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Library
New & Notable on the Web
June 2009
Developments on the Legal Web
Martindale-Hubbell Connected
“Professional networking site for lawyers.”
Govfresh.com
"GovFresh is a live feed of official news from U.S. Government Twitter, YouTube, RSS, Facebook, Flickr accounts and more, all in one place."
LexOpus
Authors “may upload works, make tem publicly viewable or not, submit to chosen journals and/or make works open to offers by law journals.”
FindACase Network
FastCase provides free searching of “state and federal case law, grouped by state.”
Flare Index to Treaties
“The Flare Index to Treaties is a searchable database of basic information on over 1,500 of the most significant multilateral treaties from 1856 to the present, with details of where the full text of each treaty may be obtained in paper and, if available, electronic form on the Internet.”
Search Engine Palooza!
Searchme
“Search for information, videos, music, images, news and more, and find the most relevant results displayed in a comprehensive blend of multimedia and non-multimedia web pages.”
Twine
A web 2.0 approach to searching, such as http://www.digg.com -“Discover information that matters to you, collect and share bookmarks and other content, receive recommendations based on your interests.”
Hakia
Applies “semantic” subject categorization technology to “credible Web sites recommended by librarians,” which will result in up to date listings of relevant information.
Bing
The latest iteration of the Microsoft windows live search engine provides added features such as cashback links for shoppers.
Wolfram Alfa
A “computational knowledge engine” whose strength is providing answers to mathematical and statistical questions.
May 2009
Database News
There were many developments on the fee database front so let’s jump right in:
Westlaw Password Changes
As of May 31, Westlaw will no longer accept your numerical Westlaw ID number to login. You will need to login with a custom username and password which you can update if you have not already done so by clicking on “Update” next to your name on the law school portal page.
Westlaw Printing Enhancements
Printing enhancements are coming including the ability to print only the statutory text if desired.
Westlaw Law School Exchange
The Law School Exchange, which allows law faculty to can publish and distribute articles, books, and other materials for research, teaching, and scholarly purposes is currently in beta mode. For more information and/or to signup for the beta release go to http://exchange.westlaw.com.
Westlaw on Twitter (http://twitter.com/)
Westlaw now has a Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/westlaw/, which provides quick news snippets about what is going on at Thomson West. If you sign up for a Twitter account you too can post “tweets” about your own current news developments. A law-specific version of Twitter can be found at http://tweetlaw.com/. Also see the twitter search at http://www.twithority.com.
Bureau of National Affairs (BNA)
The law library subscribes to over 100 online versions of BNA looseleafs and newsletters which can be found on the library databases webpage by title and subject. BNA has recently upgraded its user interface and it is worth a look if you are not already familiar with these materials. Titles include the online version of the Standard Federal Tax reporter, the Labor Law Reporter, the Securities Law Reporter, and the Daily Report for Executives. Many items allow you to signup for email highlight summaries as well as customization options such as favorite databases.
BNA US Law Week
Circuit split case summaries have made a welcome return to the BNA US Law Week database.
BNA on Lexis and Westlaw
As part of our subscription agreement with BNA, BNA content is available on Lexis and Westlaw for members of the Villanova Community.
Lexis New Attorney Hub (http://law.lexisnexis.com/webcenters/)
Lexis recently debuted an information center for new attorneys which may be of general interest. The “Hub” includes practice tips, podcasts, and legal news. Also of note is the LexisNexis News site at http://www.lexisnexis.com/news/.
April 2009 - Citation Managers
One of the more tedious writing chores is creating citations for footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies. Three major options are Endnote (http://www.endnote.com), Refworks (http://www.refworks.com/), and the free Zotero plugin for the Firefox web browser (http://www.zotero.org). Endnote has recently provided basic support for Bluebook (http://www.legalbluebook.com) legal citation styles. Refworks will reportedly follow suit. There is also a law-specific citation manager called Cite-It (http://www.citeit.com/) which supports both Bluebook and ALWD citation formats. Endnote and Refworks are available for use by members of the Villanova Law community via the Falvey library (http://library.villanova.edu/Help/FAQs/Refworks). Endnote and Cite-It software which must be downloaded to your computer while Refworks is a web-based program.
Citation managers have varying features, although nearly all of them allow you to “cite while you write,” or insert citations into your documents as you type them. You can insert notes and comments about the item and links to websites. Refworks allows you to share reference lists over the web. You can import information about books and articles from Googele Scholar (http://scholar.google.com) into Endnote (see the Google Scholar preferences), Refworks, and Zotero. Software such as Endnote have more features than web-based programs such as Refworks. However, this also makes the software products more difficult to use. If you are just starting out, you may want to try Refworks or Zotero to get a feel for using a citation manager. You can export your citations so you can migrate to another citation manager if necessary. Some tips to consider are:
1) Practice with a small set of five articles to get the hang of it first. As with any database, errors increase exponentially with the size.
