works in progress
By - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - 10:04pm
This is probably a bad idea.
I mean that two ways. One, I may very well be the only person interested in doing something like this and people looking at this project will think, “That’s dumb, Glassmeyer. Why’d you waste time setting that up?” Two, there is a great probability that this will cause me much more trouble and drama than it will ever be worth. And I’m really trying to stay out of the trouble and drama business in 2011. CUE THE MARY J. BLIGE!
Before I bury the lead amongst all my usual blog silliness, I’m going to just spit it out: I set up a wiki where librarians and other interested parties can share information about all aspects of the library/vendor relationship. It can be found at LisVendor.info . Which, handily, what I call it as well. It’s really a product of my own greed and laziness – I find that the more I get into looking at Library-Vendor relations, the more I realize that I don’t know. And I want a one stop shop to collect that information and learn from what others know.
Now for a slightly longer explanation…
About a year ago, I was having dinner with someone at the Computers in Libraries Conference in Washington, DC. The conversation turned, as it does, to the legal information duopoly. (Seriously, Gentle Reader…I am a HELL of a dinner date.) Specifically we were talking – or maybe I was ranting, the memory is fuzzy (A HELL OF A DINNER DATE) – about the secrecy clauses that Wexis enforce in library contracts and Carl Malamud’s efforts to FOIA and release this information from government agencies. I said jokingly, “Someone oughta set up a wikileaks for library contracts.”
My companion and I looked at each other and laughed at the silliness of the idea. And then became serious as we realized, “hey, that’s actually sort of a good idea.” And then laughed again. Then my companion became deadly serious and told me to not do it, but if I was going to do it, keep my name the heck off of it so that I didn’t get personally or professionally harmed. Because “THEY” would come after me.
Undeterred, I came home from CiL, detoxed and then registered the LISVendor.info domain. And then realized that I’m not a computer programmer. Between trying to figure out a way to set up the web site, getting settled into my new job and new region of the country (only 2 weeks into it at that point!), then summer conference season, then trying to figure this new professor gig and survive fall semester, then fall conference season and organization responsibilities… well, the next thing I knew it was last week and I hadn’t really made too much progress on the site besides having the URL point to a drupal install and many many broken iterations of the site.
As you may have noticed, Gentle Reader, I think about library-vendor relations a lot. A LOT. And one thing that I keep discovering is that the things I’m interested in or information I want isn’t really easy to find. So I end up having to spend a lot of time searching around and creating things the Legal Information Providers Merger Graphic. Or those HCOD Math numbers. I also keep realizing that there are big chunks of history and information that I just don’t know because I’m a newer librarian and I’m in a pretty small subject corner of libraryland. So, for example, when Steve Lawson mentioned “The Big Deal” in a recent post, I had hunt around and figure out what the heck he was talking about.
So that’s a major part of what I’d like the site to become. I want a place where librarians can teach and learn from each other on this very important topic.
When I was thinking of the wikileaks idea last year around this time, I also had percolating in my head a post from The Librarian in Black about Unethical Library Vendors that encouraged librarians to share their opinions on vendors with each other. Since not everyone has the time or energy to maintain a blog – and the blogoshere is scattered and hard to keep track of - I thought it’d be nice for there to be a centralized place for librarians to share this info – a libraryland version of the “Shopping for a Better Planet” book that I mentioned in my last post , if you will. It’s forward movement and a way we can all do something that could have some use to others – not waiting for organizations or even our employers to do something.
So, again, I don’t know if anything will come of this. It’s going to take a lot of work from a lot of people to become successful. If you want to take the idea and run with it and put it somewhere else I don’t mind. And if nothing comes of it, that’s fine too.
I set up a rough shell to get things started. I invite you to dig in there and get involved.
By - Monday, October 11, 2010 - 11:51am
My job title has two parts: Outreach Librarian and Faculty Services Librarian. While both parts of this job have separate and distinct duties, they do share the common goal of making the library and its services as accessible as possible to patrons.
