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Have you ever wished that law review articles, administrative materials and/or U.S. Supreme Court decisions were made electronically available in PDF format? Your wish has been answered! These are just some of many materials available to you as a Penn Law student via the searchable HeinOnline database.

As announced yesterday, Biddle Librarians will be in the Clock area from 12:00-1:00 PM today showing the ins and outs of HeinOnline.

Snacks will be available. Stop by and learn more; you know you want to.

A recent program on Public Television featured an interesting story about the conflict between intellectual property rights and traditional knowledge.

So you want find out what your professor has been thinking about lately? You want to know what’s been on his or her mind? Here is your chance. (More after the jump.)

If Rupert Murdoch has his way, he'll soon own the Wall Street Journal--and drop the newspaper's online paywall in the process. (More after the jump.)

In 2008, you're likely see a lot more case law available free of charge on the web. (More after the jump.)

Ever been curious to hear the voice of Chief Justice John Roberts during oral argument?  Perhaps you have wondered what the main reading room of the Supreme Court Law Library or the chambers of Justice Ginsburg looks like?  Or maybe you are interested in perusing the financial disclosure reports of Justice Scalia?  If so, then the Oyez website is for you.

Designed for scholars, students, and USSC groupies, "[t]he Oyez Project is a multimedia archive devoted to the Supreme Court of the United States and its work."   At its core, Oyez "aims to be a complete and authoritative source for all audio recorded in the Court since the installation of a recording system in October 1955."  Currently, Oyez' "audio collection covers all audio from the 1990 Term through the end of the 2004 Term," and has selective coverage prior to 1990.

In addition to providing audio coverage of Supreme Court Oral arguments, Oyez also provides portraits, photos and biographical information for all of the past and current Justices, organized by Court.  Virtual Tours of major portions of the Supreme Court building are also available.

For those looking for more slightly off-the-wall information about the Court, Oyez also has you covered.  For example, interment locations of prior Supreme Court Justices are available via Google Maps (a strangely compelling feature).  Those who can't get enough of the American pastime may also enjoy playing Oyez baseball, a game that challenges you to compare the personalities of baseball players and Supreme Court Justices.

Of course, much more information is available on the website.  Feel free to explore.  In the meantime, this post is now in recess.

Did you know that October 14 was Open Access Day?  No?  That's ok, because Ed Greenlee and I didn't either until we were asked by Shawn Martin, Head of Scholarly Communication at Van Pelt library, to commemorate the event by giving a talk to the librarians on examples of Open Access in legal research and scholarship.  While the presentation was geared towards our library colleagues, we provided links to some important legal research tools that are available free of charge on the Internet.  They include:

Cornell University's Legal Information Institute.  The Legal Information Institute is a web portal to a large number of free web sites containing primary legal materials: case opinions, statutes, and administrative materials.

THOMAS.  The THOMAS site is maintained by the Federal Government and offers a wide range of legislative materials, from various versions of bills, to selected hearing transcripts and legislative history summaries along with hot links to key documents.

The Directory of Open Access Law Journals.  This site provides a list of institutions participating in the Open Access Law Program.

"Wikibooks" and virtual casebooks.  Wikibooks is an open source for a wide range of texts. At the present they offer a limited number of books in the area of law but Wikibooks will be a growing resource for open access legal texts.

Wex.  Wex is like Wikipedia but for legal information: it attempts to provide a community-edited legal encylopedia and dictionary.

eLangdell.  eLangell is an open source project of CALI (Computer Assisted Legal Instruction) program and the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. Just initiated in June of this year, it will offer a variety of materials including multimedia course materials and case books.

Opencongress.org.  Part of the Sunlight Foundation's suite of free government information databases, Opencongress.org is an innovative example of bringing Web 2.0 tools like blogging, RSS feeds, and social bookmarking to the public policy arena.

