Monthly Archives: June 2008

Copyright Renewal Records

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From Inside Google Book Search

“How do you find out whether a book was renewed? You have to check the U.S. Copyright Office records. Records from 1978 onward are online (see http://www.copyright.gov/records) but not downloadable in bulk. The Copyright Office hasn’t digitized their earlier records, but Carnegie Mellon scanned them as part of their Universal Library Project, and the tireless folks at Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly corrected the OCR.”

“Thanks to the efforts of Google software engineer Jarkko Hietaniemi, we’ve gathered the records from both sources, massaged them a bit for easier parsing, and combined them into a single XML file available for download here.”

[Hat tip to BoingBoing for this news!]

More Free Stuff

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We love free things here at LegalResearchPlus….

And, thanks to the Center for Governmental Studies, an interesting free resource is now available.  The folks at CGS have just created the PolicyArchive.

According to the PolicyArchive website:

“PolicyArchive is an innovative, new digital archive of global, non-partisan public policy research. It makes use of the power, efficiency, and economy of modern Internet technology to collect and disseminate summaries and full texts, videos, reports, briefs, and multimedia material of think tank, university, government, and foundation-funded policy research. It offers a subject index, an internal search engine, useful abstracts, email notifications of newly added research, and will soon expand to offer information on researchers and funders, and even user-generated publication reviews. Over time, it will grow to include policy content from international and corporate organizations.”

They ask that you register on the front page. But take a look at the site. You can view 12,000 plus documents, including some CRS reports. There are also handy indexes, too. Take a look and if you have research to contribute to the site, they have a link for adding content. I also signed up for the free newsletter for the latest policy additions to the collection.

Hat tip to the terrific Sunlight Foundation blog for spotting this new resource.

New Panamanian Criminal Procedure Code

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Panama is the latest Latin American country planning to introduce accusatorial reforms to its criminal procedure regime. A draft Criminal Prodecure Code (Código Procesal Penal) is currently being discussed in the National Assembly. If the draft becomes law, Panama will join over a dozen other Latin American countries that have moved from inquisitorial systems to accusatorial ones. The new Panamanian code includes oral proceedings at trial and the separation of prosecutors and judges.  A Spanish version of the draft Criminal Procedure Code is available at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/3182192/proyecto-de-ley

Internet for Everyone

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Two of our law professors, Barbara van Schewick and Larry Lessig, among others, are driving a new campaign to ensure universal high-speed Internet service.  Today’s San Jose Mercury News has a story by Frank Davies about the Internetforeveryone.org campaign, “Broad coalition backs universal broadband.” From the story:

Better broadband access and quality can be a boring and technical issue, fraught with bureaucratic complications, admitted the organizers for InternetforEveryone.org. But they also see it as crucial to the future of the U.S. economy, education and even the health of democracy.

At a news conference in New York, the group warned that the United States is falling behind European and Asian nations with Internet access that is more limited, more expensive and slower. . . .

 

Zipcar founder Robin Chase, also a member of the coalition, is quoted as comparing high-speed to a utility:  “Maybe it’s not as basic as water, but it’s as basic as hot water.”

The campaign is also the subject of an item in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s The Wired Campus today, “Higher Education Groups Become Part of Broad Internet Coalition.”

E-book survey

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Here’s an e-mail from ebrary, sent out today:

ebrary is pleased to announce that the results of the 2008 Global Student E-book Survey, completed by nearly 6,500 college and university students and designed by more than 150 librarians, are now publicly available at no cost. To receive a digital copy, please register at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=V6KfjUjiRPtGyJYmHINDRg_3d_3d. Printed copies will also be available at the ebrary booth (#1792) at ALA Annual, June 28-July 1, 2008, in Anaheim, CA, USA.

We hope that you find the survey, which explores college and university students’ usage, needs and perceptions regarding e-books, interesting and useful. The results also include an insightful analysis by Allen W. McKiel, Dean of Library and Media Services at Western Oregon University. As you may know, we welcome any papers regarding the survey and would be happy to help you publish and promote them.

For your reference, the press release that was distributed today is available online at http://www.ebrary.com/corp/newspdf/ebrary_student_survey.pdf.

We’d like to extend an enormous thank you to everyone who participated in the survey. If you have any questions or comments, please reply to this email.

Sincerely,
The ebrary Team
ebrary
318 Cambridge Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94306
USA

Some of their survey key findings:

On research or class assignments, e-book usage is on par with print books . . .

Fifty-one percent of students would “very often or often” opt to use electronic versions of books over print versions . . .

Thomson Reuters vs. Bloomberg

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Stanford Law School was one of the first, if not the first, law schools to provide a Bloomberg Law terminal to its faculty and students.  Very slowly, but surely, Bloomberg is building a fan base here, especially for its docket information and truly outstanding subject-specific Law Reports (as noted on this blog a couple of times).  George is our Bloomberg point-person, but from what I’ve seen the quality of its content is very high — the question is, however:  Is it worth it? 