Law faculty as patrons are…interesting. Their research requests are often much more intricate because they are pretty well versed in research basics, although since many of them did their legal training pre-WEXIS, they may not be aware of all of the new research possibilities technology has to offer. Also, it’s not that I don’t always give it my all and try to answer all patrons requests quickly and efficiently and correctly, but I REALLY don’t want to mess up any part of a faculty research request. I think I must have some lingering nervousness from my law school days…but it may also be because they’re also colleagues that you have more of a long-term relationship with than any other type of patron.
All of the above is just preamble to the main point of this post: I wanted an easy web form so that faculty could easily request library services (of any type) and allow for me to track said requests. Oh, and the back end had to be really easy to use too because I don’t have hard core technological skills and my IT department is already swamped.
There’s a couple commercial and open source products available to do this, but I decided to use the free, web based Google docs spreadsheet function. I had some experience with the form creation through my work on the AALL National Inventory of Legal Material and am impressed with how much you can manipulate the questions and pages, which then fill out a spreadsheet. You can create the form by either creating a spreadsheet and having the column headings automatically populate the form (which can then be edited for clarity) or by creating the form first and then have the spreadsheet made from that.
A copy of the form is here. That’s not the version that my faculty use, so feel free to mess around, input answers. Then you can see how the form answers end up on a spreadsheet here . This bring me to another benefit of this system…I can easily share the spreadsheet with my fellow librarians (and give them editing privileges so that they can add in request tracking notes.) Plus, the form acts as a marketing tool since it lists all of the possibilites of library services, some of which Professor X may not have been aware of.
In all honesty, it hasn’t been used yet by any faculty member, but it’s still new and requests are down over all because of fall semester rush. It only took me an hour or so to set up, so at the very worst I just have another avenue for faculty to request services and at the very best, they go to the form and see what possibilities of library services are available and use us more.
By - Tuesday, August 24, 2010 - 9:30pm
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!
By - Tuesday, June 8, 2010 - 5:05pm
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 - Thursday, May 20, 2010 - 5:21pm
A funny thing happened on my way to the Chicago Law.gov meeting…
A little over a week ago, I got asked to look at local states’ online legal materials offerings so that I could give a brief spiel on them at the Chicago law.gov workshop. (I’ll tell you more about what I found in a minute.) Since I’m still relatively new to the jurisdiction, I asked around and sought some advice and one thing led to another and now I am heading up the Indiana Working Group for the AALL Inventory of State Legal Materials.
The link above has more information about the National Inventory. You can also read this Call to Action by Erika Wayne and Paul Lomio of Stanford Law School. Essentially, it boils down to this: the current hodge-podge system that states are using to put their legal materials up on the free Internet, frankly, sucks. There are big problems, such as lack of official status, no authentication, no preservation, etc. And smaller ones, such as basic usability and UX design problems.
If we want this to change, we need to organize. The law.gov workshops and information roadshow are one way of getting info to stake holders and people who make the decisions. We also need to have similar information sharing events locally – get this issue in front of state librarians and library groups, local bar associations and CIOs. And there also needs to be data collected so that organizations like AALL who have Government Relations Offices can really put the pressure on and advocate effectively.
Creating a state inventory of legal materials is not hard. It is, however, tedious and time consuming. And often horrifying if you at all care about the integrity of legal information. For Indiana, I got a google docs spreadsheet template from Mary Alice and Emily at the AALL Goverment Relations office. You can see the work in progress here. State level materials are on the far left, then moving to the right are county level and then municipalities. Oh, yeah, when I say inventory, I mean down to the every last municipal code from every one horse town I can find in this state.
Because, you know, the law isn’t just Big Motions for Justice argued in front of Supreme Courts. A lot of it is just regular Joes and Janes who want to know if their town’s zoning regulations will let them build that fence in their yard. And in 2010 they should be able to figure that out easily without having to consult an attorney or wade through disclaimers and copyright assertions that make them wonder about a dozen things besides their current legal issue, assuming that they can even find where on web their local government decided to put this information. But I digress…
Where was I? Right. State inventories. Not hard, but tedious. To keep confusion down with many contributors editing the document, Google Spreadsheets makes it pretty easy to create a web form that will populate the spreadsheet. Here is the one for the Indiana Inventory. If you are in Indiana and would like to volunteer, please let me know! (My contact information appears under the contact tab.) If you are in another state and would like to participate, contact your state working group coordinator. A complete list can be found here. Some states only have one or two people volunteered thus far and your help would be very appreciated, I’m sure.
