Category: crazy ideas
By - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - 10:30pm
Here’s a couple things I believe:
- There are several providers of free legal information out there that are reliable enough to recommend to my patrons to use.
- Librarians need to collaborate and communicate more with information vendors – all information vendors…Wexis, ILS providers, independents and non-profits.
- Most legal research educational materials suck. They’re dry and the publisher bias contained within some is almost laughable.
- Legal information vendors use tactics to get law students hooked on their products that would make a drug dealer blush.
So, when Tom Bruce emailed me a few weeks ago and asked if I’d be interested in creating a Free Law Research Guide aimed at law students, I jumped at the chance. Without further ado, I present to you The Law Student Guide to Free Legal Research.
Although sponsored by Justia and the LII, I had total editorial control over what resources got selected. (I also didn’t get paid anything, so I have no real conflicts of interest to declare. Tom has promised to buy me the beverage of my choice upon our next meeting, though.) My only real direction was that I should only recommend sources that I – as a librarian – would use but that I should make it fun and interesting for the average law student. As for that…well, if you’re reading this, you’re probably a librarian. I just want to warn you that you may feel the need to do some pearl clutching at what you read in the guide. I make statements like “Legal research is boring and tedious and nothing can change that.”
Listen…legal research is boring and tedious.
You know, for normal people.
Librarians love it, but that’s why we became librarians. If it makes me a bad librarian to admit that publicly and I’m gonna go to Librarian Hell for doing so, well….I’ll be sure to pack marshmallows.
ANYWAY, the project evolved over the course of the past few weeks from the initially planned 3 page PDF that they could post on their social media outreach sites to the website linked above. (A great big thank you to CALI for hosting it on their Classcaster site!) There is still a PDF available that contains the basics of the site, but there’s much more available. For instance, there is a blog that will allow us to highlight developments in the #lawgov movement, new resources that are available or just general thoughts on legal research. I really love Austin Groothuis’ inaugural post. Guest bloggers are invited and welcome!
Although the site is primarily aimed at law students, there is also a section for law librarians and legal writing instructors. Just as one goal of the site was mirror the student-aimed Wexis offerings, we wanted to offer a similar assortment of teaching aids in the hope that it would encourage the introduction of free legal resources in the classroom. If you have a handout or powerpoint show that you’d like to share, please contact me and I’ll happily load it and give you full credit. Check back often for more updates.
Speaking of teaching free legal resources, there’s currently a short (~30 seconds) poll on the law librarian resources page. Aside from my anecdotal evidence, it occurred to all of us during our planning that we had no idea how, when or if free legal resources were being taught in law schools and firms. We would really appreciate it if you could share your experiences. Thanks!
One benefit of the website is that I can constantly add or make changes. The next section that seems obvious to add is a foreign and international law one. But I’m always open to suggestions. Similarly, if you find something that you think should be changed, drop me an email or tweet and I’ll look into it. I’m generally pretty low ego when it comes to things like this and am open to constructive criticism. So, look around and let me know what you think!
4 comments
By - Tuesday, August 10, 2010 - 9:47pm
A collection of the signs I removed from my library
I never thought I would care passionately about library signage, let alone write a blog post about them, but here we are.
My job title is “Faculty Services and Outreach Librarian” and I have joked that “Outreach Librarian” is the job duty equivalent of “other duties as assigned.” For me, anyway, “outreach” includes making the library a welcoming, friendly place for our patron base.
You know…marketing.
Unlike my academic and public library brethren, when I think about marketing and the library, I don’t really have to worry about getting bodies in the door. Law students will pretty much always use the library. Heck, they’d live here if we’d let them.
Why bother trying to make them feel welcome? Marketing goes beyond getting them in the door. Or even checking out books (especially in an academic law library where much of the collection doesn’t circulate.) I hate to break it to you, Gentle Reader, but students don’t always separate the “library” from “the librarian.” For all they differentiate, you might as well be physically attached to your reference desk.