Today’s New York Times has an article by Ian Austen about the new Thomson Reuters / Bloomberg rivarly, “The New Fight for Financial News.”  It makes reference to Bloomberg’s monthly “take it or leave it” fee for all content, which includes Bloomberg Law.  But, as the story points out:

Neither company has sorted out a strategy for competing with [free] online services. Michael F. Holland, the chairman of Holland & Company and the former chief executive of First Boston’s asset management division, said he can no longer justify a Bloomberg terminal for his current role and often turns to the Web for data. He first used a terminal in the 1980s and remains a fan: “There really is nothing else that’s quite like the Bloomberg,” he said. “From the beginning, it has provided incredible information. But at a very high price.”

 

According to our information, the following law schools have some sort of access to Bloomberg Law:

Stanford, UVA, NYU, Cardozo, Duke, Vanderbilt, UCLA, Boalt, Chicago, Michigan, Cornell, Columbia, Fordham, Yale, Boston College, Boston University, Penn, Brooklyn, Harvard, St. Johns, New York Law.
There may be errors and/or omissions in this list, so we welcome corrections.

 

Harvard’s law library director (again) in the news

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From the Boston Globe:  “Stopping Google – With one company now the world’s chief gateway to information, some critics are hatching ways to fight its influence,” by By Drake Bennett (June 22, 2008).

Google may be widely admired for its technical wizardry and its quick, accurate search engine, but one of the company’s most impressive accomplishments has been its ability to grow as powerful as it is while still remaining, in the minds of most Americans, fundamentally likable. . . And even privacy protections, points out John Palfrey, executive director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, can have their costs, making search engines themselves less efficient and making it harder to gather information about criminals and terrorists.

 

Source:  HLS’s News@Law — Week of June 23, 2008

IssueLab

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This week we cataloged IssueLab — http://www.issuelab.org/ — a site suggested by a faculty member here.  The site collects, archives, and freely shares research data generated by nonprofit organizations.

Here’s the catalog record:

Title: IssueLab [electronic resource]
URL: http://www.issuelab.org/
Imprint: Chicago : IssueLab.
Note: Title from caption (viewed on June 20, 2008).
Note: “Bringing nonprofit research into focus”–Caption subtitle <2008->
Scope and content: “IssueLab is an online publishing forum for nonprofit research. [Its] mission is to more effectively archive, distribute and promote the extensive and diverse body of work being produced by the third sector”–About Us page (viewed on June 20, 2008).
Notes: Mode of access: World Wide Web.
Subject (LC): Nonprofit organizations–Electronic information resources.
Subject (LC): Nonprofit organizations–Research–Electronic information resources.
 

To the librarians

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Sergio just posted a review of a new book, Teaching of Intellectual Property – Principles and Methods, that sounds great and we’ll order it post-haste.  However, since today is the first day of summer, I thought I might offer a good summer read.

I was flipping through the pages of books we have recently acquired and stopped dead in my tracks when I found a book dedicated “To the librarians.”  What’s not to love about a book dedicated to us?

And turns out it’s a terrific read.  The book in question is this one:

 
Author: Weinberger, David
Title: Everything is miscellaneous : the power of the new digital disorder
Imprint: New York : Times Books, 2007.

Contents: The new order of order — Alphabetization and its discontents — The geography of knowledge — Lumps and splits — The laws of the jungle — Smart leaves — Social knowing — What nothing says — Messiness as a virtue — The work of knowledge.
          Subject (LC): Knowledge management.
          Subject (LC): Information technology–Management.
          Subject (LC): Information technology–Social aspects.
          Subject (LC): Personal information management.
          Subject (LC): Information resources management.
          Subject (LC): Order.
                  ISBN: 9780805080438
                  ISBN: 0805080430

You can learn more about the book by visiting its corresponding website and you can read a review of the book on Boing Boing.   The author, David Weinberger, is affiliated with the HLS Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and his bio is here.

To give you just a little taste, on p. 133, in the Social Knowing chapter:

. . . Westlaw makes a good profit providing the standard numbering of court cases, applying proprietary metadata to material in the public domain.  But just about every industry that creates or distributes content — ideas, information, or creativity in any form — exerts control over how that content is organized. . . .

This creates a conundrum for businesses as they enter the digital order.  If they don’t allow their users to structure information for themselves, they’ll lose their patrons.  If they do allow patrons to structure information for themselves, the organizations will lose much of their authority, power, and control.

The paradox is already resolving itself.  Customers, patrons, users, and citizens are not waiting for permission to take control of finding and organizing information. And we’re doing it not just as individuals.  Knowledge — its content and its organization — is becoming a social act.

Now that’s one book I’ll take pool-side this weekend.