For my minor contribution to law.gov Chicago, I looked at the major state level offerings of Indiana, Kentucky and Illinois. By “major”, I mean session laws, statutory compilations, administrative codes, administrative registers, supreme court cases and appellate court cases. From just that brief toe-dip, I was able to see the following trends and problems:
Non-jurisdiction Specific General Problems:
- No one stop shop for state laws – case law is held on court websites, statutory law on the legislatures’, admin law varies. My first year law students aren’t always aware of the separation of power and types of law each branch creates, so it may not be obvious to the general public that they will have to visit several different sites. Also, just as a random check, I googled “[state name] law” and none of the court websites appeared on the first page of results.
- Usability is a nightmare within these sites. Finding and navigating the information sources was difficult for me and I’m smarter than the average bear when it comes to navigating electronic legal information.
- It’s very hard to determine the official and/or authentic status of the laws posted on the web. That was the most time consuming part of the exercise, really.
- Predominant formats used were PDFs, Word/Wordperfect and HTML.
- In several instances, “official” versions were only obtainable from commerical publishers at significant costs.
Indiana Notes:
- Nothing available online prior to 2000, with the exception of some non-code acts.
- The Indiana Administrative Code and Register is no longer being published in a print format. They do have “certificates of authenticity” but nothing electronically guaranteeing that.
- Copyright is a bit of an issue. There is a notice on the statutory and admin codes that the headnotes contained in them are copyrighted by Thomson West. The official case reporters are the Northeastern Reporter and the Indiana Cases offshoot of this reporter, both of which have “Copyright (C) [year] Thomson Reuters” in the front. Prior to the Thomson products being the official version, there were a state produced publications called “Indiana Reports” and “Indiana Court of Appeals Reports,” both of which have a “Copyright [year] State of Indiana” notice in them.
Kentucky:
- Okay, this is hilarious. And by that I mean deeply disturbing. As many of you know, I am recently departed from the great Commonwealth of Kentucky. I spent three years teaching law students that there were two official versions of the state code, both published by commercial publishers. Well, that is wrong. As it turns out, the official Kentucky Revised Statutes is only created electronically and is stored in a database that only the Legislative Research Commission is able to really look at (although you can purchase a copy for personal use.) The print Lexis and West versions are only certified. The web version is clearly marked as unofficial and that no warranty is made to correctness or completeness.
- The Kentucky courts opinion search used search methods that I have never heard of before in my life. Stemming? Fuzzy searching?
- More copyright issues. Again, we have case law being printed in Thomson Reuters reporters with copyright notices in the front. Also, the front of the Revised Statutes have “Placing these files on the Internet does not alter or relinquish any copyright or proprietary interest or entitlement of the Commonwealth of Kentucky relating to this information.” …so does that mean that the Commonwealth is claiming copyright on them? I do not know.
Illinois
- Illinois really surprised me. And by “surprised” I mean disappointed. For one of the larger states in the union, its online offerings were terrible.
- The online code was current only. As in current current. Changes were constantly being added, and no previous editions at all to be found. It was also stated that it was primarily for the legislature’s use.
- Also, there is no official print version of the code.
So, that’s just a brief overview. The unofficial spreadsheet that I used to cobble the Kentucky and Illinois information together can be found here. It’s mainly just my messy notes, but you are more than welcome to look at them.
By - Monday, May 3, 2010 - 5:00pm
After my recent post on the mergers in the legal information world, Greg Lambert ran with the idea and created expanded graphs for Thomson Reuters and Reed Elsevier. Best of all, in a “Oh I wish I had thought to do that!” move, he uploaded his graphs to Google docs so that anyone can download them and use them however they want. The Thomson one is here and Reed Elsevier one is here.