If the library doesn’t feel friendly and welcoming, then the librarians don’t seem friendly and welcoming. If the librarians don’t seem friendly and welcoming, then the students are not going to feel comfortable asking us questions when they need to. (Law students are already having to overcome the perceived sense of weakness by having to ask for help in the first place – let’s not make it harder than we have to, eh?) So I’m implementing alternative venues for students to ask questions and making the website more user friendly and pondering creating Social Networking profiles and revamping the blog and yes, worrying about the library’s signs. Any gateway to the library, be it real or virtual, is getting the once over from me.
So, let’s talk about the signs.
The picture above is a collection of the signs I removed last week from my library’s walls. Every day, in getting from the front door of the library to my office and then to the magic coffee machine in Tech Services, I would pass by six of these. An outdated picture of a cellphone with a giant international no sign over it and “CELLULAR PHONES PROHIBITED” in capital letters.
Granted, I have a well-documented problem with Authority and The Man, but these signs just seemed unnecessarily harsh. I’d look at them and think, “Geez, did cell phones make fun of your mom? Did they run over your dog? Did one steal your prom date? WHY THE HATE FOR CELL PHONES???” Not only were they harsh, but they were also inaccurate. We don’t care if people text or play games or surf the web with their phone. (I guess there’s also a chance they might be using them productively.) All we cared about was that the library stayed quiet so that our patrons could study.
After clearing it with the Powers That Be and consulting with the library communities on FriendFeed, I came up with the following new sign….TA-DA!
New Library Cell Phone Sign
This is for the front doors of the library and there are similar ones for the restrooms, stacks, etc. Clean, peaceful, friendly and up-to-date. Instead of telling our patrons what they CAN”T do, we’re telling them what they CAN. Plus, it accurately reflects our cell phone policy. I am pleased.
Sometimes it’s the little things.
By - Monday, July 5, 2010 - 2:55pm
A "Factini", given out on SLA exhibit hall floor
SCENE :
EXT – MEAN STREETS OF CRYSTAL CITY, VIRGINIA – NIGHT. I’m attending the Computers in Libraries conference. My conference husband and I were walking a friend back to her hotel (which was located approximately in West Virginia) for the night. We are approached by a couple drunkenly swaying towards us.
Drunk woman: Heeeeeeyyy….
Drunk man: Oh, gawd….it’s some more of those f**king librarians!
The drunk couple then stumbled on towards the Crystal City Hyatt.
My friends and I looked at each other. “Did they…did they just say what I thought they said?” I assumed that they were people staying in our hotel, tired of tripping over laptop cords and the myriad other inconveniences caused by several hundred librarians taking over a smallish hotel. We ran into them again later that night at the Hyatt bar and, upon seeing them in the light, realized that they were vendor reps working the CiL exhibit hall.
END SCENE
As you’ve probably noticed, Gentle Reader, I think a lot about vendor relations and libraries. Even so, the above Computers in Libraries experience was the first time it ever occurred to me that vendors might not like librarians. I mean, librarians are the good guys! They’re the big, mean corporations marching through our budgets like Sherman through Georgia! What do they have to be grumpy about?
Last month I attended the Special Libraries Association annual meeting. This was my first time attending the full SLA conference and it was an eye opening experience. From the exhibit hall Factinis to the vendor sponsored receptions to vendor reps attending programming to the fact that elected president of the organization WORKS FOR A VENDOR and at least one board member of the legal division does as well…well, my mind was blown at how much vendors were woven in throughout the SLA fabric. And you know what? I kinda liked it.
I guess it’s because so many of the SLA membership come from a corporate/business/law firm background, but there’s a very matter-of-fact business relationship with vendors at SLA. The vendor-librarian relationship felt like one of equals. It was very refreshing. I was able to discuss product issues at several points throughout the conference with representatives and develop personal relationships with them – which was much preferable to the gauntlet run that the AALL exhibit hall feels like.
I can’t help but feel that many librarians have a major martyrdom complex when it come to vendors. They’re the big evil corporations and we’re the saintly librarians who are just trying to help people after all and isn’t so awful that they keep taking advantage of us? I am guilty of feeling this way myself.