As our presentation demonstrated, there are a great many resources for legal research out there that aren't named Westlaw or Lexis-Nexis.  And they are doing some innovative things in the way that legal information is presented online.  None of this would be possible without the Open Access movement's committment to unfettered access to, and use of, information resources.

Law librarians are regularly called upon to provide information with regards to how individual members of Congress have voted on certain topics.  As both a lawyer and a librarian, I am constantly amazed by the availability of U.S. Government information, including the voting records of our Federal Electorate, which is handily available on the Internet.  This is true process transparency in action, as part of what makes our democratic process great is the ability to hold our electorate responsible for their action (or inaction) through the voting process.  As we are on the heels of an important election, the interests of legal research and the public interest are once again intertwined.  I offer you below some legal resources by which you can make your own accounting before you head to the polls this November.  Beyond the near term elections, this information can help any student of the law track bills, examine a bill's history, and understand the voting records of our elected officials.

Project Vote Smart is a bipartisan-volunteer organization that has proclaimed itself the "voter's self-defense system."  This fantastic website makes accessible the voting records of every candidate and elected official from the President to local government officials in each state.  Another important feature is that the website breaks votes down by subject area to enable voters to examine how candidates cast their ballot on subjects of special importance to them, the individual voters.  Not only is the information readily available and presented in a format that is easily understood, Project Vote Smart provides a variety of search mechanisms, including an area code search, to assist voters to gain information on candidates who hold local government offices that they might not be aware of.  Additionally, the website enables RSS feeds to allow voters to stay informed and updated on a regular basis.

Thus, if you're nearing Election Day and can't decide on a candidate for either a federal, state, or local position, I would recommend visiting Project Vote Smart to see where your candidate falls on the issues that interest you.  If, on the other hand, you are interested in examining the roll call votes on a particular piece of legislation that is, or was, pending before either the House or the Senate, then you should also be aware of the official government websites described below.

THOMAS is a source of U.S. Government information that is organized and published by the Library of Congress.  Here, you can gain information relating to the roll call votes on every bill that went before the house (since 1990) as well as the Senate (since 1989) by visiting the roll call vote page.  Additionally, another two sources for examining roll call votes are the Clerk's office for the House of Representatives and the Secretary's Office of the Senate.

On each of these government sites, the roll call votes are broken down by Congressional Session and individual bills instead of individual members.  This information, however, when combined with that available through Project Vote Smart, allows any citizen to get the complete picture with just a few clicks of their mouse.

Here's a scenario with which you might be familiar.  You're working on a paper, and you know that the trend of what Americans think about some aspect of your topic is likely to be helpful in making your point. It could be anything from views on the legalization of marijuana, to the importance of the separation of church and state, to the legalization of abortion, to which candidate various groups will support for national office. There seems to be no limit when it comes to opinion polling. How do you get the data you need for your paper?  What are the options?

Generally, people using public opinion surveys look for one of three things:

1. An individual question that appears in one survey or that appears in several surveys over time (enabling a trend or time-series study). The sought-for elements are the question text (with potential or actual responses) and the frequencies for each response. This aggregate data is also called "marginals" or "toplines." This is the "Yes 40%, No 30%, Don't know 15%, Braindead 5%, Other 10%" information.
2. All the questions appearing in one survey. The safest way to retrieve a questionnaire's questions is to start from a known question in, say, iPOLL*, and search on that question's survey organization plus beginning and ending dates. iPOLL*, the Odum Institute* question database, and the Gallup Brain* offer a shortcut that might omit some of those modular questions recycled among concurrent surveys -- for each question retrieved, the database presents a hyperlink that assembles the questions. 
3. The raw data, or individual respondents' responses to each question, also known as microdata [where marginals are aggregate data]. Seldom if ever would you want microdata, even if you were to say, "I want the data for these questions." In most cases, what you really want are marginals, or frequency of response. Generally, you will need microdata only when you ask as a follow-up question: "I need to know how many Hawaiians hated Ronald Reagan" or "Do poor, uneducated city dwellers approve of school vouchers?" The trigger in these cases is the detail, the subgroups. Other potential microdata uses would involve relations among more than one question: "How many people who like mustard on their pretzels would pay $500 for an Eagles ticket?" Generally, unless you have viewed the survey's questions or codebook, it's likely not worth your time, or the time of the person who's going to help you with using SPSS or SAS, to re-process the raw data.
   

