Reference at Newman Library

From the Law Corner

1. I’ve just published a new US Government Documents Guide as a companion to  my three other law guides  (Law, Parts 1 & 2 and Legislative History).  I’ve tried to integrate the four guides so that they work together w/o being redundant. The Gov Docs guide is general; it refers to, but does not duplicate, more specific guides, such as Frank’s US Census Data guide.

2. The U.S. Dept. of Justice has just released new horizontal merger guidelines (press release and link guidelines ).   According to the press release, “these changes mark the first major revision of the merger guidelines in 18 years”.

3. A new title is listed on the Law Guide, Part 2:  The Law Student’s Guide to Free Legal Research on the Web .  This guide is produced by Sarah Glassmeyer, Faculty Services and Outreach Librarian and an Assistant Professor of Law at Valparaiso University School of Law, and is sponsored by Justia.com and Cornell’s Legal Information Institute.

AALL Conference 2010

The American Assoc. of Law Libraries conference is going on right now in Denver.  If you are interested,  you can access the handouts here.  Also, the opening keynote address and two programs were streamed and can be viewed.  One is on copyright law and the other is on designing guides using Libguides, wiki authoring tools and Drupal.  Everything is on the same page.

“Copyright Provisions in Law Journal Publication Agreements”

This may be of interest:  a  recent article in Law Library Journal examines the copyright provisions of law journal publication agreements and makes certain recommendations for journals and librarian / authors. 

Keele, Benjamin J. “Copyright Provisions in Law Journal Publication Agreements.” Law Library Journal 102.2 (2010): 269-283. Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts with Full Text. EBSCO. Web. 8 June 2010.

 (Link to article on EbscoHost)

WestlawNext

Thanks to Michael, I have a WestlawNext trial password that expires tomorrow.  I have been experimenting with the new platform and find it to be much cleaner and easier to use than the old one. TRL (Thompson Reuters Legal) is attempting to get away from the old “choose a database, formulate a search” method, and sophisticated search algorithms are meant to facilitate Google-style searching. This seems to work well for simple searches: a search for Roe v. Wade retrieves only one case instead of the five that used to appear on WL Academic. But most librarians will want to use Boolean search, which is still available on WestlawNext. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to find, and the instructions for field searching (a search by judge’s name, for example) have not yet been included. Many law firm librarians are concerned about the pricing. Both time-based and transactional billing are available, but transactional searches will include a charge for the search and a new “view” charge per document opened. Additional charges apply for printing and emailing documents. Documents viewed and stored to a folder, however, may be retrieved later at no additional charge. Please let me know by tomorrow if you would like to see WestlawNext.

Affordable textbooks

There is guide on the CUNY portal (“How to save Money on Textbooks,” http://portal.cuny.edu/cms/id/cuny/documents/informationpage/TextBook_Savings.pdf) which includes information on renting as well as purchasing used books.  Also, there is a Facebook student group called “Baruch College Textbooks : buy or sell,”  which seemed to be active at the beginning of the semester (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?v=wall&gid=33732797453).

Legal materials added to Google Scholar

Resource Shelf covers the addition of legal materials to Google Scholar at http://www.resourceshelf.com/2009/11/17/federal-and-state-legal-opinions-along-with-patent-info-added-to-google-scholar/ .  The advanced search option allows targeted searching by jurisdiction and type of document (federal or state case, patent, article).   As noted by Resource Shelf, many  of these materials are already available on the web (Justia offers federal cases linked to Pacer dockets and there are several free sources for patents, including the U.S. Patent Office) but now  these materials are part of the Google Scholar database.   Google Scholar is also linking to materials (e.g. law review articles)  in propriety databases, including Lexis and HeinOnline.