As a Vietnam Veteran, I find the Iraq situation fascinating. (More after the jump.)

Think blogs are fair game for citation in law review and journal articles, and even court opinions? You're not alone. (More after the jump.)

When I worked in the University of Pennsylvania’s Van Pelt Library, I spent much time browsing the DS 500 area of the stacks for books on the Vietnam War. (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 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

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.

Reference librarians like to help people find useful information; it is one of the joys of our jobs.  Recently, I have been asked by several patrons where they can access PDF copies of information produced by the Federal Government.  As a reference librarian, I enjoy these kinds of questions because they provide terrific opportunities to both assist and educate patrons on a legal resource available, available to anyone free of charge, through the Government Printing Office (GPO).

The GPO is the Federal Government's primary centralized resource for gathering, cataloging, producing, providing, authenticating, and preserving published Federal Government information in all its forms.  The GPO's core mission--"Keeping America Informed"--dates to 1813, and it is this inherent function of government that GPO carries out on behalf of the public for all three branches of government and many of the federal agencies. 

One of the ways that GPO produces and distributes information products and services is through online access via their GPO Access website.  The information provided on this site is the official U.S. Government published version, and GPO Access makes approximately a quarter million titles available to the public.  Moreover, through GPO's partner websites, an additional half million titles are accessible.

The GPO has done a terrific job organizing access to materials produced by the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches of our Federal Government.  Visiting these sites, you will encounter the kinds of resources reference librarians are asked about on a a daily basis such as the Legislative History of Bills, the Congressional Record, Conference and Committee Reports, Public and Private Laws, the Statutes at Large, the U.S. Code, the Code of Federal Regulations, the Federal Register, and Court Opinions, just to name a few.  It is important to note however, that excepting the Supreme Court materials, GPO Access only provides historical access to resources dating back to the 1990s.

GPO Access is a terrific resource that is both free and easy to use.  With just a little practice, researchers can save themselves and their clients a great deal of money by pulling resources from this open source.

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.

When you put a title in Biddle's online catalog, LOLA, often you will see a result like the following: 

LEWIS          KB78.a8 U58c          ASK CIRC DESK

This means you need to go to the Circulation Desk and fill out a request to have the book pulled from our Lewis Collection in Silverman Hall.  Seems easy enough.  But what happens when disaster strikes?

On Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 water was discovered on the floor of the 5th floor stacks in the Lewis Collection in Silverman Hall.  During the night water had flowed across the floor and seeped down into the lower floors.  The books on the 3rd and 4th floors had absorbed water like sponges.  In some cases the books swelled so much, the ends of the metal shelves bent, the shelves dropped out from below, but the books still stayed up in the air!

Once the flooding was discovered, University representatives from the Office of Risk Management and Insurance arrived to evaluate the situation and contacted Belfor, a remediation company that handles property restoration for the Penn.  Belfor set up fans and dehumidifers and began collecting and boxing the wet books, marking the boxes to indicate their location in the stacks.  By the following Wednesday, books were still being collected and boxed, fans and dehumidifers were still running.

After boxing up the books, Belfore then froze them to stop possible mold growth.  The books were then run through a freeze dry chamber and dried.  Once dry, mold cannot grow, since the main component to grow mold--moisture--is removed.  After the books are processed, they inspect them for growth and can then clean them with a special vaccuum cleaner called a HEPA vac.   Paintstaking and time-consuming, this process t is still being performed on some of the collection.

The Library had expected to start receiving books back in a few weeks.  In late June, 288 boxes of books were ready to be returned, but a humidity report had to be run in the stacks before we could bring back the books.   The humidity analysis was completed in mid-July, but asbestos was found in the floor tiles that were damaged.  So, a bid was put out and in late August the asbestos abatement was done by a different contractor.    

