Category Archives: Current Awareness

My need for a “focus assistant.”

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Can technology offer us “continuous augmented awareness?”

An earlier post here, commenting upon an article a year ago in The Atlantic, asked, “Is Google making us stoopid?”  Now an article in the July / August 2009 issue of the same magazine asks, “Is Google actually making us smarter?”

The article, “Get Smart,” by Jamais Cascio, discusses how Twitter can help us move from a world of “continuous partial attention” to one of “continuous augmented awareness.”  I’m a fan of Twitter but I find it hard to quickly sift through tweets about pancakes to the ones that provide truly valuable and timely information (not that pancakes aren’t important, but I use Twitter mainly for work).  Here’s what Mr. Cascio writes:

But imagine if social tools like Twitter had a way to learn what kinds of messages you pay attention to, and which ones you discard. Over time, the messages that you don’t really care about might start to fade in the display, while the ones that you do want to see could get brighter. Such attention filters–or focus assistants–are likely to become important parts of how we handle our daily lives. We’ll move from a world of “continuous partial attention” to one we might call “continuous augmented awareness.”

The article suggests that:

The trouble isn’t that we have too much information at our fingertips, but that our tools for managing it are still in their infancy.

Data.gov and GovFresh.com

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Remixing government data

“Last year, before he took on the role of federal chief information officer, Vivek Kundra came up with a new twist on the idea of government by the people: Let the people build some public-facing online government applications. . . Of course, repackaging government data for education and profit is nothing new. Dozens of businesses generate income by deciphering the notices that fly across the Federal Register and Federal Business Opportunities Web sites every day. But a recent confluence of technical and political factors portends a much wider use of government data. With Web 2.0 technology, anyone with some coding skills can make their own use of well-formed government data. And with the Obama administration calling for greater government transparency, Kundra wants to replicate D.C.’s success on a national level via the soon-to-be-launched Data.gov site.”

http://gcn.com/Articles/2009/05/04/Data-democratized.aspx

 

New Consolidated Government Information Stream

Launched May 3rd, GovFresh “is a live feed of official news from U.S. Government Twitter, YouTube, RSS, Facebook, Flickr accounts and more, all in one place.”

http://govfresh.com/

As an instructor of Advanced Legal Research I find the updates from the Law Revision Counsel to be particularly useful.  For example:

US Code: House has passed H.R. 1107, to enact Title 41 (Public Contracts) as positive law. For details of the bill, see http://bit.ly/xKKi5

 

Source: The Intersect Alert, a newsletter of the Government Relations Committee, San Francisco Bay Region Chapter, Special Libraries Association.

http://units.sla.org/chapter/csfo/csfo.html

Twitter boosts public access to federal courtrooms

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In an AP story today by Roxana Hegeman, “Twitter Boosts Public Access to Federal Courtrooms.”

The lead paragraph reads:

“In a victory for news technology in federal courts, a judge is allowing a reporter to use the microblogging service Twitter to provide constant updates from a racketeering gang trial this week.”

Thanks to Bob Ambrogi  for tweeting about this….

Wonderful development in law librarianship today – Legal Information & Technology launched

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From a SSRN announcement:


We are pleased to announce a new Legal Scholarship Network (LSN) Sponsored Subject Matter eJournal — Legal Information & Technology, sponsored by the Mid-America Law Library Consortium.

LEGAL INFORMATION & TECHNOLOGY


View Papers: http://www.ssrn.com/link/Legal-Information-Technology.html
Preview the First Issue:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/sample_issues/1334262_CMBO.html

Subscribe: http://hq.ssrn.com/jourInvite.cfm?link=Legal-Information-Technology

Editors: Randy J. Diamond, University of Missouri School of Law, and Lee F. Peoples, Oklahoma City University – School of Law
Sponsor: The Legal Information & Technology eJournal is sponsored by MALLCO, the Mid-America Law Library Consortium.

 

The consortium encourages and promotes cooperative endeavors among its member law school libraries in order to advance the research and educational opportunities of all member libraries, the institutions they serve, and the broader legal community.

Law schools from nine states are represented in MALLCO. Arkansas: University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, University of Arkansas-Little Rock; Illinois: Northern Illinois University, Southern Illinois University; Iowa: Drake University; Kansas: University of Kansas, Washburn University; Missouri: Saint Louis University, University of Missouri-Columbia, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Washington University; Nebraska: Creighton University, University of Nebraska; North Dakota: University of North Dakota; Oklahoma: Oklahoma City University, University of Oklahoma, University of Tulsa; and South Dakota: University of South Dakota.
Description:

This eJournal includes working papers, forthcoming articles, and recently published articles in all areas of legal information scholarship. Topics include (but are not limited to):

The impact of legal information on domestic, comparative, and international legal systems;

The treatment of legal information authorities and precedents (e.g., citation studies);

The examination of rules, practices, and commentary limiting or expanding applications of legal information (e.g., citation to unpublished opinions and to foreign law);

The study of economic, legal, political, and social conditions limiting or extending access to legal information (e.g., trends in the legal publishing industry, intellectual property regimes, and open access initiatives);

The finding and use of legal information by academics to produce legal scholarship, by law students to learn the law, by attorneys in practice, and by judges and others decision makers to determine legal outcomes;

The history of legal information systems and technological advancements;

Legal information system design and assessment; and

The relationship of substantive areas of law (such as information law, intellectual freedom, intellectual property, and national security law) and other academic disciplines (e.g., information science) to legal information. This includes the scholarship of law librarians, other legal scholars, and other academic disciplines.

