Biddleblog

Does anyone in the Penn Law community use Twitter? If so, the Biddle librarians would like to know. (More after the jump.)

Welcome and welcome back!

Some of you who have been around here in the past might have noticed that we like to create at least one technology-related exhibit per year. Last year, we displayed some library resources related to copyright alternatives, including the "copyleft" and "free software" movements, and Creative Commons. This time, we thought we'd kick off the year taking a look at yet another emerging topic in law and society: the Open Source movement.

An eagle-eyed Biddle patron might notice that we've recycled some of our materials from the "Alternatives to Copyright" exhibit. This is by design, because Open Source does often challenge traditional understanding of ownership and intellectual property.

We've broken the exhibit into three main topics. The main display case (pictured above) provides an overview of the Open Source movement, including some prominent examples--tech geeks will notice the the Linux penguin, an icon of open source. The other two cases deal with Open Education and Open Law, both of which Penn Law School's faculty and journals have contributed to in a number of ways.

As the center for information on campus, the Biddle Law Library is always interested in alternative models to the distribution, creation, and accumulation of knowledge. The Open Source movement engages a variety of cultural, educational, and legal topics. We hope our fall exhibit on the topic will answer some questions and raise even more.

Check back with the Biddleblog for regular updates on some of the things we're working on and thinking about. Enjoy the year!

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.

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.

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.

 

The 2008 Presidential Campaign was an exciting and historically significant race of special interest to legal and political researchers. The importance of the issues and the biographies of the candidates ensured this race a place in history. However, this election cycle also marked the advent of new ways to involve the average citizen in the campaign process. Web 2.0 technolgies were applied to politics through the use of sophisticated, interactive websites and social networking tools. Interested observers were given unprecedented access to information. 

The election may be over, but your access to the issues doesn't have to end with Inauguration Day. The Obama administration has committed itself to transparent government, which is a boon for legal reseachers. A great place to begin exploring the Executive Branch is the the official website of the White House. This site offers many useful resources to the legal researcher, including videos, audio clips, blogs, position statements, and the text of important Executive actions.

The home page highlights recent important events with video clips and links. Notice that in the upper right hand corner, you have the option to sign up for email updates. The main page also offers you a basic keyword search feature. Scrolling down to the bottom of the page allows you the option of viewing the page in Spanish or reading copyright and privacy policies.

The Briefing Room portion of the site features a frequently updated blog that reports on the activities of the President and Vice President.The Briefing Room also holds the text of all Executive Orders,  Presidential Proclamations, and the the names and positions of all Presidential Appointments and Nominations.

Another useful feature of the site is the Agenda page. This portion of the site explains the Obama administration's position on a number of important issues, such as the economy, Iraq, and the environment.

The White House site also quickly links you to important government officials through the Administration page. Short biographies and appropriate website addresses are available for the President, First Lady, Vice President, the Cabinet, White House Staff, and Executive Office staff. Information on the branches of government and federal agencies and commissions is available through the section of the site entitled "Our Government".

It is important to note that the White House site only contains information on the current administration. To access documents from past administrations, use GPOAccess, as explained in the Nov. 25th Biddleblog post.

In the case of the Detroit Free Press v. Ashcroft (303 F.3d 631), Judge Damon J. Keith stated "Democracies die behind closed doors." The Obama administration has pledged itself to transparent government. A good way to monitor this committment is through the White House website.

Are the doors of our government truly open? Visit the White House site and form your own judgment on the Obama administration's "Open House" policy.

Biddle Law Library at the University of Pennsylvania Law School will host the first MidAtlantic Academic Law Libraries Symposium on March 13, 2009. The symposium is being sponsored by  Bloomberg, Law Division.

The morning session will feature John Palfrey, Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School and a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society will deliver the keynote speech. 

In the afternoon Jordon Steele, Archivist at Biddle,  will facilitate a panel on blogs in academic law libraries and Ed Greenlee, Associate Director for  Public Services at Biddle will moderate a panel on the role of Facebook in academic law libraries.

A few of the institutions attending include the law libraries at Duke, Fordham, Howard, Cardozo,
Hofstra, University of Maryland and University of Pittsburgh.

Ed Greenlee and Tim Von Dulm, Reference Librarian, are the co-organizers of the symposium.

For more information,  please email Ed Greenlee at egreenle@law.upenn.edu. 

 

I am posting this entry on behalf of our reference intern, Michele Penn, who brought this very cool site to my attention.--Jordon

Are you trying to find text of Senate debate on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (a.k.a. the "Stimulus Package")? What about a presidential signing statement from 2003? How long would it take for you to find those documents, and which web sites would you use?