It was the end of October before the floor tiles were replaced and on November 12th five coats of wax were put over the new tiles.  On Tuesday, November 18th the first shipment of books was returned.  We now receive 120 boxes of books every Tuesday and Thursday.  We expect there to be just under 3,000 boxes total with anywhere from five to twenty books in a box. 

 We decided that our staff would unload the books so we can "fine tune" them as we shelve.  The remediation company boxes them slightly out of order, which slowed the reshelving process, but we expected that.  Some of the books are sad to look at but they are more useful that way then if we did not have them at all.

  

I had a little experience with this when i worked in a small US Department of Agriculture Research Library.  Our books stored in the basement were damaged when an outside drain became backed up and rainwater came under a door.   Fortunately the chemist were doing a freeze-drying project with vegetables and we put each book one by one in the freeze dryer they were using for the vegetables! 

If I were to give advice at this point, it would suggest that one number both the boxes and the shelves.  While our aisles are numbered in our storage library, each shelf does not have a unique number on it.  This means that the person who numbered the box and filled it with the wet books could use a different point of reference than the person unboxing the dry books.  You can see how this means that there might be shelving errors.

Reconstriucting the Lewis Collection continues to be a work in progress.  But we look forward to restoring access to one of the great circulating legal monograph collections in the country--box by box.

Some additional images that might interest you are after the jump.

You’ve heard that a regulation is due any day now, and you can’t wait to see it.  Where do you turn? 

The Office of the Federal Register has created the Public Inspection Desk to provide online access to materials that will be published in the Federal Register.  Typescript copies are available as PDFs.  Many federal agencies have been doing this for some time (e.g., the SEC) and probably will remain sources for advance copies of rules, regs and notices that will be published in Federal Register materials.  However, one of the most useful features of the Public Inspection Desk is the target date of publication.  If you are going to work in a regulatory practice, you will want to save this link: http://www.federalregister.gov/inspection.aspx.

This is only part of the story.  Federal rules and regulations touch on all aspects of our lives.  We know that new rules appear in the Federal Register.  And we also know that those rules are codified as regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR).  The Feds have even worked out how to help you find current regulations with nearly one-stop shopping – in the eCFR.

If you want to learn more about federal regulations and research in administrative law, I'll be conducting a presentation entitled "Administrative Law: Federal Rules and Regulations" at noon on February 23, 2009 in G-214.  Please contact me to sign up, as pizza will be provided.

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.

If you have access to Biddle Law Library's electronic resources, you now have access to a new database: AudioCaseFiles (ACF). ACF provides multimedia access to audio opinions and trial video. You can search by course or casebook to locate material from 1L classes and 2L and 3L subjects.                                                           

Through streaming video, visitors to the site canl watch practitioners argue cases on products liability, antitrust, mergers and acquisitions, and other areas of the law. You can listen to the audio content through your computer or download it in MP3 format. Streaming trial video is also available.

 

As we enter the March Madness of The Final Four, here is a legal research tip that should help you to visualize the relationships between four primary legal sources.  I like to call them "The Big Four."

The Big Four comprises the following four resources: Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register and Code of Federal Regulations.   Even if you forget the mechanics of moving from any one quadrant to the other three--as in basketball, practice makes perfect--you will be ahead of the game in your summer or permanent job if you can internalize the basic concepts portrayed in the chart below. 

You may also download this chart by clicking the following link: big four09.pdf.

The top 2 boxes in the Big Four chart are statutes passed by Congress.  The bottom 2 are regulations written by agency officials.  The bottom 2 are sometimes called "delegated legislation" because they cannot exist without statutory authority. 

It is also useful to read this chart from left to right.  The left 2 boxes are the chronological, historical record, while the 2 on the right are current, subject-arranged codes with obsolete matters dropped.   The left 2 are useful for legislative history and background information on regulations.  The right 2 are essential for practicing law today.  However, sometimes you have to consult the left 2 boxes for very recent laws, such as President Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, because they haven't yet migrated to their codified versions on the right.

