Daily Archives: May 1, 2008

Recycle your PACER documents

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pacer.resource.org

(I also posted this on the Free Government Information blog):

Here at Stanford, the campus recently enjoyed the excitement that is Recyclemania. (Stanford actually won the Gorilla Prize!)

In the spirit of Recyclemania, I want to share an amazing project for recycling PACER documents. The site, brought to you by Carl Malamud and the good people at Public Resource, gives everyone a chance to liberate PACER case downloads.

How do you do it? Here are the simple instructions from the site:

“Just upload all your PACER Documents to our recycling bin. Click on the recycle bin and you’ll be presented with a dialogue to choose files to upload. Then, just hit the “Start Upload” button and you’ll hear the sounds of progress as your documents get reinjected into the public domain.

We’ll take the documents, look at them, and then put them onto bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/pacer for future distribution. This is a manual process and you won’t see your documents show up right away. But, over time, we hope to accumulate a significant database of PACER Documents. “

Interested in helping, but you don’t have the time to recycle documents onto the site? Well, lucky for you, the site also allows you contribute with Digital Offsets. The digital offsets are a tax-deductible donation to Public.Resource.Org which will then be utilized to purchase PACER Documents for the site.

Are you lucky enough to live near one of the 16 libraries with FREE access to PACER? Perhaps, you want to sign up to join the Thumb Drive Corps, who will go to these locations with a jump drive and download as many PACER documents as possible for the Pacer recycling site.

So, what is good for the bottle, is good for the docket….

-Erika

USC 2006 edition

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Over the past few weeks reports have appeared confirming that Titles 1 through 9 of the 2006 edition of the United States Code are available both online and in print from the GPO.  The University of Wisconsin Law Library noted the news in their blog and listserv postings confirm that libraries in the Bay Area are receiving the physical volumes.

Although use of the print version of the Code has waned, it continues to be the only official and authenticated version of the Code and the version that lawyers and students must cite to in court filings and legal scholarship. 

The fact that this edition is two years late raises, again, questions about the reality of legal research and the fiction of legal citation.  Isn’t it time to recognize that online versions of the code have surpassed the print in the terms of usage and utility?  More importantly, isn’t it time that the government worked toward making their online version of the code official?

The Catalog Rules

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Every spring, we survey our students on all sorts of library stuff.

In a question dealing with online services, we asked students which databases and search products they used for research. We included Socrates, our OPAC, since we want to emphasize the catalog and its importance at every opportunity. The drop down choices that we provided for answers included Westlaw, LexisNexis, Google, BNA, RIA, HeinOnline, MOML and more. We also gave students an opportunity to fill in the blank for other databases not listed in the question.

Most interesting and gratifying, Socrates, our online catalog, gets great use, even more use than LexisNexis!

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