So, yes, over the past six months, I’ve had a bit of a change of heart about vendors. The “love” in title of this post is a bit of a misnomer, as I still don’t *love* vendors - I just couldn’t resist the movie allusion. I have, however, gained a certain respect for vendors.
Now, vendors are far from perfect. They still pump out a bunch of inferior products at ridiculous prices and the time has come where libraries and other cultural institutions can replicate much of their offerings better and cheaper. And some of their business practices cause me to give them the old side eye. And I get damn near giddy when I read about things like the University of PEI fighting rising subscription prices. But they’re not ZOMG EVIL and an antagonistic relationship with them is only going to harm libraries in the end. Mutual respect, open communication and equal partnerships are what the librarian-vendor relationship needs.
Because just as it’s getting to a point where librarians can do without some of the services traditionally offered by vendors, vendors are able to do end runs around librarians and get directly to our patrons. Exhibit A: Westlaw’s “Are you on a first name basis with your librarian?” advertisement from last year. And how many of you librarians have had students come up to the ref desk and mentioned that they purchased a PDF of an article that we could have gotten them for free via ILL?
Is hanging out with vendors at conferences going to solve all of these problems? No. But I think if we approach vendors as equals instead of expecting them to treat us like customers (with the attendant “the customer is always right!” mentality) we’ll have a better relationship and better products. And as for the tired meme that librarians who go work for vendors (and, to a certain extent, professional associations) have “gone to the dark side” or “sold out”…*pfft* Again, vendors (and orgs) having an understanding of what the daily needs and desires of the library community are can only be an improvement over them trying to figure it out via grumpy listserv postings or annual meeting focus groups.
(Hmm..maybe I should have titled this post “Vendors are from Mars, Librarians are from Venus”.)
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s currently a dust-in LawLibraryLand over AALL’s Committee on Vendor Relations and the appointment of a vendor representative. (See LLB posts here and here for starters) I’m not sure what the right answer is, but I can say that in my years as an AALL member, I haven’t felt like CRIV was any different than any of the other AALL committees. Perhaps a single AALL representative to vendors (much like the AALL Government relations office) would allow for long term relationship building which a rotating committee roster simply cannot provide. I also think AALL should take a page from SLA and have more involvement from vendors at all levels of the organization. Close your eyes for a minute and imagine Anne Ellis as president of AALL…crazy right? But why is that?
So, again, I don’t have all (or any) answers, but I am planning on using the second half of 2010 to approach vendors as an equal partner in the information game instead of demanding that they be nice to me and wondering why they are treating a business relationship as just that.
By - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - 6:05pm
Credit: Toothpaste for Dinner http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/032007/the-computer-demands-a-blog.gif
Outreach Librarian is in some ways the job title equivalent of “other duties as assigned.” For me, that means that I’m responsible for my library’s blog and other Web 2.0 endeavors. Like many library blogs, ours is on life support, if not officially dead.
Library blogs are dead.
Blogging is not as easy as it seems. Sure, it’s easy to set a blog up and post to it. But then you have to keep posting to it…again and again, constantly looking for appropriate topics to write about. I mean, hopefully before your library started blogging, y’all came up with a goal and intended audience for the blog. You did do that, right? Oh, dear… I guess I won’t ask about posting schedules or divisions of labor then.
Long live the library blog.
My first step was to decide whether or not we still needed a library blog. Blogs were one of the original Web 2.0 applications and by the constantly changing standards of the post-Web 2.0 revolution Internet they almost seem a little old-fashioned. Not to mention the fact that they take a heck of a lot of work. Shouldn’t we all just have Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and slap QR Codes on everything?
No. We shouldn’t.
“Old fashioned” as they may be, I think blogs still have a place in libraries. Librarians need a quick and easy way to push information to patrons, highlight aspects of their collections or otherwise humanize their institution. And they need more than 140 characters to do it.
So how can one maintain a vibrant and interesting library blog without it becoming an overwhelming task? I’m lifestreaming my library.