The chart above shows a familiar statute, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  This is the title that forbids discrimination in employment on the basis of "race, color, religion, sex or national origin."  But how do you find it?  A glance at the chart will tell you that Title VII is the original title in the 1964 session law--not the title in the current U.S. Code, i.e. 42.  The move from left to right quadrants is one that even Scottie Reynolds might miss because it is a change in both number (7 to 42) as well as form (Roman to arabic). 

Things can get even more complicated when you realize that the 50 titles of the U.S. Code are usually not the same as the 50 titles of the C.F.R.  Conversion tables in paper are readily available in any law library or online on Westlaw.

Reference librarians in Biddle love to help people navigate the legislative/regulatory maze.   If you have any questions, stop by the Reference Desk anytime or call 215-898-7853.

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.

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

 

Throughout their law school careers, Penn Law students must complete 70 hours of pro bono service. While fulfilling this requirement, many students may encounter an unfamiliar and somewhat arcane system – the Philadelphia courts. Other students end up involved in a Philadelphia court case through a clinic, or through a summer job. This first encounter tends to be fraught with uncertainty, awkwardness, and the unpleasant feeling that you simply do not know what you are doing. Although these feelings are a natural result of lack of experience, with some simple background on the workings of local courts, sheer terror is avoidable.

 

Have you ever wanted to read the actual appellant’s brief submitted by Thurgood Marshall in Brown v. Board of Education?   Maybe you are stuck conducting a cite checking assignment for the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and would like to examine an electronic copy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. classic treatise The Common Law (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1881) from the comfort of your living room.   Or perhaps you would like to read the actual transcripts of the Scopes Monkey Trial after watching Spencer Tracy in Inherit the Wind.   Fortunately, these and thousands of other historical resources are readily available to you via the Making of Modern Law databases. (More after the jump)

You find a reference to a book or an article that is on point for a seminar paper – but it isn’t at Biddle, on campus, or available as a pdf. Do you give up in defeat and look for a substitute resource that you can get on campus? Your topic is somewhat obscure and a search of LOLA and Franklin by subject or keyword just doesn’t give you the “right” hits. Are you resigned to look for a new topic?

   

 

If you’ve ever tried to conduct a complicated conversation over email with multiple people, you know how challenging it can be to untangle discussions of several topics over many email threads. If the conversation also involves trading a document back and forth for editing, it can be even tougher to keep everyone current.

 

Would you like to see the research that helps Congress frame issues?  If so, you will want to look the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports. 

As an agency of the Library of Congress, CRS functions as the "personal librarian" to congressional members, providing comprehensive research on timely issues.  Members of Congress "ask CRS to provide background information and analysis on issues and events so they can better understand the existing situation and then assess whether there is a problem requiring a legislative remedy . . . .  CRS [also] attempts to assess emerging issues and developing problems so that it will be prepared to assist the Congress if and when it becomes necessary" (The Congressional Research Service and the American Legislative Process, 2008). 

CRS reports provide in-depth, non-partisan analysis of topical policy issues – supplying background information, relevant laws, statistical data, research citations, and more.  The reports are succinct and focus on framing each issue within a legislative framework.  In some cases, the reports may even be foretelling.  For example, a 2006 version of the below report stated that "the threat of oil spills raises the question of whether US officials have the necessary resources at hand to respond to a major spill." 

 

Have a research project involving foreign or international law for your coursework or journal, clinic or public service-related activities? 

 

 

    
Lexis and Westlaw research terminals at the Biddle Law Library, 1984

Online legal research platforms have come a long way since the days of a dedicated Lexis or Westlaw terminal, and this month the Penn Law community has access to the newest development in online legal research, WestlawNext.

