Daily Archives: June 6, 2008

Tools of the Trade, part IV

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In terms of tips, this one is more a love letter.  And while I have focused my first three “tools” posts on web-based resources, this one is about a book.  But not just any book. 

I was first introduced to Tapping the Government Grapevine  by its author, Judith Schiek Robinson, my Government Documents professor in library school.  Since then, it has been a go-to resource for everything from tracking down government produced statistics to being used as a teaching aid in legal research classes.  Despite a publication date of 1998, Tapping has aged well with the introduction of many new government e-resources.  This book can ground any student in the basis of government publications.

The Government on the Web: TMI?

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Is the federal government giving us too much information on their websites?  Not quite, but Ed Felten, David Robinson, Harlan Yu and Bill Zeller argue in their new paper, “Government Data and the Invisible Hand,” that the government’s focus on creating and maintaining websites with pre-packaged reports and ready-to-digest data analysis is misguided.  The authors advocate, instead, strengthening the infrastructure behind the sites, with a focus on allowing public access to underlying data from federal agencies.

(Thanks to Ed Felten and his post on Freedom to Tinker)

10 Essential Web Sites for Litigators

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Genie Tyburski at The Virtual Chase has put together this great list, and we’re pleased and delighted to see Justia listed as a “top 10″ web site for litigators.

Justia: Relatively new to the legal Web scene, Justia deserves mention for several reasons. It stands alone in offering a free keyword-searchable database of federal district court filings. You will find court opinions from 2004 to present as well as other filings. (See also: Free Case Law Databases)

Other offerings worthy of special mention include a database of federal appellate court opinions, RSS feeds for monitoring civil court filings by the type of lawsuit (Select any available topic and go to the bottom of the page to find the feeds.), RSS feeds for tracking federal regulations, and a blog search engine for law-related blogs.

 

 

Global and trasnational law schools

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The National Law Journal recently wrote about a new Chinese law school applying for ABA accreditation. http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202421959463.  The Peking University of Transnational Law (Shenzhen campus)  will offer a three year course of study mainly in American law taught in English.  Additional information about the school, in English and Chinese, is available at: http://www.stl.szpku.edu.cn/info/

Asia is home to other experiments in global legal education : Handong Global University International Law School (Korea) http://lawschool.handong.edu/english/default.asp  and O.P. Jindal Global University Law School (Haryana, India) http://www.jgls.org/    It appears these schools will teach local students, but employ faculty and staff from various countries.  The promotional literature for the Jindal Law School also states that they plan to raise $12 million for the library.  Here’s hoping that these transnational law schools presage an era of global law library collaborations.

 

 

 

New legal research books

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Here are cites to two new legal research books listed in this week’s Hein GreenSlips.

 Gabor, Francis A.
Guide to legal research and writing from the transnational perspective.
By Francis A. Gabor, Lake Mary, FL, Vandeplas Publishing, 2008. 148p. ISBN 9781600420405. $34.95. PAPER. Legal research & writing

Bouchoux, Deborah E.
Legal research explained.
By Deborah E. Bouchoux, Austin, TX, Wolters Kluwer Law and Business/Aspen, 2008. xxxi,376p. ISBN 9780735567221. $61.95. PAPER.
Legal research & writing ; Legal research
– United States
L.C. 2007032066 KF240

Searching PACER

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PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), the online public access service that allows users to obtain case and docket information from U. S. appellate, district and bankruptcy courts, has a number of search features.

One is “Calendar Events” (under “Reports” > “Civil and Criminal Reports”), which enables date and time delimited searches of specified venues for court conferences, hearings, trials, etc. per numbered categories of legal action (“Nature of Suit”).

For example, a recent U. S. District Court for the Northern District of California PACER search for patent (830) jury trials yielded 9 results in the San Francisco and San Jose chambers for September thru December 2008, permitting a Stanford Law School patent litigation instructor to make arrangements for class field trips to attend some of the trials.

… And don’t forget, if you obtain documents from PACER, to recycle them per Erika Wayne’s May 1 post in this blog:

Recycle your PACER documents

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Law in a Nutshell

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This came via the Stanford Medical Library’s newsletter, Lane Connexion (Vol. 4, Issue 2, Spring 2008).

NIH Public Access Policy and You

NIH-funded research results in the publication of approximately 80,000 articles annually.  On April 7, 2008 the NIH enacted a new Public Access Policy to ensure that the public has access to these results.  It requires scientists to submit journal articles arising from NIH funds to PubMed Central, a free online archive of full-text biomedical journal articles (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/). The new NIH reporting requirement provides an important opportunity to make published research funded by NIH and written by you and your colleagues accessible to all — the public, health care providers, educators and scientists around the world.

. . .

The author must ensure that the publisher’s copyright agreement permits inclusion in the PubMed Central fulltext database before they sign it.  Stanford will provide a letter to include with your submission when a publisher does not explicitly acknowledge the PubMed Central reporting requirement in their agreement.

. . .

 

For more, see the Lane Medical Library page, “National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Law in a Nutshell.”

More on E-Books

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An earlier post here talked a little about e-books.  Paul Krugman’s op-ed in today’s New York Times offers a few more insights on e-books and what their use means for the publishing industry.  In the article, “Bits, Bands and Books,” Mr. Krugman makes these observations:

. . . But we may finally have reached the point at which e-books are about to become a widely used alternative to paper and ink.

That’s certainly my impression after a couple of months [with] . . . the Kindle. . . .

It’s a good enough package that my guess is that digital readers will soon become common, perhaps even the usual way we read books.