*It's safe to assume that more than 90 percent of you are interested in either 1. or 2. above. iPOLL, the Odum Institute and the Gallup Brain are the three places most people go for question-level info:

iPOLL (Roper Center), Penn Library Web. Authoritative, includes archived Gallup, Roper, and other pollster questions back to the 1930s. The Roper Center archives ABC News and New York Times media polls as well as Kaiser Family Foundation polls, Los Angeles Times polls, National Opinion Research Center polls, and Wall Street Journal polls; the jewels in the Roper collection are the Roper polls (including the famous "Bowling Alone" surveys), their Japanese and Latin American polls, and the Gallup Organization polls. The LexisNexis version of iPOLL, RPOLL, has identical content, but searching and question formatting are not so good. iPOLL draws from survey organization and survey sponsor press releases, survey reports, data documentation, and lots of other sources. I recommend it most highly.

Odum Institute Public Opinion Poll Question Database, Penn Library Web.  A fine small-scale competitor to iPOLL, covering the Harris Polls and the Network of State Polls (e.g., the Pennsylvania Poll, the California Poll). In the "Search" dropdown, choose "Question Text."

Gallup Brain, searchable via Sharon Black, Annenberg School Library. Gallup charges a pretty penny for access to their full archive question database. You will not get access by going through http://www.gallup.com/ either. As all the old Gallup polls and the main series of recent Gallup surveys appear in iPOLL, you can often get what you need without accessing the Gallup Brain.

There are other places to go for polling data. If you want to explore on your own, feel free to browse the University Library's Research Guide on Public Opinion Polls. However, there are also numerous specialized and local polling entities which do not appear in the guide. I would be happy to do my best to help you find and begin to use any of this data.

If you have questions about this kind of research, please feel free to contact me.

This year, the reference librarians at Biddle gave their One L legal research workshops a 21st-century update.  Our focus was entirely on the use of digital materials, primarily those available on Westlaw and Lexis.

At the same time, we kept one important remnant from the analog world: we maintained the use of small groups rather than large lecture classes for the workshops.  The IT department facilitated our work by installing large screen plasma monitors and computer work stations with wireless keyboards and mice in four group studies in Biddle. The sessions allowed us, as instructors, to engage the students in a more direct way than would be possible in a large group.  The small group sessions also facilited a bit of infomality, which helped to keep the students' attention.

In an effort to make the instruction as relevant as possible, the sessions focused on actual problems that the One Ls were working on: closed and open memos, a classic of the first-semester law school experience.

While we assigned the students to the same study room for all three workshops, instructors moved from room to room, allowing more librarians and first year students to get to know one another. We're looking forward to the Spring semester, when the reference staff will be premiering a new workshop for the One Ls that will focus on using the Internet to conduct legal research.

Governmental web sites are usually one of the first places people go for official government information. Few of us, however, know that government blogs exist as a possible source of information. It may surprise many to learn that the federal government maintains a web page entitled "Blogs from the U.S. Government," which lists active and archived government blogs.

While governments have been slow to embrace Web 2.0 technology, it has nevertheless begun to do so. According to Webcontent.gov, "Blogs put a human face on government. They can make government more 'open' by allowing more interaction between government and its citizens." Bill Gates, Microsoft founder, is quoted on webcontent.gov as saying: "It's all about openness. People see blogs as a reflection of an open communicative culture that isn't afraid to be self-critical." Since 57 million adult Americans read blogs (according to a 2006 Pew Internet & American Life Project report called Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet's New Storytellers (PDF)) government blogs serve as a more dynamic way to engage or further a dialogue between citizens and governmental officials.

