Attendees
Janey Chao, Arthur Downing, Stephen Francoeur, Joseph Hartnett, Gerry Jiao, Ellen Kaufman, Louise Klusek, Wilcina Longdon, Kannan Mohan, Ryan Phillips, Linda Rath, Chris Tuthill
Legal Information Industry
The Tech Sharecase began with a discussion of the current state of the legal information industry. The conversation stemmed from a graphic done by Sarah Glassmeyer showing mergers of legal information providers. The graphic can be found here and posted on Sarah Glassmeyer’s blog.
We discussed how this has affected access. One results is costs have gone up. Westlaw Next will bill at $1,700 an hour if you don’t have a contract. The same problems are coming up in financial information industry too.
We recapped the situation surrounding the Firefox addon, RECAP, and the Princeton University, Center for Information Technology Policy’s efforts to build a free and open repository of public court records by providing access to PACER documents. We also touched upon Carl Malamud’s battle to make legal information available freely.
Louise mentioned the WorldBank is going to make all of its data, over 2,000 economic indicators, freely available. And we discussed some of the less-than-optimal methods information seekers go through in order to obtain information that is prohibitively expensive. The group noted instances where the situation has led information seekers to cross legal and ethical boundaries. Some scholars who have obtained data surreptitiously have been contacted by database vendors and been asked how they are able to source data to which those scholars’ libraries have no subscription.
Embedding Videos into LibGuides
Linda presented her centralized LibGuide which is a repository of video sites. It will be useful for others creating LibGuides as they can copy boxes from Linda’s LibGuide. Linda explained how to solve the problem–windows overlap–by altering embed codes in edit mode. The solution is to add two lines of code to the embed script. Details are on Linda’s LibGuide entitled “Reusable Media.”