Information Age Concierges
I decided to shift the focus of my library blog from law news and legal research to anything and everything related to surviving law school – something very much in the LifeHacker vein. This blends nicely with my belief that, while librarians are excellent resources for students’ scholarly work, we have much more to offer. Students today are surrounded by information resources and issues constantly, from Facebook privacy settings to negotiating google results and everything in between. Personally, I like to think of us as Information Age Concierges.
In addition to the traditional “hey, check out this database!” blog posts, I wanted to be able to share links of interests within a blog post…but without having to create a separate blog post for each. Writing up a blog post for each link would either be more trouble than it’s worth since I often just want to say “check this out!” OR, considering the amount of information I want to share, would be overwhelming to the blog. Not to mention the fact that I wanted to make this blog as un-labor intensive as humanly possible. Essentially, I wanted something very similar to the activity stream that we use on Henderson Valley Eggs, but I didn’t want these links to exist on an RSS feed in a side bar, since I wanted to keep the meat of the blog as dynamic as possible.
Man alive, I am so high maintenance!
The rough draft
Here is the rough draft of what I’m planning: the Valpo Law LibHacker. That’s currently hosted on my own server space while I wait for campus IT to set me up with a hosted Wordpress install here so please ignore the URL weirdness. I think I’ve found a good way to mix the ability to have stand alone blog posts with daily RSS stream posts. More how-to and tech specs will appear in a later post, but basically I’m using self-hosted Wordpress with the Feed Me, Seymour theme and Recommended Reader plugin. Initially I wanted something like the lifestream on Jenny Levine’s The Shifted Librarian blog, but I can’t get the lifestream plugin she uses to work. However, the Recommend Reader plugin has the benefit of letting me control how many items appear in a post and since everything goes a specially created Google Reader account, I can put anything with an RSS feed through it – think new book acquisitions, LibGuides updates, other Web 2.0 services, etc. I’ve currently populated the account with a variety of blogs that I thought law students may be interested in – blawgs, productivity tips, tech news and grad student cartoons, but the possibilities are pretty much endless.
I plan on ironing out the bugs on this throughout the summer and have it up and ready to go by the time the students show back up in August. I’ll report back to the class with anything else I discover.
By - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - 12:57pm
(Hey, remember when I said that I was taking a break from blogging? Well, I lied. I’m a liar. And, more to the point, a procrastinator. So I am blogging instead of packing for my imminent move to Indiana. La!)
As I alluded to in my last post, we are at a magical time in libraries because technology and librarian interest are finally at the point where we can make some viable LibPunk alternatives to corporate products and services. And most of this is because of the “opens”…Open Access, Open Source, Open Standards, etc.
There’s a lot of confusion about what these topics mean. I’ve seen Open Access and Open Source topics put in the same conference presentation when really the only thing that they have in common is the word “open.” Happily, yesterday Dorthea Salo broke down all the “Opens” into a handy guide. I highly recommend checking that post out.
As you may know, Gentle Reader, one of my major topics of interest/bones to pick with the rest of the world is the Free Law movement. I wonder if maybe we should start calling it the Open Law movement…would that would put it in a better light with people unfamiliar with the issues? As someone once said to me in a bar, “People don’t respect free stuff because they don’t think it’s worth anything.” (Yes, I think the Free Law stuff is an appropriate conversational topic in when hanging out in bars. I am Just. That. Cool.) So, anyway, that statement blew my mind. Granted, I was a little tipsy, but THINK ABOUT IT.
Just for the heck of it, here’s my interpretation of Open Law, using the framework that Dorothea Salo used in her “Battle of the Opens” blog post.
OPEN LAW
What is being made open? The primary legal materials from a multitude of jurisdictions – federal though the 50 states and 1000s of municipalities. These include, but are not limited to: court cases, legislation, administrative regulations and codes.
What legal regimes are implicated? That’s the kicker…NONE. Primary legal materials are created by government bodies and therefore should be free to use by anyone. Of course, that didn’t stop the state of Oregon from asserting copyright on its code. As I noted earlier, there is the slight the problem that the finding aids to wade through this massive amount of law are proprietary systems owned by a small number of large corporations. And the secondary materials that are really necessary for fully understanding and researching law are under copyright protection.