WestlawNext looks and performs very differently from classic Westlaw. Some examples of differences between these two research platforms are:

• Unlike classic Westlaw, WestlawNext does not require that you select a database before you begin your search.
• WestlawNext searches do not require boolean search operators. As a result, searching in WestlawNext is more similar to a natural language search in classic Westlaw.
• Printing from WestlawNext to the dedicated Westlaw printers in the law school is currently not supported. You must bring up a document in classic Westlaw to print from the Westlaw printers.
• WestlawNext offers the ability to annotate materials online, organize materials in folders, and send documents to your Kindle e-reader device.
• Not all content available in classic Westlaw is available to search on WestlawNext. If you are curious about whether a specific resource is available on WestlawNext, you can search for the title in the main search box, browse WestlawNext to locate your title, or ask a reference librarian for assistance. 

For more information on the differences between WestlawNext and classic Westlaw, consult Westlaw's own guide, Comparing Westlaw and WestlawNext. If you're interested in responses to WestlawNext, a roundup of reviews is available here.

Generally, users more familiar and comfortable with Google searching might prefer WestlawNext and researchers that like more control over their searches and results may prefer classic Westlaw. Knowing how to navigate both systems is essential, as legal practitioners may have access to only one (or none) of these systems in their practices. For assistance with WestlawNext, speak with a reference librarian or attend a WestlawNext training sessions provided by the law library early this spring semester (dates and times to be announced).

Many thanks to my colleague Jordon Steele and the Biddle Archives for locating excellent examples of Biddle Law Library's old Westlaw and Lexis terminals.

       

We all love HeinOnline’s easy access to law review and journal articles, but did you also know Hein is a great tool for foreign and international legal research?

HeinOnline is an especially user-friendly resource for treaty research. All of the major sources for finding treaties and executive agreements to which the United States is a party can be found in the . The Treaties and Agreements Library contains all of the official publications for U.S. treaties, including Statutes at Large, Treaties and International Agreements (TIAS) and United States Treaties (UST), as well as Treaties in Force, the U.S. State Department’s annual index of treaties and international agreements currently in effect. This library also provides access to the unofficial but very reliable KAV Agreements series and its finding tool, Kavass’s Current Treaty Index, for agreements too recent to have been published in official sources yet. Additional finding tools, guides and secondary sources on the law of treaties can be found in this library to assist your research. For treaties deposited with the United Nations Secretary-General, go instead to the United Nations Law Collection, where you can quickly retrieve a treaty using its United Nations Treaty Series (UNTS) citation, or search for treaties by keyword, name, or member states using the “Search for a Treaty” feature.

Decisions and documents of the major international tribunals, including the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (INTLOS) can also be found in the United Nations Law Collection. Documents from the post-World War II Nuremberg and Tokyo criminal tribunals are accessible in the World Trials Library, along with a wealth of historical trials material. For decisions of the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ), look in the Foreign & International Law Resources Database, which also offers access to many yearbooks and digests for research into specific areas of international law. 

HeinOnline’s newest library, World Constitutions Illustrated, is an excellent resource for comparative and historical constitutional research. In this library, you can readily find current and prior constitutions for every country of the world, with at least one English translation available for each non-English-speaking country. The World Constitutions Illustrated library also includes a variety of books, periodicals and other sources on the constitutional law of each country to enhance your research.

HeinOnline libraries provide even more resources for specialized questions. For example, if your research involves foreign policy questions, the Foreign Relations of the United States library incorporates Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), the State Department’s official documentary history of major foreign policy decisions, plus additional U.S. foreign policy documents. If your project focuses on historical English law, the English Reports library contains a full reprint of English Reports, comprising the important English cases from 1220-1867, and Statutes of the Realm, containing English legislation from 1235-1713.

If you would like pointers on how to use HeinOnline’s tools for foreign and international law research or help in developing a research strategy for your project, email Gabriela Femenia, Foreign and International Law Librarian, at gfemenia@law.upenn.edu, or stop by Tanenbaum 412.

 

 

 

(This is a modification of a 2009 legal research blog post that you may find useful)

Going to California to clerk for the summer or to begin a full-time practice? Given today’s challenging economic climate, you may want to consider eschewing traditional fee-based databases (e.g. Lexis and Westlaw) and instead take advantage of free (and reliable) internet resources to conduct basic California research.