2) Be careful with how you put the information in Endnote. For example, be uniform in how you input title information. Make sure you put the information in the database in a uniform manner. Do you capitalize each word in the title of an article? If you capitalize in some article titles but not in others the bibliography will look haphazard. Also, be sure to put the title in the database with the proper Bluebook abbreviation format. If you import from Google Scholar, for example, the entries from HeinOnline may or may not provide Bluebook abbreviations.
3) Be uniform in how you input author information. The author's name may or may not include middle initials when a citation is imported from a database. Some imports only include the author's last name and first initial. You will need to clean up these variations by hand.
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On the lighter side, subscribe to West’s “Headnote of the Day” email at http://westapps.west.thomson.com/westheadnote/hnod.asp.
Wordle (http://www.wordle.net) creates fun “word clouds” from text you provide.
March 2009
Westlaw – it’s not your father’s legal research. Westlaw has been steadily releasing software applications that go beyond basic searching:
Westlaw Watch (http://watch.westlaw.com) allows users to easily manage periodic monitoring of news and other databases for topics of interest.
CourtExpress (http://courtexpress.westlaw.com) is a docket research database.
Westlaw WebPlus (http://west.thomson.com/documentation/westlaw/wlawdoc/lawstu/webplus.pdf) provides a web search engine with a focus on legal information sites. Access via http://lawschool.westlaw.com.
Westlaw Litigator (http://litigator.westlaw.com), provides access to and demos of several specialty Westlaw tools, such as: Westlaw Legal Calendaring, which calculates specific litigation deadlines and adds the dates and deadlines to your calendar and Reports which provide at-a-glance analysis of attorney, judge or expert's litigation experience over time.
The Westlaw Litigator website also showcases LiveNote (http://www.livenote.com/), which aids with realtime transcript creation and transcript management as well as West BriefTools (http://west.thomson.com/westlaw/advantage/tools/brief-tools/), which allows users to insert flags, update briefs, and monitor citations using KeyCite.
A new offering from Westlaw is West First Focus, which integrates references to print and online materials from Thomson West on a specific topic of interest. First up, The Financial Crisis (http://west.thomson.com/products/first-focus/).
As a BNA subscriber, members of the law school community may access Web Watch, a current awareness tool from BNA at http://webwatch.bna.com. Web Watch provides links to documents related to recent “hot topics,” such as economic stimulus, green economy, and cybersecurity.
On the Obama watch, the askSam information retrieval service has created a searchable database of Obama speeches at http://www.asksam.com/ebooks/obama-speeches/. A short collection of Obama speeches, President Barack Obama in His Own Words is available at http://www.america.gov/publications/books/obama_speech.html.
Finally, on the lighter side, check out Wordle (http://www.wordle.net) a fun “toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. One blog used it to “visualize” the terms in licensing agreements at http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/22/another-way-to-look-at-terms-of-service-agreements-wordle-visualizations/.
February 2009 - The Free Access to Law Movement
Almost from the beginning of the web in the mid-1990’s, there have been efforts to provide free access to legal materials. Ralph Nader’s Taxpayer Asset Project (http://www.tap.org) was instrumental in obtaining U.S. Supreme Court opinions in electronic format via FOIA requests which are now available from many sources on the web, such as Findlaw (http://www.findlaw.com – now owned by West), and the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute (http://www.law.cornell.edu). LexisOne (http://www.lexisone.com) also provides free access to Supreme Court opinions and the last 10 years of state and federal decisions.
However, recently a new group of visionaries (see http://usefularts.us/2009/01/13/liberate-the-law/) have come to the forefront of the free access to law movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Access_to_Law_Movement), making further inroads on the fronts of open source access, acceptance of unpublished opinions (http://www.nonpublication.com/) and bringing “documents to the people.”
Justia (http://www.justia.com). Tim Stanley, original founder of Findlaw, has a new project with a similar goal, to provide as much free legal information on the internet as possible. Justia includes a free U.S. District Court and Court of Appeals database, as well as a free federal courts case filing database drawing from PACER records.
Public Library of Law (http://www.plol.org). Sponsored by the makers of Fastcase (http://www.fastcase.com), PLOL includes, statutes, regulations, and cases from the U.S. Supreme Court and Courts of Appeals as well as cases from all 50 states back to 1997.
Public Resource (http://public.resource.org). Public Resource is an organization which has as a state goal “Making Government Information More Accessible.” Many electronic government documents have been obtained by the group, including, they claim, more than 20% of the records available in Pacer. A recent wired magazine article profiles the group. See http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2008/12/open_pacer.