How does openness happen? Organizations like AALL and Public.Resource lobby and harass the government until they start doing things like releasing the Federal Register in XML. Then organizations like the Cornell Legal Information Institute, Open Congress or Justia take the information and make it more user friendly. A lot of this is computer stuff that I don’t fully understand so I just generally give it the blanket term “MAGIC.”
Again, with the law, openess only goes so far. As Rich Leiter recently wrote, librarians need to work on creating meaningful access to the law as well. We should also be trying to get more Open Access to secondary materials.
Free law is dead…long live Open Law? Whaddya think?
By - Monday, February 22, 2010 - 11:50am
http://www.flickr.com/photos/topekalibrary/3727452909/ " width="300" height="237" />Photo Credit Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library http://www.flickr.com/photos/topekalibrary/3727452909/
I recently finished my last bibliographic instruction session at UK. (When you are leaving a job, every “last” seems to take on special significance…My last Bibliogrpahic Instruction session. My last coffee run to the student union. My last creepy public patron..*sniff* the memories…but I digress.) Anyhoo, it was for the Advanced Legal Research course and the topic was “Researching Federal Legislative History.”
This is my absolute favorite subject to teach and research task to perform. As I was prepping for the class, I began compiling the usual suspects for my resource show and tell….LexisNexis Congressional, CIS Index, Thomas, USCCAN, GPOAccess/FDsys, etc. I started to think about it, though, and realized that *I* don’t always just use the “accepted” resources. When I’m trying to find a cite for a popular name of a law, I don’t walk over to the reading room and grab a Popular Name Table from the USCS, I just google it. Sometime – just sometimes – I even look at the wikipedia entry to get an idea of what I’m searching for. So why aren’t I telling the students about this?
It hit me like a thunderbolt: I was teaching the bibliographic instruction version of abstinence only education!
I decided to mix it up a bit this year. After all, what are they going to do? Fire me? Heh. (As an aside, is this what it feels like to have tenure? Because it’s a pretty heady feeling! Double heh.) While covering the Usual Suspects, I also mentioned wikipedia and Googling for information. And when doing so, I took the time to mention what you should be looking for in free web resources and the pros and cons of using them. Also, in addition to having the students look up information via the traditional sources, I had them in their in-class lab and homework assignments google for popular names and compare the information that they find via sites like Wikipedia to what they find via a traditional source like CIS Index.
I haven’t started grading them, but I did glance through the assignments this morning. (They were just turned in on Friday.) From what I could tell, the students get it. They saw that wikipedia doesn’t always have complete information, but occassionally contains links to official sources from Thomas or GPO. I asked them to explain how they would do a similar legislative history assignment (a no “right” or “wrong” answer question, I just wanted their honest feedback) , and generally they say that they would try a google search first to get the popular name, but then use traditional sources. Not only that…many of them seem to prefer the books!
I am definitely going to try and expand upon including this type of information throughout my future bibliographic instruction sessions. I feel better knowing that my kids are going out into the world better prepared for what they’re probably going to do anyway. And I’m glad that they are hearing it from me rather than getting it second hand from their classmates. 
By - Thursday, February 4, 2010 - 12:05pm
My Westlaw/iPod experience has reminded me of yet another Something I Didn’t Learn In Library School – Librarian Ethics.
Sure, we covered the basics, like “don’t give out patron information” and…um…actually, that’s the only one I really remember talking about. There must have been others (something about whether or not you can let a teenager have a book on how to commit suicide, maybe?), but I’m positive I was never confronted with a hypothetical of the sort I just experienced in real life.
As the comments on my iPod post (and ones I’ve received privately) have shown me, this is clearly an issue that librarians feel strongly about. It is also an issue open to wide interpretation – ranging from “So, hot damn, enjoy who you are, and all the benefits that come from it.” to “Accepting such gifts certainly clouds our ability to evaluate a product fairly and anyone who says otherwise is most likely kidding themselves.”