For students doing clerkships in New Jersey or law graduates working for firms and other organizations in the state, there are a number of legal research resources freely available on the internet. Many of the websites listed below are maintained by the state government and other reputable information providers. Maximize your searching skills and minimize the expense of your legal research by making use of these tools before you use Westlaw or Lexis.

The Biddle Law Library recently acquired ProQuest Legislative Insight, a new database to assist with your legislative history research.

Like Penn's subscription to ProQuest Congressional (formerly LexisNexis Congressional), ProQuest Legislative Insight provides full-text PDF scans of many legislative documents. Unlike ProQuest Congressional, Legislative Insight organizes these documents by their affiliation with a particular piece of (passed) legislation.

For example, if you want to research Public Law 90-209, the National Park Foundation Act, you can search Legislative Insight for this particular law by name or citation. Since this Act is included in Legislative Insight's database, all documents affiliated with this act are available as full-text PDF scans. In ProQuest Congressional, whether or not the full text of the same documents is available depends on the year the document was created and ProQuest Congressional's subscription coverage.

Try turning to Legislative Insight first if you are researching a bill that was passed into law. While not all laws are included in this database, if Legislative Insight covers that bill you will have the full text of that particular legislative history available to you. If it is not available, make sure to still consult ProQuest Congressional or ask a reference librarian for assistance.

 

Biddle Law Library has recently acquired several electronic resources useful for those interested in foreign law research.

Israel Law Reports, the reporter for key Supreme Court of Israel decisions in English translation, is now available as part of HeinOnline. By selecting the Israel Law Reports library on HeinOnline, you can browse the published cases or conduct keyword searches on the contents to find cases on a particular topic. The Israel Law Review is also available as part of this library. If you prefer to see the cases in hard copy, Biddle also receives Israel Law Reports, formerly Selected Judgments of the Supreme Court of Israel, in print, as well as reporters for the Supreme Court and rabbinical courts in the original Hebrew.

Manupatra is the leading database of Indian law. It contains full-text cases from the Supreme Court of India and the state High Courts, as well as decisions of various specialized tribunals, commissions and boards.  In addition to the text of national and state legislation and regulations, Manupatra offers commentaries on selected key acts and a variety of other useful secondary sources. Material in Manupatra can be searched by subject or keyword, and cases include citator functionality. Because access to this database involves an extra step, please see the LOLA entry for Manupatra for instructions on how to start using it.

While vLex is a globally-oriented database presenting primary and secondary legal resources for 134 countries and international organizations, it is particularly helpful for those researching the law of Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. vLex provides the full text of constitutions, legislation and legal codes, plus law journals, newspapers, and treatises, all searchable in multiple languages. Please note that although vLex includes a translation feature, the translations produced are not official and are only intended to help researchers use the material within vLex.

For assistance accessing and using these and other Biddle foreign law databases, and with help planning and conducting research in foreign law, email Gabriela Femenia, Foreign and International Law Librarian, at gfemenia@law.upenn.edu, or stop by Tanenbaum 412.

You need to find books for a research paper on antitrust in baseball. Are you a Shelf Browser or a LOLA Browser? Do you find the area in the Biddle stacks where books on your topic are shelved and browse, making you a Shelf Browser? Or are you a LOLA Browser, searching for books using Biddle’s online catalog? While both methods will help you find relevant materials, if you only use the Shelf Browser method you may be missing important titles.

The ideal is to use both methods. There’s nothing wrong with browsing, and it can be rewarding to surreptitiously find a key resource. But not all books on your topic will be in the same shelf area due to either different subject content or to a shelving location. Biddle has several shelving locations – Biddle, Closed Reserve, Reserve Reading Room, and Lewis to name a few. In addition, a LOLA record will provide links to online pdfs and databases. 