Altlaw (http://www.altlaw.org) aims to provide a search engine that will make case law easier to find. It currently includes Supreme Court opinions and federal court opinions going back about a decade. See http://usefularts.us/2009/01/13/liberate-the-law/.
PreCYdent (http://www.precydent.com). Spearheaded by a law professor, who wrote a work on social networks and the law, PreCYdent utilizes bibliometrics, or citation based searching. The developers claims more relevant results than in Lexis or Westlaw. See http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog/2008/01/law-prof-as-too.html.
Legal Education Commons (http://w.cali.org/lec), developed by CALI (http://www.cali.org) has partnered with Public Resource to provide free online searching of many federal court cases, in addition to a platform for sharing information generally amongst the law school community.
January 2009 - Inauguration Special
Change.gov (http://www.change.gov)
First up is the official website of the Obama Transition team, where you can get information on election issues, apply for jobs, and submit your suggestions for changing government for the better. The “plum book” of job openings is available at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/plumbook/.
Inauguration Day 2009
The District of Columbia’s official Inauguration information site at http://www.inauguration.dc.gov, the Presidential Inauguration Committee website at http://www.pic2009.org, and the official tourism site of Washington, D.C. at http://www.washington.org, are all good sources if you are traveling to see the event.
America.gov – Telling America’s Story (http://www.america.gov)
This interesting website from the U.S. Department of State (http://www.state.gov) features historical and cultural information about America provided for potential immigrants or others outside of the United States. Publications by this department in print are only distributed overseas, but web versions (often in PDF format) are available on topics such as the history and geography of the U.S., arts, literature, and other topics.
Public Papers of the Presidents
The White House (http://www.whitehouse.gov) will soon have a new occupant, and a new set of web pages. The official Bush Whitehouse electronic documents will be administered via National Archives (http://www.archives.gov) which administrates the presidential libraries. For example, the Clinton Presidential Library includes at http://www.clintonlibrary.gov/archivesearch.html several versions of its Whitehouse website. The National Archives is bracing for more than ten times the amount of electronic data as the Clinton White House (see article at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/washington/27archives.html).
There are various ways of finding public papers of presidents past. The official site for the series Public Papers of the Presidents is the Government Printing Office, or GPO at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/. Click on the “Presidential Materials” link on the top page. Archives.gov links to both National Archives and Presidential Library sources. For more information on Presidential Libraries, see the Congressional Research Service (CRS) report on Presidential Libraries (http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/secrecy/RS20825.pdf). In addition, see the American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/).
December 2008
Theme issue: Digital Archives and Repositories
There are many repositories of text and multimedia legal materials on the web outside of the more well known legal information portals such as Findlaw, Lexis One, the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute and Justia.
Famous Trials provides background material of various types on over 30 famous trials throughout history from the Trial of Socrates (399 BC) to the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui (2006). The materials provided vary, but may include transcript excerpts, biographies, and selected exhibits.
The United Nations Audio Visual Library of International Law provides “Historic Archives containing documents and audiovisual materials relating to the negotiation and adoption of significant legal instruments under the auspices of the United Nations,” a Lecture Series featuring a multimedia collection of lectures on international law topics and a Research Library which includes links to documents and research guides. Recommended by Matthew McGovern.
The Yale Law School Avalon Project includes several digital archives of documents related to law, legal history, and diplomacy. Documents lists are organized roughly by century. The project also maintains Project Diana, a human rights documents archive.
OpenCRS provides the text of Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports that normally are accessible only via a member of Congress. CRS is a division of the Library of Congress which provides reports on policy and current political events for members of Congress.
Public.Resource.Org, a non-profit organization devoted to “Making Government Information More Accessible,” has several archives of information from government agencies. The organization is currently involved in efforts to make federal legislative history material created and collected by the GAO (Government Accountability Office) between 1915 and the present available to the public. The material was provided to Westlaw and is the basis of the FED-LH database, which includes pdfs of a wide variety of legislative history materials for selected federal laws. Or, as Public.Resource puts it: “The Government Accountability Office shipped our federal legislative histories off to a multinational in return for a timeshare account …” More information on the controversy can be found at the Justia Law Technology & Legal Marketing Blog.
November 2008
Go Phillies!
In honor of the Phillies winning the World Series, this will be a special Philadelphia/Local themed issue of New and Notable on the Net.
The Philadelphia Lawyer
The Philadelphia Lawyer is a monthly magazine published by the Philadelphia Bar Association. Don’t miss this month’s issue which includes an article by Villanova Law’s very own Matthew McGovern on using a combination of print and online sources to find Pennsylvania regulatory materials. Click here for the article text.