I can’t say what the right action is for others. I do want to make it clear that I don’t judge the librarians that went to Eagan or the ones that are keeping the iPods. (Or take pens or gift cards or stuffed animals, etc.) Counted among that group are some people that I consider good friends and I trust that their judgment is not clouded by vendor swag. I can only do what my gut tells me feels right, and for me that means not accepting any gifts from vendors.
The guy you see pictured here is one of my favorite fictional characters ever. His name is Omar Little and he is a thief, murderer and perjurer, amongst other things. He also has a personal code of honor that he upholds no matter what. (Apparently if you are involved in a drug war in Baltimore, you never, ever, EVER fight on Sundays. Nice.) While my stance on vendor swag may appear to be smug and self-righteous, I am the first to admit that I am not a perfect person. I haven’t publicly been called on it yet, but I do want to admit that when I was in Boston for ALA Midwinter, yes I took several free books from publishers in the exhibit hall…because I never do business with those vendors. I also take candy that they leave in Tech Services during the holidays and will eat the meals our reps bring when they demonstrate a new product.
I am also at any one time committing at least 4 of the 7 deadly sins.
So, no, I’m not perfect. I do, however, feel strongly that the librarian profession is more than just a job. Librarians are the gatekeepers to the world’s knowledge. This profession is an important one that has a greater duty to society, on par with doctors and teachers and, yes get your giggles out now, lawyers. So, yes, I do take these things seriously, perhaps a little more seriously than others. (In addition to this iPod dustup, this week I found myself harping on a nascent librarian friend on FriendFeed for talking about a celebrity patron publicly.) Maybe I do need to just chill out, just a little.
While I’ve been waiting to see what the legal department at MPOW has to say about how I can dispose of the iPod, I thought I’d check to see what my professional organizations have suggested with regards to ethics and to specifically see if they have any guidance to offer librarians when presented with gifts. Guess what? THEY DON’T.
Ethical Roundup:
- AALL has a code of ethics that hasn’t been updated in over 10 years. It states: ” We have a duty to avoid situations in which personal interests might be served or significant benefits gained at the expense of library users, colleagues, or our employing institutions.” which I guess is the most applicable. The Committee on Vendor Relations, near as I can tell, is silent on the swag issue.
- SLA doesn’t have a code of ethics (???!!!???) , but instead refers people to ASIS&T and AIIP, among others.
- ALA code of ethics
I can’t believe I’m actually suggesting this, but perhaps we need a committee for hashing out this issue and coming up with a more explicit policy? Or maybe also an ethical hotline where librarians can ask for opinions when confronted by the many sticky wickets of modern librarianship? Just a thought…
By - Thursday, January 7, 2010 - 11:45am
…and yet, I still don’t have an office with a window.
One of the things I wanted to play around with this year (and one of my predictions for 2010 Big Thing) are geolocation based applications. There was one slight problem: I live pretty much smack in the middle of nowhere…at least as far as developers are concerned. I could only watch while my coastal colleagues checked in on a variety of geosocial services.
(As an aside, one of my Big Issues is to keep reminding tech people that it’s not that people who live in the middle of the country don’t want to utilize some services, but that they are physically unable to. High speed internet and mobile telecommuication networks simply do not exist in large swaths of the United States yet. So keep that in mind when you are designing stuff…some of your users may still be using dial-up or non-3G. [/end rant])
However, that changed this week. Foursquare, one of the more popular geosocial networking sites, opened up its service to everyone – not just people who live in major metropolitan areas. As soon as I saw that, I created an account for myself and started exploring.
Foursquare is a social network with game-like features. Users create profiles (here’s mine) and then when they visit a place (usually a business, but can be anything – including your couch!), they “check in” using a mobile device. The more they check in, the more points they get and the more points they get, the more “badges” they are awarded. Visit more than anyone else and you become the “mayor” of that location. In addition to getting points and badges, visitors are able to leave tips about the location for other visitors. For a restaurant, it may be something like “order the spinach salad- it’s amazing!” or “there’s free parking two blocks away”.
Fun? Yes. Silly? Yes. Completely worthless to libraries? Absolutely not.