The eJournal also includes working papers, forthcoming articles, recently published articles, and selected documents (such as White Papers, briefings, reports, course materials) on the practice of law librarianship. Submissions are welcome in all areas of law librarianship including:

Administration, management, and leadership;

Facility design and construction;

Evaluating and marketing law library services;

All aspects of public, technical, and technology services;

Collection development, including sample collection development policies and procedures;

Electronic resource management and development including licensing, digitization, and institutional repositories;

Research and reference services; and

Legal research instruction teaching methods and substantial or innovative course materials.

“The Virtual Tax Library: A Comparison of Five Electronic Tax Research Platforms”

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“The Virtual Tax Library: A Comparison of Five Electronic Tax Research Platforms“

Florida Tax Review, Vol. 8, No. 9, 2008
Loyola-LA Legal Studies Paper No. 2008-40

KATHERINE PRATT, Loyola Law School Los Angeles

JENNIFER M. KOWAL, Loyola Law School – Los Angeles

DANIEL MARTIN, Loyola Law School – Los Angeles

Improved LexisNexis and Westlaw tax research platforms and new electronic tax research platforms offered by BNA (BNA Tax Management Library), CCH (CCH Tax Research NetWork), and RIA (RIA Checkpoint) constitute a virtual tax library that offers tax researchers much of the content and functionality of a physical tax library, as well as some useful functionality features (e.g., direct linking of primary and secondary sources) a physical tax library cannot provide. The new virtual tax library offers tax researchers numerous benefits, including the convenience of a portable library, more reliable and current research results, and increased research efficiency. Many tax researchers have not adapted their tax research techniques to effectively utilize the virtual tax library, however, because they are unfamiliar with the new and improved electronic tax research platforms.

To reduce tax researchers’ costs of evaluating and comparing the five electronic platforms, this Article provides detailed comparisons of the content and functionality features offered by the platforms. This Article also explains how to access various types of primary and secondary tax sources on the platforms and provides detailed search pathways that will enable tax researchers to navigate around the electronic platforms.

Part I of this Article provides background information regarding the development of the new electronic tax research platforms and explains our project and methodology. Part II compares the primary and secondary source content offered on the five electronic platforms and compares various types of free tax information that are available on the internet. Part III compares the various functionality features offered on the five electronic platforms. Part IV illustrates the differences in search results obtained by using the various electronic platforms to research a topical tax research question. Part V discusses the factors that are relevant when designing an electronic tax research system and makes recommendations about combining the electronic tax research platforms to create a workable virtual tax library.

A chart in Appendix A provides a side-by-side comparison of the primary source content available on the five electronic tax research platforms. The chart includes search pathways and date restrictions for each type of content. A chart in Appendix B provides a side-by-side comparison of the functionality features offered by each platform. The chart includes quick reference guides for initiating various types of searches, as well as user support information for each platform.

The published version of this article includes new information (e.g., search pathways and date restrictions for the content information in Appendix A) that was not included in the draft version of this article.

Source: LSN Law Educator: Courses, Materials & Teaching Vol. 5 No. 1,
  01/09/2009

Law Libraries’ Tech Tools – e.g., Ozmosys

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Today’s Daily Journal at p. 4 has an article by Gina Lynch and Jane Metz, “Law Libraries’ Tech Tools Give Firms a Handle on Vast Information Universe” (password may be needed).

Talk to any information professional today, and they will tell you that their biggest challenge is taming the information glut and sifting through the hundreds of technologies now available to slice and dice this data.

The article discusses current awareness services and how “LexisNexis in partnership with Ozmosys. . . created TotalAlert – a software product that consolidates multiple sources of electronic information into one daily e-mail.”

With this tool

the library team can create practice-, industry- and client-specific searches in commercial databases such as Lexis, CourtLink and Westlaw. These searches can be captured by Ozmosys. In addition, Ozmosys provides a long list of free Web alerts and can capture premium electronic subscriptions held by the firm. Librarians use the Ozmosys software to consolidate these various resources into practice-specific topics and create e-mail distribution groups.