PA Law Library
PA Law Library is a fee service provided by the Jenkins Law Library based in downtown Philadelphia. It includes U.S. Supreme Court Opinions, Third Circuit Opinions, PA Supreme Court, Superior Court, and Commonwealth court opinions. It also provides access to PA Attorney General Opinions, and PA Environmental Hearing Board cases. It includes opinions from the PA District and County Reports 3rd and 4th Series, as well as several reports not reported in the District and County reports. It also includes local court rules, a list of recent suits filed and an attorney directory. Members of the Law School community may access this service on campus by clicking on the "Law Databases" link.
HeinOnline
HeinOnline is pleased to introduce its newest library, the National Moot Court Competition. Now for the first time, you will have digital access in HeinOnline to the winning records and briefs from the 1st-58th annual National Moot Court Competitions. Now moot court team members can search the documents from 1950-2008 to find on point discussions from the briefs and records written by the winning teams. To access HeinOnline go to the Law Library webpage, and select “Law Databases.”
New York Times Historical Database
Falvey, Villanova's main library, has discontinued their New York Times microfilm subscription. Fortunately, though, for PDFs from the beginning of the publication up until the past 2 years or so, the New York Times Historical database should suffice to serve our research needs. You can access the main library databases at http://www.library.villanova.edu. Click on "Databases A-Z" and then "Historical New York Times (ProQuest)."
October 2008
Election 2008
As election day approaches you can get more information about the issues and candidates from websites such as Factcheck.org, Congress.org, and Real Clear Politics.
Lexis/Westlaw Directories
Ever wanted to find out if a publication is on Lexis or Westlaw without logging on? You can search the Westlaw directory online at http://directory.westlaw.com.
You can search the Lexis directory online at http://w3.nexis.com/sources/.
Happy Belated Constitution Day!
Constitution Day and Citizenship Day is celebrated September 17, the day the U.S. Constitutional Convention signed the Constitution in 1787. The Constitution is celebrated during Constitution Week, which this year was September 17 through September 23, 2008. Constitution Day/Week materials are still available at websites such as the National Constitution Center (which is based in Philadelphia), the National Center for Constitutional Studies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Legal Self-Help Sources
Interesting Web 2.0 community sources are springing up, such as Expert law and LawGuru. Whether some of these sites encourage the unauthorized practice of law is an open question. Good sources of information for legal referrals include the ABA Lawyer Referral Directory and LawHelp.
LawHelp for the various states such as Pennsylvania may include references to free interactive legal forms. For example, see the National Legal Services Document Assembly Server, which uses Hotdocs document assembly software from LexisNexis. Another place where you can see free samples of Hotdocs for creating legal forms is at the LexisOne website. Free registration is required to use LexisOne.
September 2008
Search the West Digest system on Westlaw
Click on “Key Numbers” at the top of the Westlaw Screen to access the West Digest system. You can search the digests in three ways: 1) do a keyword search of the digest system in the search box, 2) browse the digest system, or 3) use the KeySearch service to browse by legal issue.
Searching the web- through Lexis and Westlaw?
Both Lexis and Westlaw have recently introduced web search services which are advertised to search law related websites. Westlaw’s services is called WestlawWebPlus and can be accessed via the Westlaw lawschool portal page, or the “Search the Web” tab which can be added by clicking on the “add a tab” link. Lexis’s "Lexis Web is a legal-specific search engine that serves up free Web content only from legal sites validated by LexisNexis attorney editors."
Docket Developments
Another new Westlaw development is that you can search the Pacer federal district and appellate court docket summaries at http://courtexpress.westlaw.com. Login using your regular Westlaw ID. If you don't remember your Westlaw number, you can click on "Switch to sign on using your own Username and Password." You do not have access to attached fulltext documents but it is a step up from searching PACER itself. Ask a reference librarian if you need assistance obtaining a PACER document.
Some PACER docket summaries and court documents (and some state dockets as well) are integrated into Westlaw. Click on "Court Docs" at the top of the screen. In addition, you may see links to dockets and other documents when you are viewing a case on Westlaw.
Probably the most direct path to docket databases on Lexis is to click on the "Public Records" tab and then select "Find Filings." Most docket databases are under that directory. On the main Legal tag, select "Court Records from CourtLink" to get to a service called Litigant, Attorney, & Judge Strategic Profiles. Strategic Profiles pulls information from the docket database to create a report on the types of cases undertaken by a given judge or attorney.
If you want to try individual courts, http://www.legaldockets.com has a directory of federal and state court websites which contain docket information. Some are free while others are fee services. Ask a reference librarian for the username and login.
P.S. Note that PACER is starting to include trial transcripts starting in this past summer.
To view the New and Notable on the Web Archives - Click here.
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