I went ahead and made a venue for my library. Unlike Facebook where you have to be an official representative of the business to make a page, anyone can create a venue on Foursquare, so I figured that I might as well do it before a student did. It took all of 2 minutes – I typed in the address, cut/paste some info from our website (and added a link to it) as a “tip”, and added the “library” and “law library” tags. Now if someone should try Foursquare while near the library, the UK Law Library will appear as an option to check in. (See illustration) I’ll be very interested to see if this takes off with the students. At present, I don’t really plan on doing too much with it, but I’m going to keep an eye on it.
I don’t really expect there to be any educational value to come out of this. And, as noted here, it may not appeal to all patrons. However, as an outreach tool, it has a lot of possibility. What would hyper-competitive law students like more than to out do each other with badges? Some businesses give special deals to mayors…maybe the library could have a special study carrel for the “mayor”? Or do a weekly/monthly giveaway drawing and every “check – in” is an entry? And of course, if students start using the “tips”, it can be used as another comment box.
So, we’ll see how it goes. Until then, I promise to not abuse my mayor-ly powers.
By - Wednesday, December 9, 2009 - 5:41pm
My library reading room is filled with law students furiously studying for finals, so I guess that means it’s almost the Kwanzchrismukah gift giving season. Instead of a traditional “gifts to give the geeks in your life” blog post, I thought I’d cobble together some library or legal or information related charities that you may want to support in lieu of giving a gift this holiday season. Personally, I’m not a big fan of the whole expected gift giving thing – either giving or receiving. If I’m giving a gift, I like it to be because I saw or made something that I thought someone I cared about would like, NOT because a day on the calendar tells me so.
The exception for this is my niece and nephew who I am legally and morally required to spoil rotten.
As for receiving gifts, well, I have enough stuff. For birthdays and holidays, I generally tell people to just give something to charity in my name. However, that once resulted in my brother buying me a membership in the NRA. So now I try to specify a list of acceptable charities. The following appear on that list (in addition to many more), but these are the top five that people who read this site may be interested in. All of the “abouts” come from the organization websites. So, in alphabetical order….
826 National – 826 National is a nonprofit tutoring, writing, and publishing organization with locations in seven cities across the country. Our goal is to assist students ages six to eighteen with their writing skills, and to help teachers get their classes excited about writing. Our work is based on the understanding that great leaps in learning can happen with one-on-one attention, and that strong writing skills are fundamental to future success. (Homepage) (Store Page)
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund – The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund was officially incorporated as a non-profit charitable organization in January of 1990 from the money left over from donations raised to defend Friendly Frank’s arrest for selling “obscene comics” in Lansing, IL in 1986. Since then, the CBLDF has helped over a dozen comic book retailers and professionals fend off the censors, some successfully, some not. (Homepage) (Donation page)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation – Blending the expertise of lawyers, policy analysts, activists, and technologists, EFF achieves significant victories on behalf of consumers and the general public. EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations. By mobilizing more than 50,000 concerned citizens through our Action Center, EFF beats back bad legislation. In addition to advising policymakers, EFF educates the press and public. (Homepage) (Donation page)
The Legal Information Institute – The LII is used by literally hundreds of nonprofits and public service organizations – local, national, and international — whose leadership and legal staff can’t afford commercial legal information services. As budgets for government and nonprofits become more and more strained, we help provide the information they use to help others. (Homepage) (Donation page)
Public Resource . Org – Making government information more accessible (Homepage) (Donation page – contains link to paypal)
So, again, those are just five options for donations in lieu of tacky crap that no one is going to use or look at past the holidays and is eventually just going to fill a landfill and/or get washed into the ocean where it will kill a baby sea turtle. Whew. Excuse me, I have to sit down…I’m a little dizzy. The air is awfully thin up here on my soapbox.
But, anyhoo, there are also plenty of other options. Just because more is always better when in comes to charities, two of my non-topical favorites are Heifer.org and my local human society (EDIT – humane society…although I do like humans too. Just not as much as animals). Do you have a favorite that you’d like to share? Drop me a comment.