 
 

 

Reviewed by Tim Von Dulm, Head of Reference Services

Are you new to the law and confused about how to read legal citations and approach legal research problems? Maybe you would like to learn about how to conduct federal legislative histories?  Perhaps you are looking for credible and authoritative recommendations for legal self-help resources?  Or maybe you are already familiar with the basics of legal research but would appreciate ready access to a reliable legal research reference resource to serve as a refresher for any questions you might have.

 

If any of these situations apply to you, then consider yourself in luck.  The Public Access to Legal Information Committee of the Southern California Association of Law Libraries (SCALL) recently published a revised version of their wonderful legal reference resource Locating the Law: A Handbook for Non-Law Librarians, 5th ed. ("Handbook").

The Handbook includes twelve chapters and four appendices directly relevant to the most common issues faced by legal researchers.  Although a significant portion of the text is understandably devoted to California legal resources and agencies,  chapters within the Handbook on "Basic Legal Research Techniques," "How to Read a Legal Citation," "Federal Law" and bibliographies and appendices on "Self-Help Resources" and "Common Abbreviations in the Law" contain relevant advice and information to researchers across jurisdictions.   Conveniently, most of the chapters and appendices facilitate the research process by including direct hyperlinks to many of the resources and agencies discussed therein. 

So what's stopping you?  Get crackin' on the legal research.  And if you still come across some thorny research problem that the SCALL Handbook cannot assist you with, don't hesitate to stop by and talk with one of the knowledgeable and friendly Biddle reference librarians, who are familiar with numerous alternative resources and who are happy to assist with your research. 

 

Check out the new Penn Law edition of LibX, a browser add-on that can be used to quickly get access to library resources.

Installing LibX

Download LibX for Firefox (version 5.0 and higher) or Google Chrome. After it is installed, the LibX icon should appear to the right of your browser's address bar.

Using LibX

The Penn Law edition of LibX includes the following features:

• Resource search: Click the LibX icon to search various resources including Biddle's online catalog (LOLA), HeinOnline, Westlaw Next, LexisNexis, and JSTOR. You can also highlight text on a page and right-click it to search the library catalog.






• Embedded Cues: When you see the LibX icon on sites like Amazon, click it to see if the resource is available at Biddle.






• Off-campus? Use LibX to reload a page via Biddle's proxy server so that it appears as though you are accessing the page from on-campus.

For help with installing or using LibX, contact Shenika McAlister, the Serials/Electronic Resources Librarian.

 

By Merle Slyhoff, Collection Development Librarian

Many law students and faculty depend on the William S. Hein Company for easy access to pdfs of journal articles, U.S. Code, U.N. materials and more.   Access is now even easier with the new HeinOnline app. 

 

Biddle Law Library subscribes to three bilingual Chinese law databases.  In November 2011, iSinolaw entered into a cooperative agreement with Thomson Reuters.  As a result of this agreement, iSinolaw was replaced by Westlaw China on February 14, 2012.

By Genevieve Tung, Biddle Law Library Intern

 

Biddle Law Library recently acquired four Lexis Nexis databases of foreign law, to assist in researching Chinese law, Canadian law, French law, and European Union law.

Written by Mark Popielarski, Biddle Intern.

Our nation’s capital is a popular destination for legal professionals.  Here are some free legal resources which may aid in conducting District of Columbia research.

 Courts

District of Columbia Courts – Official website for the D.C. Court System.  Court cases for all divisions are available online, but the interface requires specific information to locate cases.  See instructions on how to navigate and use the system.  The Superior Court homepage provides information about the court’s different divisions and contains links to the court’s rules, administrative orders, and forms.  Useful information available on the Court of Appeals site, include rules and forms.

U.S. District Court for DC – Official site provides access to opinions (2005-present), rules & forms.

U.S. Court of Appeals DC Circuit – The website provides useful information related to the court including opinions (1997-present), rules, and forms.