A perusal of "Blogs from the U.S. Government" reveals a variety of blogs ranging from "Peace Corps Volunteer Journals," concerning the experiences of Peace Corp workers, to the State Department's "Dipnote," which "offers the public an alternative source to mainstream media for U.S. foreign policy information and the opportunity to discuss important foreign policy issues with senior State Department officials." Of particular interests to many of us at this moment is the Congressional Budget Office Director's Blog, which among several objectives, attempts to remedy misunderstandings of CBO data or testimony.

There are those who will seriously question the veracity, value and reliability of information found on government blogs, as indeed should be the case. Regardless, government blogs remain a potential resource which may provide invaluable information and insight.

For further reading about government blogs, I recommend Professor David C. Wyld's report entitled The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0 (PDF).

Many of us, if not most, use popular online search engines like Google and Yahoo! to search the web. While these search tools often locate what we want, we might still wonder to ourselves, "What else can I have find outside of Google?"

General search engines retrieve web pages by employing "spiders" or robots to visit web pages periodically and index their content. These general search engines, however, are not effective in locating "deep" or "invisible web" pages--web pages that do not contain hyperlinks, which would otherwise allow spiders or robots to identify pages. Examples of web page file formats not indexed by search engines include image files (i.e. tiff and gif), streaming media (i.e. flash and mp3), specialized searchable databases, and pages intentionally excluded by a web page designer. Since the deep Web is, by some estimations, 400-550+ times larger in size than the "surface" or "visible" Web, the importance of deep Web searching becomes all the more apparent.

Deep Web searching is particularly appropriate when specific or precise information such as statistics or data are needed. Deep Web searching is also appropriate when authoritative, timely, and exhaustive information is needed.

If general search engines do not retrieve what you want, deep Web searching may be worth a try. Deep Web pages may be identified by using subject directories and search engines.

For academic research, well-regarded subject directories that canvass the deep Web include the Librarians' Internet Index and Infomine. General deep Web search engines include Incywincy and OAlster.  For in-depth deep Web searching, consider meta-search engines such as SurfWax and Copernic Agent.

If you wish to locate other deep Web search engines, type your key words in a general search engine such as Google, followed by "database." For instance, if "'air pollution' and database" is entered into Google, you will retrieve the Environmental Protection Agency's AirData web site, which provides "access to air pollution data for the entire United States."  For example, I tinkered with the AirData web site, and I was able to generate 2007 Philadelphia Air Quality Index Report (below).


If you are already visiting a web site and you wish to determine if deep Web searching is available, review the site map to see if the words "database "or "statistics" appear. In addition, you may also want to search for "database" within the web site's internal search engine.

While many previously-invisible pages are now visible with the use of general search engines, the breadth, depth, and weight of the deep web provide a glimpse into the information world beyond Google.  As the title of this post indicated, however, the deep Web is still an emerging front in the field of research and requires time, effort, and, sometimes some additional assistance.  With that in mind, if you are interested in learning more about your options regarding the deep Web, don't hesitate to contact me for more information.

Penn Law School is fortunate to be a beta site for Bloomberg Law (BLAW), a division of Bloomberg, a major provider of business and financial information.

Given today's challenging economic climate, more attorneys are choosing to turn away from fee-based databases (e.g. Lexis and Westlaw) and are instead conducting basic legal research utilizing free (and reliable) internet resources. 

Although not appropriate for every situation, free legal research databases offer an an attractive and cost-effective alternative for many researchers who are simply searching for basic legislative, regulatory, and judicial information. 

One of the primary websites utilized by researchers and librarians alike for accessing free legal information is GPO Access.  Maintained by the Government Printing Office, GPO Access is a web portal that provides free electronic access to a wealth of important information products produced by the Federal Government, including judicial opinions, legislative materials and regulatory information.  Some of the more popular materials linked to from GPO Access include: U.S. Supreme Court Slip Opinions and Docket Information; the U.S. Code; the Congressional Record; the Code of Federal Regulations; and the Federal Register.

