10 million full-text patent documents from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s patent index, as well as Elsevier journal articles and other documents.

[Snip]

The new technology is now available through the patent research and retrieval service LexisNexis® TotalPatent™ and the automated patent application and analysis product LexisNexis PatentOptimizer. In addition, the functionality is also available through lexis.com.

Source: LN (via Business Wire)

See Also: Learn More About Pure Discovery

As electronic book readers increase in popularity with students and professionals, West is making nearly 30 of its titles available for electronic download for the Amazon Kindle. The addition of electronic versions of selected titles allows West to meet the needs of law students, law school faculty and legal professionals who are increasingly using new electronic media in the classroom, on the job and for personal use.

You can learn more and review the 30 titles via this news release.

Source: West (via PR Newswire)

When 22-year-old programmer Aaron Swartz decided last fall to help an open-government activist amass a public and free copy of millions of federal court records, he did not expect he’d end up with an FBI agent trying to stake out his house.

But that’s what happened, as Swartz found out this week when he got his FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act request. A partially-redacted FBI report shows the feds mounted a serious investigation of Swartz for helping put public documents onto the public web.

The FBI ran Swartz through a full range of government databases starting in February, and drove by his home, after the U.S. court system told the feds he’d pilfered approximately 18 million pages of documents worth $1.5 million dollars. That’s how much the public records would have cost through the federal judiciary’s pay-walled PACER record system, which charges eight cents a page for most legal filings.

The article continues with details about how Swartz was able to access the PACER documents.

[Snip]

He [Swartz] donated the 19,856,160 pages to public.resource.org, an open government initiative spearheaded by Carl Malamud as part of a broader project to make public as many government databases as Malamud can find. It was Malamud who previously shamed the SEC into putting all its EDGAR filings online in the ’90s, and he used $600,000 in donations to buy 50 years of documents from the nation’s appeals court, which he promptly put on the internet for anyone to download in bulk.

[Snip]

PACER records still cost eight cents a page, but now PACER users running the Firefox browser can donate their downloads to the public domain with a simple plug-in called RECAP.

Use of the plug-in is not likely to start an investigation of you.

But then again, who knows.

Source: Wired (via /.)

See Also: Our First Post about RECAP (8/14/2009)
We also mention OpenJurist (free) and OpenRegs (Federal Regulations). Both of these services are also free.

Dozens of leading academic, library, consumer advocacy, organized labor and publishing organizations joined the Open Book Alliance today in calling on Google and its litigation partners to create an open and transparent process to negotiate a settlement in the Google Book Search case. The parties published an open letter to Google, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, demanding that they include key stakeholders to represent the broad range of public interests in the mass digitization of books. Google and its partners abandoned a previous settlement proposed in the case after the U.S. Department of Justice and others criticized the deal and recommended that the court reject it, but Google and the plaintiff publishers continue to negotiate behind closed doors on a revised settlement proposal.

[Snip]

Joining the Open Book Alliance in calling on Google and its partners to open the process in service of the public interest are leading library associations such as the New York Library Association, the Ohio Library Council, the New Jersey Library Association, and the Special Libraries Association…

You can read the full text of the letter here. (2 pages; PDF)

Source: Open Book Alliance (via PR Newswire)

UPDATE: We’ve learned the the Open Book Alliance letter wasn’t the only letter sent today.

From an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Blog Post:

Today EFF along with the ACLU and the privacy authors and publishers they represent, the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries and the Association of College and Research Libraries, CDT, EPIC, SFLC, Professor James Grimmelman sent a joint letter to Google urging it to include privacy protections along with its reconsidered Google Book Search Settlement.

Access the complete letter here (2 pages; PDF)