A joint Poudre River Public, Front Range Community College, and Colorado State University libraries committee has released:
eBooks and eReaders in Public and Academic Libraries
(May 2011)
The purpose of the study was to gain a better understanding of this rapidly-developing topic as well as to make recommendations aimed at serving the customers of each library.
Hat tip to ResourceShelf.com.
Cross posted on Law Library Blog.
Judy Janes and Marissa Andrea just published a good article on open access law journals. Their article, “One Journal at a Time,” includes a few paragraphs providing “a brief history of open access.” In addition, they comment upon how “the success of RSS feeds, SSRN alerts and SMARTCILP/CLJC email updates has further accelerated the transition to Open Access journals.”
In their “Learn More” section of the article they link to a video presentation where Dick “Danner discusses Open Access and the Durham Statement and also his paper entitled “The Durham Statement on Open Access One Year Later: Preservation and Access to Legal Scholarship” available at SSRN.”
Other resources linked in the Janes and Andrea article include:
Directory of Open Access Journals
Science Commons Open Access Law Project
and
New York Law School list of law reviews with online content
This movement will benefit us all, as Janes and Andrea state it:
. . . As more journals become available on the Internet through an initiative called Open Access, published legal scholarship — once only available in print form from law libraries, or online through proprietary databases — will reach a wider audience. This is a movement not only benefiting practicing attorneys, but historians, scholars and members of the public with legal research interests, who will be able to access legal scholarship by simply googling a topic.
How many times have we seen students spinning their wheels online seeking that illusive ”white horse case?”
Don’t know what a white horse case is (I’m showing my age here)? Then look it up in Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage, one of my most favorite reference books. I love this book and I read it for fun and find many definitions — besides “white horse case” (and this is the only book I’ve found which offers a good definition of the phrase) — to share with my students, so I was delighted to see that this book is now out in its third edition; from the Oxford University Press Law Newsletter:
Bryan A. Garner reaffirms his position as the foremost expert of legal usage and style with the Third Edition of his Dictionary of Legal Usage. This month, be among the first to own this revamped and expanded new edition with more than 800 new entries.
Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage
Third Edition
Bryan A. GarnerThis new edition discusses and analyzes modern legal vocabulary and style more thoroughly than any other contemporary reference work.
I can’t wait to start pouring over those 800 new entries. Talk about poolside summer reading!
“West’s Words, Ho! Law Books by the Million, Plus a Few”
Green Bag 2d, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 301-339, Spring 2011
George Mason Law & Economics Research Paper No. 11-25
ROSS E. DAVIES, George Mason University School of Law, The Green Bag
This essay introduces an interesting but nearly invisible artifact of American law: A promotional pamphlet titled Law Books by the Million: An account of the largest law-book house in the world, the home establishment of The National Reporter System and The American Digest System. It was produced by the West Publishing Company in 1901 and is reprinted in its entirety below at pages 311 to 339 of this issue of the Green Bag. Professor Robert Jarvis has quite rightly bemoaned the meager public information about John West, founder of the West Publishing Company and an important figure in American legal history. A similar, albeit less severe, paucity of information plagues the West Publishing Company itself (now owned by Thomson Reuters). There isn’t much out there about the company’s early years, and what little there is can be strangely difficult to get hold of. For example, the biggest single source of West history – William Marvin’s 1969 book, West Publishing Company: Origin, Growth, Leadership – is out of print, rare, and not available on the Internet. The same goes for The Publications of West Publishing Company and The Romance of Law Reporting: Serving the Bench and Bar, pamphlets published by West in 1901 and 1934 respectively. Law Books by the Million is nearly as hard to find, but at least it is in the library and in the public domain, and therefore susceptible to reproduction here. And it is worth the trouble and expense. Law Books by the Million provides a readable, richly illustrated narrative of the processes West used to create and disseminate its products in the early years (that is, the late 19th and early 20th centuries) of those simultaneously democratizing and costly, mutually reinforcing revolutions in American law: the expansion of the bar and the legal information explosion.
Source: LSN Legal Education eJournal Vol. 8 No. 35, 06/13/2011
Looks like the University Jean Moulin and the Bar Association of Lyon’s conference on law and narrative cinema is turning into an annual event. The 2nd annual meeting was held in late March in Lyon. In addition to panels, the conference also screened films. Participants included screenwriters, directors, attorneys, professors, and administrative judges.
Les Rencontres Droit, Justice & Cinema 2011
Les questions de Droit et de Justice abordées par le prisme du cinéma de fiction
Lyon, France. March 21-25, 2011
http://lesmistons.typepad.com/files/dp-comoedia—rencontres-djc-20115.pdf
2010 Conference
http://www.barreaulyon.com/Le-Barreau-de-Lyon/Actualites/Rencontres-Droit-Justice-et-Cinema
Hat tip to the Law and Cinema Blog (Le Blog Droit et Cinéma)
http://lesmistons.typepad.com/blog/
Freeliterature is a valuable portal to e-book sites, including not only collections of items in English — such as Project Gutenberg — but also in other languages from around the globe.
Categories of books/materials covered — see here — include, among other things:
Freeliterature also invites participation — see here — in the proofreading of electronic texts in order to help make them available online.
Hat tip to ResourceShelf.com.
Cross-posted on Law Library Blog.