Another outstanding website for finding free and relaible legal information is the Legal Information Institute (LII).  Maintained by the Cornell Law School, the LII provides publishes a series of “topical” pages that serve as concise explanatory guides and Internet resource listings for roughly 100 areas of law.  Access to free State and International legal resources is also provided.

If you still cannot find the information you are looking for via GPO Access or LII, be sure to consult some of the excellent research guides produced by academic law libraries that delineate the myriad of free legal resources available.  Georgetown and Duke Law Library research guides on free and low cost legal research are two wonderful examples of these easy-to-use guides that are chock full of useful information.  

Penn Law students entering the workplace this summer would be well-served knowing the basics of finding and utilizing appropriate free and low cost research materials.  Good luck and happy researching!

 

A couple of Saturdays ago, while most of you were sleeping, relaxing, or mowing the lawn, I was at work.  Well, sort of: I attended a symposium at Georgetown Law Center called "The Future of Today's Legal Scholarship."  Despite the seemingly broad title, the bulk of the day centered on one particular resource that is emerging as an important way for people to exchange, discuss, and comment on aspects of the law: the legal blog.  The symposium was organized in honor of Bob Oakley, former Director of Georgetown's law library, who passed away in 2007. 

 

The keynote address was delivered by Bob Berring, a well known figure in the both the legal and library fields.  While Berring admitted that he had to teach himself to be blog literate, he expressed a broad understanding of the nature of legal scholarship and research and the extent to which the blogosphere is shaping these fields.  Berring argued that, while it is unlikely that the law review will be supplanted by a new form of legal resource anytime soon, legal blogs have their role in advancing legal thought.

Berring's comments set the tone for the day.  There were refreshingly few--if any--broad-brush criticisms of the blogosophere as a debased form of communication.  If anything, most of the speakers pointed out the distinct advantages of blogs when compared to other publishing platforms: namely, the immediate topicality of the posts, the casual tone, and the ability to receive feedback from readers.  These qualities were echoed by Chris Borgen, Associate Professor of Law at St. Johns and founder of the popular law blog Opinio Juris.  Borgen outlined what he believed blogs did well and what they did not do well.  In the latter category, Borgen argued that, by and large, you don't see a legal subject treated with the same depth in a blog post as you do in a journal article.  On the other hand, Borgen argued that a major exception to this characterization was the way many law blogs have handled current controversies over civil liberties, torture, and Guantanamo Bay.  In this scenario, these blogs were better than mainstream news articles, Borgen argued, because you had legal experts (lawyers, professors, etc.) writing the posts.  "They already knew what the Geneva Conventions were," Borgen said of these legal bloggers.

Underscoring the increasing importance of blogs in judicial contexts, Lee Peoples, Law Library Director at Oklahoma City University School of Law, presented recent research he had conducted on instances where blogs had been cited in judicial opinions.  Peoples' research suggests that blogs are increasingly taken more seriously as reliable locations for legal theory, but that they still have not been standardized enough to facilitate wholesale adoption.  Furthermore, Peoples raised a point that other panelists returned to during the day: if a blog or blog post is cited, how can we be sure that this resource will be preserved in perpetuity?

Tom Goldstein, founding of the very popular SCOTUSblog, claimed that bloggers have totally different priorities than librarians and preservationists: bloggers think about the information itself, not the long-term preservation of that information.  However, later in the day Ph.D. student Caroyln Hank presented findings in a study that gauged bloggers' perspectives on digital preservation that would suggest otherwise.  Hank found that most bloggers actually do think about the long-term access to their blogs, but that, by and large, responsibiltiy for preservation should lie with the individual blogger and not a library or archives.