By - Tuesday, November 3, 2009 - 12:57pm
This blog post can summarized by a simple question: Why do we delegate the reporting and indexing of the American legal information system to commericial vendors using a proprietary system?
Here’s the historical background/two minute summary I give to 1Ls and Pro Ses approaching legal research for the first time:
(And if you’re a law librarian, lawyer, or otherwise in the know about such things, feel free to skip the next 3 paragraphs)
America utilizes something called the common law system. That means, basically, that we rely upon courts to make our laws in addition to legislatures and regulatory agencies. They do this by either interpreting statutory laws and regulations or analyzing previous cases. It also means that that courts may have to follow the rulings of other courts depending on their geographic location and level of the court. Not every court case is available for review or “reported”…actually very few of them are and they are generally from Courts of Appeals or Supreme Courts. While there are very few reported cases, there are still thousands of cases appearing in hundreds of print volumes. I got a whole library full of ‘em! The rise of electronic publishing means that there are even more “unreported” cases available.
So. How do we sort through these cases? Even if every volume of every reporter were indexed – which they’re not (Note 1) – it would take you forever and a day to find all the cases on your topic. Well, in the late 1800s, there was a man named John B. West who devised a system of organizing and classifying caselaw still used today called Key Numbers. Key numbers are awesome, they allow you to search more efficiently across jurisdictions and time periods – Hell, until relatively recently they allowed you to search at all – and if you should be so lucky to find a key number directly on your topic take a moment in your research process to pause and do a little victory dance because life just got a whole lot easier for you.
But you’re not done! If you find a case that says exactly what you could hope a case would say for your legal issue, you need to find out if it’s still valid. (A higher court or later court may have over turned it.) So you need to check with a system called Shepard’s Citations (available in print or electronically through Lexis) or KeyCite (available electronically through Westlaw). And then recheck all of the cases you find via these systems to make sure they’re valid. Finding statutes and regulations relatively easier than case law, but you still need to check if they’ve been “interpreted” via KeyCite or Shepards.
(BORING OVERVIEW OF CASELAW RESEARCH OVER)
KeyNumbers and Shepards are very useful and necessary products. My only problem with them is that they are “products” owned and sold by large commercial vendors who have a duopoly on accessing legal information – information that is owned and produced by the federal goverment (read: YOU THE TAX PAYER) and forms the very basis of our system of government. (Note 2) As I tell my students, we don’t pay borderline outrageous fees to Lexis and Westlaw for their information – we already own that. We’re paying it for their organization of it.
I think we’re finally at a point in history where the democratization of technology will allow it so that we (as in We The People as well as Legal Information Geeks) can take back our legal information from the vendors. The first steps are already in place. There’s Public.Resource.Org, Justia, and The Legal Information Institute (among others) harvesting what info they can and placing it up on the free internet. The second step is to get Law.gov (recently endorsed by the Mid America Law Library Consortium) up and running. The third step? We need to come up with an open indexing system. Raw data is great, but it’s just raw data. To truly be useful, we need to find a way to organize this information so that it will function within the American Legal System.
I am hopeful that if Law.gov comes to fruition, the government and/or civic minded computer geeks will find a way replicate the functions of KeyNumbers or Shepards (without violating Wexis’ intellectual property) so that Joe and Jane Q. Public can access this information without having to pay vendors. (And, on a selfish note, not to mention a side benefit of some healthy competition decreasing Wexis rates.) I also hope that AALL, SLA, ABA and other legal or information professional organizations become active participants in this process and ensure that issues like authentication are considered.
If you want to talk more about these issues, check out this Friday’s episode of The Law Librarian on Blog Talk Radio. Carl Malamud will be a guest to discuss Law.gov. You also can download it later as a podcast.
Notes:
1) A brief check in the reading room showed that some are. For example, U.S. Reports, published by the GPO. However, my library doesn’t have too many non-West reporters. These all have Key Number based indexes.
2) Legal information isn’t the only area where this is happening. Check out the recent documentary Food Inc to see how a significant portion of the American food chain is controlled by a couple of big companies.
