Monthly Archives: August 2009

New collaboration tools

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I’ve written before about Bloomberglaw.com’s Active Workspace collaboration tool.

Now the Wall Street Journal just announced its feature called My Journal which “introduces a new level of versatility with new ways to organize, manage and share breaking news, articles, videos and more.”

In My Journal users can set up folders to email content to friends and colleagues.  Users can set up “Collections” and whenever new content is added to the collection, it’s automatically e-mailed to the addresses the user has identified to receive such updates.  I’ll try this with our advanced legal research class this fall.

Text-to-Speech Translation

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Google Translate and Bable Fish provide free machine translation of text from various languages. The Text-to-Speech Web site now allows you to hear how the text should be pronounced. Over two dozen languages are available. The Spanish options include Chilean, Mexican, Castilian and Argentine accents.   English options are American, Indian, Irish, Australian, Scottish, and South African. These are machine translations so the voices are a bit robotic.

Text-to-Speech Translation

Academic Library of the Future

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The Hanover Research Council has just released (August 2009) a report entitled “Academic Library of the Future.”  From the cover:

In the following report, The Hanover Research Council investigates issues relevant to strategic planning for the “academic library of the future.”  After providing an overview of key trends, we detail how the academic library is undergoing profound transformation with regard to new technologies, user expectations, library staff roles, space design, and ownership issues.  The report concludes with examples of cost-effective innovations addressing a wide range of challenges and solutions at four different institutions.

Foreign Law Portal – InformáticaJurídica.com

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InformáticaJurídica.com is a foreign law portal focusing mainly on Internet law, privacy, and intellectual property issues. It provides citations to statutes from hundreds of countries. It also posts selected full-text statutes and case law in the vernacular, principally from Latin American and European countries. The site also contains a bibliography of Spanish and English language secondary literature, a list of past and future conferences and meetings, and links (click on directorio).  Site navigation is entirely in Spanish.

InformáticaJurídica.com

http://www.informatica-juridica.com/

Blog de la ACBJ

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The Argentine Association of Law Librarians (Asociación Civil de Bibliotecarios Jurídicos) was started a blog: Blog de la ACBJ. In addition to the posts, the site also provides useful links to Argentine legislation, case law, doctrine, and secondary sources. 

Blog de la Asociación Civil de Bibliotecarios Jurídicos

http://bibliotecariosjuridicos.blogspot.com/

CALR – Is the Future Now?

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Yesterday was B-Day for us, the launch of Bloomberglaw.com.   Peter Schwartz’s article “The Reinvention of Legal Research: The Future Is Now” for The Huffington Post makes this observation:

The large legal publishers are in trouble. If law firms can no longer pass through online research costs to clients, multi-billion dollar legal publishers such as West and Lexis can no longer support pricing models premised on law firm cost recovery. Because West and Lexis cost structures depend on this pricing model, they are beginning to experience painful margin squeezes, compounded by the entry into the legal research marketplace of both nimble, low-cost competitors and new rivals with deep pockets such as Bloomberg.

RECAP: Turning PACER Around

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Meet  RECAP (http://recapthelaw.org) – Be impressed.  Very impressed.

PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) documents sit behind a pay-wall; however, these are public record documents, so once a document has been retrieved from PACER, it may be freely shared.

RECAP  enables us to easily share federal court documents. The goal of this project is to publish an extensive archive of these documents to the public for free (our favorite word).

RECAP is an extension to the Firefox browser. There is a a video on the site that demonstrates the extension in action.

RECAP works with Firefox to upload case dockets and documents that you have paid for to the public archive, and notifying you when free versions of documents are already available.

RECAP is a project of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.  It is one of several projects that harness the power of the web to increase government transparency.

China Green from Asia Society

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China Green, from the Asia Society, provides videos, photographs and graphics on climate change, energy policy, sustainability, and environmental conditions in China.

From the Web site’s description page: 

China Green, a multimedia enterprise, will document China’s environmental issues now and for years to come and will strive to serve as a web forum where people with an interest in China and its environmental challenges can find interesting visual stories and share critical information about the most populous nation in the world whose participation in the solution to global environmental problems, such as climate change, will be indispensable.

China Green

http://sites.asiasociety.org/chinagreen/

Tsinghua China Law Review

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We have received the inaugural  issue of Tsinghua China Law Review. Wishing Carlton Willey and the folks at Tsinghua Law School the best of luck with their new journal.

Tsinghua China Law Review http://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/docsn/fxy/tclr/tclr.htm

Table of Contents, Volume 1 Number1, Spring 2009

The Necessity of Codification of China’s Private International Law: A Study from the Perspective of the Historical Development of Chinese Conflicts Law

CHEN Weizuo, Tsinghua Law School

Gathering Momentum for US-China Cooperation on Climate Change

 Steve Wolfson, US Environmental Protection Agency

A Comparative Study of Lawyers’ Ethics in the US and PRC: Attorney-Client Privilege and Duty of Confidentiality  

XI Xu, Baker & McKenzie LLP

A Look at China’s Antidumping Policies and Practices  

R. Shane McNamara, UCLA School of Law

Law and Literature in the Tang Dynasty: Imperial Scholar Bai Juyi and the Concept of Panwen

Norman P. Ho, Harvard University

The Conflict and Harmony on Interpretation of
Hong Kong Basic Law

WANG Xuanwei, Tsinghua Law School

For additional information, see our earlier post on the journal http://legalresearchplus.com/2009/03/03/tsinghua-china-law-review/

Ta-Ta Taxes the Tax Magazine

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We just got the invoice for the renewal of CCH’s Taxes the Tax Magazine.  A 10% price increase.  There’s no way I’m renewing a journal with a double-digit price increase unless some professor here tells me that he or she needs it and absolutely, positively can’t exist without it.  This inflationary spiral must stop.