Continuing on the preservation theme, the symposium organizers were wise to include representatives describing two different approaches to digital preservation.  Linda Freuh, a Project Manager from the Internet Archive, discussed that organization's approach: a centralized model, whereby the Internet Archive harvests blogs and stores them on their own servers.  Stanford's LOCKSS model, however, takes a different strategy, advocating a distributed approach to preservation, whereby multiple institutions preserve the same digital resource.  LOCKSS stands for "Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe."

The entire list of speakers can be found here.

Once the panel discussions ended, attendees broke up into working groups roughly divided along themes raised throughout the day--selection, preservation, research, and so forth--and brainstormed about ways of tackling these issues.  Lots of great ideas were bandied about, but there was a common thread among all of them: when selecting which blogs to preserve and decided how to preserve them, libraries are encouraged to form partnerships with peer institutions rather than "going it alone."

In the end, the "Future of Today's Legal Scholarship" symposium provided a lively forum for reflection about the rise of the law blogosphere, its impact on legal research, and the major challenges facing law libraries as they attempt to provide access to these and other digital resources in perpetuity.  I consider the day an unqualified success.  Bob Oakley would have been proud.

  

Looking for the electronic version of a journal?  Looking for the print version?  Biddle Law Library can help.  Just click on the link to the Library’s A-Z journal list below, and you are on your way.

http://kv9zt7xr9l.search.serialssolutions.com/

Once on the A-Z list page, choose a search from the dropdown menu, or feel free to browse.  To browse, click on the letter corresponding with the first letter of the journal title.

  

Biddle’s A-Z list displays search results in an easy-to-read manner.  Immediately under the title, a link to library print holdings displays first.  This will help you determine what physical journal issues the library has and where they are located.   If Biddle offers access to the full-text electronic version of the same title, that information, along with a link to the e-version, will appear below the print holdings.  If you don't locate a journal in Biddle's A-Z list, be sure to check the Penn Library's E-Journals link.  This will take you to the University's larger journal holdings.

Don’t forget to bookmark the A-Z list link!  It will definitely come in handy and will save you time.

Dear Online Search Expert,

I am an experienced searcher. I use Google all the time, but I am new to Westlaw. When I searched the Westlaw databases ALLSTATES, ALLCASES with the terms "power of attorney" and "conservator," it turned up the maximum of ten thousand documents. I modified it as follows: "power of attorney," "conservator," "new york," and I still got the same maximum of ten thousand documents. Something went wrong. What happened?

Frustrated 2L
 

Dear Frustrated 2L,

There are a couple of factors at work here.  Let's explore them.

First, we need to look at which databases you selected. If you had chosen a more relevant database, you would have received fewer, but more appropriate results. In short, selecting the right jurisdictional databases limits your results to relevant authority.

Similarly in legal practice, selecting a multi-jurisdictional database, whether in Lexis or Westlaw, will cost more than selecting a limited jurisdictional database. Larger more all encompassing databases are more expensive than smaller more relevant jurisdictional databases, resulting in less cost and better results. This will allow you to spend more time with analysis and writing.

Second, your search query can be improved. Adding terms narrows a Google search, but adding additional terms does the opposite with Westlaw. This has to do with Boolean connectors, such as AND or OR. Where there is no express connector, Google implies an AND between terms. On the other hand, Westlaw implies an OR, increasing the number of results.

Westlaw limits search results at 10,000 to reduce unnecessary strain on its servers, caused by poorly constructed search queries. In your case, adding "new york" would have increased the actual number of results from the hundreds of thousands into the millions.

What would I have done? I would have chosen a New York cases database like NY-CS. I would also have wanted "power of attorney" and "conservator" to be near each other in the discussion.   To do this, I would have run a search with a proximity connector (such as "/p" to search terms within the same paragraph) instead of an implied OR. Therefore, one search would be: "power of attorney" /p conservator. Using this search, results in 24 manageable cases.

Thanks for asking,
Online Search Expert