Two government watchdog organizations, OpenTheGovernment.org and the Sunlight Foundation, have teamed with a nonprofit technology organization, the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), to create a web site, ShowUsTheData.org.  The site asks users to nominate and vote on which unclassified federal government documents should be available online.  Here, "online" means findability and access in places other than official ".gov" sites. According to the web site's documentation, the goal of the project is to "encourage open government and citizen participation in democracy through full disclosure of unclassified government documents in open, interoperable formats."  Visitors to the site can suggest a document created by any of the three branches of government or vote on up to three "Most Requested Documents." 

The collaborators on this project do not accuse the federal government of hiding or limiting access to government information; rather, the argument is that most web users look to commercial search engines for government information, and that information is difficult to find there or not there at all (because departments and agencies do not open their sites to web crawlers). The E-Government Act of 2002 has made government documents easier to find, but the bill to reauthorize the Act died in committee last fall. Government documents are organized by branch on GPOAccess.gov, but that site can be cumbersome for inexperienced searchers and users who are not aware of government jargon. Groups like the CDT and the Sunlight Foundation want for documents to be accessible where most people first tend to look: the commercial search engine.

This project is timely, as the Obama administration has committed to open government and transparency in governmental action. Whether for a clerkship or personal use, it is likely that you will have a need to find government documents. Check out ShowUsTheData.org to vote for the documents you'd like to feature more prominently on the web.

 

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.

Q:  Which Penn Law School faculty members can be downloaded from iTunes?  (Read on for the answer.)

 

We recently read about the release of Penn law student Andrew Bingham’s first album, “A Hoarder Wants to Give,” available on iTunes.  But faculty on iTunes?  Yes.  Think beyond music… 

 

 

On the top bar of your iTunes web page is a link to iTunes U, standing for iTunes University.  iTunes U provides access to over 200,000 free educational audio and video downloads by eminent scholars and thinkers from universities, museums and other cultural institutions.  Downloads are saved in an iTunes U Library folder on your iTunes page and can be viewed or listened to on your iPhone, iPod, or on your computer.

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Find an interesting New York Times article but need to study for your Civil Procedure exam? Save articles to read later with Instapaper or Read it Later, two web tools with mobile applications that allow you to save articles to read later from your computer, smartphone, iPad, or even e-reading device.

Using Instapaper or Read it Later is similar to bookmarking (i.e. saving) a link but both provide more functionality. Use either service to save online articles to read from anywhere by visiting just one website or by using a compatible mobile application.

Using either Instapaper or Read it Later is relatively straightforward:

• Begin by creating an account with either service
• After creating your account, you can install a button in your web browser that will allow you to save an item quickly. Installation is simple and takes less than a minute.
• Next time you see an article you would like to read later, just push the button on your browser to save it to your account. Both applications save the text of the article on your screen, so if your article has multiple pages you should first click on the print view to retrieve the full text, then click on Instapaper's or Read it Later's save button so that the application saves the entire article.

To read your saved articles, just log in to your account to access all articles. However, there are other ways to access your account information, including the option to read your saved articles without web access. For example, you can install mobile applications for Instapaper or Read It Later on your iPhone or iPad, Android smartphones, or your Blackberry. By using these applications, your articles will sync to your mobile device so that you can read your saved articles even when your phone or iPad does not have internet access. As a result, both applications can help you stay up-to-date from anywhere and are perhaps perfect for the commute to and from the law school!

Both Instapaper or Read it Later will work on your favorite nonlaw news sites or blogs, but you can also try using these applications to stay up-to-date on legal news and the legal profession by saving articles from sites such as Law.com,  SCOTUSblog or one of the blogs listed at Law Professor Blogs. Happy reading!

 

 

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. 

By Jennifer Huck, Systems and Emerging Technologies Librarian

There are so many productivity tools out there, sometimes it is hard to know where to begin.  Never fear!  Here are three well-regarded productivity applications that you might find useful.  These applications all have “cloud” storage in common.  This makes it easy to access and sync your documents or share with colleagues quickly and easily, no matter where you are or what device you are using.

Google Docs:

Google Docs is a suite of products that allows you to create documents online, including text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and drawings, as well as forms for websites.  You can access your documents as long as you have an Internet connection.  You can share documents with other collaborators, making it an excellent tool for students and faculty working on academic or extracurricular group projects.  The best part is that you can collaboratively edit at the same time and see who is making what changes.  You can also chat live with your collaborators in a sidebar.  Google Docs are also excellent for creating final, polished documents.     

Google Docs is available via web login and as an Android app.  Free.