 

The article also addresses:

Creating an Interactive Intranet: Applets and Custom Views

Turbocharging the Library Portal: More Than Just a Catalog

Facing New Frontiers

As the FDIC Turns: Senator Schumer’s Letter about IndyMac

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The letter that Senator Chuck Schumer sent to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of Thrift Supervision about IndyMac has been making headlines, especially after the bank run that lead the FDIC to step in officially.

We had a faculty member interested in reading the letter in its entirety, and our search found many places on the web that excerpted selected text, but not the complete correspondence.  Ultimately, our search was successful and I am posting the full text of this hot doc here (hat tip to the nice people at AmericanBanker.com).

New legal research articles

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This week’s Current Index to Legal Periodicals brings notice of two new articles by law librarians:

LEGAL RESEARCH AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jayasuriya, H. Kumar Percy and Melanie Oberlin. Admiralty and maritime law articles published in non-maritime law journals (2007). 39 J. Mar. L. & Com. 229-273 (2008).

Smith-Butler, Lisa. Cost effective legal research redux: how to avoid becoming the Accidental Tourist, lost in cyberspace. 9 Fla. Coastal L. Rev. 293-346 (2008).

Bloomberg Law Reports – Follow the bouncing URL

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I’ve written about the Bloomberg Law Reports.  They’re good.  Very good.  But they’re not good enough to justify the hoops we now have to go through to provide access to them.  Up until mid-June (6/19 to be exact) I received via e-mail nice PDFs of each issue, and I then selectively forwarded the issues to faculty who I thought would be interested.  Quick, easy — a nice library service.

But starting on June 25th I now receive (weekly?) notices such as this one:

Bloomberg Law Reports® can now be found at:
 
 
Bloomberg Law Reports are comprehensive legal analyses targeted to the legal and financial communities. Bloomberg Law Reports examine recent legal and regulatory developments covering a wide array of topics including: Antitrust & Trade, Asia Pacific Law, Banking & Finance, Bankruptcy, Corporate Law, Director & Officer Liability, Employee Benefits, European Law, Executive Compensation, Health Law, Immigration Law, Insurance Law, Intellectual Property, Labor & Employment, Litigation, Mergers & Acquisitions, Privacy & Information, Risk & Compliance, Securities Law, and Sustainable Energy.
. . .
Issues of Bloomberg Law Reports delivered by e-mail are currently provided on a complimentary basis. Please feel free to distribute them throughout your firm. To view enhanced versions of Bloomberg Law Reports, including hyperlinks to cited materials, please access the reports on the Bloomberg Professional� service (BBLR <GO>). For more information on BLOOMBERG LAWSM (BLAW) and the Bloomberg Professional service, please contact us: . . .
“Issues of Bloomberg Law Reports delivered by e-mail . . . ” Huh?  Are they?  Or aren’t they?

Each week the URL changes.  This is far too much trouble for me or our faculty.  And I don’t have the time to visit the website, download each report and then share it.  So I’ve now stopped reading the Bloomberg Law Reports – there are limits to what I can do.

IP-based access works.  Passwords work (although IP-based is better).  Bouncing URLs don’t.  And biometric B-units are a nuisance, for me anyway.

Many of our students and faculty want to access our resources from home.  A consistent URL, which can be bookmarked, is really needed for them to read the Bloomberg Law Reports.  URLs that change weekly add far too much frustration.

And these changes came without any explanation.

Aspatore Books

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I was introduced to Aspatore Books at the meeting of the West Academic Advisory Board (Thomson recently acquired Aspatore).  Aspatore provides questionnaires to experts it has identified and helps to then craft short chapters for these experts to revise and approve.  I think the concept is an intriguing one and I see two additional uses for the books in the series.  For one thing, the books can help librarians identify individual names to use for more precise searching (e.g., searching author fields of business and trade journals).  And beyond that, being a reference librarian is often a case of putting a patron in touch with someone who might be able to help them with specialized needs, and these books can help identify who some of these contacts might be.

Aspatore has recently published two books about law librarianship.  The books are:

The Changing Role of Academic Law Librarianship: Leading Librarians on Teaching Legal Research Skills, Responding to Emerging Technologies, and Adapting to Changing Trends (Inside the Minds series).   Contributors include Paul D. Callister, Michelle M. Wu, Philip C. Berwick,  Nancy L. Strohmeyer, Roy M. Mersky, Joan Shear, Christopher L. Steadham, Carol A. Parker, and Olivia Leigh Weeks

and

How to Manage a Law School Library: Leading Librarians on Updating Resources, Managing Budgets, and Meeting Expectations (Inside the Minds)

Full disclosure:  I have a chapter in this book.  (A number of the authors of chapters in these two books are or were members of the West Academic Advisory Board). Other authors are: Dan Martin, Michael Whiteman, Scott B. Pagel, William Blake Wilson, Christopher A. Knott, Kris Gilliland, Marian F. Parker, Penny A. Hazelton, and Sherri Nicole Thomas

I imagine that copies of both titles, in addition to others from this publisher, will be available in Portland and I encourage you to take a look.