I’ve been poking around some more on this when I have had the time, and to complete the Big 3 trifecta, I made one for Wolters Kluwer that appears here.
Like I said in the original post, I originally just made that graph to better visualize what has happened. But, as with the USA Today infographics, that’s just a pretty way to see information. I had to leave some titles out of the graphics since I haven’t been able to find accurate dates for their acquisitions/creations. Here is a plain text document that has more information about product lines than I have been able to put on a graph in outline form. As with the graphs, feel free to download and reuse, remix and recycle that information however you see fit. Also with my original graph, this is still a beta release, meaning that I expect that there are mistakes and additions to be made. So, please don’t hesitate to let me know of any.
By - Monday, April 26, 2010 - 5:26pm
I’m currently investigating the whys/hows/best practices of digitizing law journals and creating an institutional repository. (Have I mentioned lately how much I like my new job? Because I really like my new job.) IRs and Open Access are topics that I really like in theory, but have very little actual practice with. So, it’s very exciting to me in a very geeky sort of way that I’m getting to spend time looking into these subjects.
This is something I’ve been needing to do anyway, because here in LawLibraryLand, we have an extra reason to get familiar with the topics. Early last year, a group of law library directors got together and created The Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship. The call to action in the statement is as follows (with my emphasis added for the highlights):
We therefore urge every U.S. law school to commit to ending print publication of its journals and to making definitive versions of journals and other scholarship produced at the school immediately available upon publication in stable, open, digital formats, rather than in print.
We also urge every law school to commit to keeping a repository of the scholarship published at the school in a stable, open, digital format. Some law schools may choose to use a shared regional online repository or to offer their own repositories as places for other law schools to archive the scholarship published at their school.
Repositories should rely upon open standards for the archiving of works, as well as on redundant formats, such as PDF copies. We also urge law schools and law libraries to agree to and use a standard set of metadata to catalog each article to ensure easy online public indexing of legal scholarship.
As a measure of redundancy, we also urge faculty members to reserve their copyrights to ensure that they too can make their own scholarship available in stable, open, digital formats. All law journals should rely upon the AALS model publishing agreement as a default and should respect author requests to retain copyrights in their scholarship.
I’m not a signatory to statement. I’m not really against it, but I guess when it came out I got stuck on the idea that a “stable digital format” was an impossibility and then just discounted the rest of the statement. Then I didn’t really think too much more about it.
This, I admit, was maybe not the best reaction to it.
So, anyway, that happened.
Well, now it’s my job to figure out how to get compliant with the Durham Statement (or at least as close as humanly possible since I’m pretty sure that whole “stable digital format” thing still hasn’t been figured out yet.) I decided to see how other schools and institutions were putting up their journals. The Durham Statement FAQs directed me to Directory of Open Access Law Journals and the Science Commons Open Access Law Project.
However, I knew that there were more law journals online than that, and I wanted to get as many examples as possible to see what other people were doing. At this point, my inner scientist kicked in and I went into data collection mode. I should note that data collection mode is easily confused with “Oh my God, Glassmeyer, are you totally insane?” mode. Don’t feel bad if you get them mixed up.
I found a list of online law reviews from this “Free Full-text Online Law Review/Law Journal Search Engine” created by the ABA. (Remember the name of that page. It will soon become important.) I transferred that list to a spreadsheet and edited out the ones that were not affiliated with a law school, which amounted to a little over 350 journals. I then decided that I was going to collect just some very basic information about each online journal: Date coverage, Searchability, if it was Indexed, if they provided PDFs and, if possible, determine what software (e.g. BePress, DSpace, etc.) they were using.
I made it through 50 journals and decided to pause because (a) I was going insane staring at that spreadsheet and (b) at just 1/6 of the way in I’ve already noticed some disturbing trends that I wanted to blog about. (Hello new “works in progress” post tag!) As I said, when Durham came out , I was primarily concerned with the “stable digital format” part. However, I see now that public indexing and metadata parts are way more requiring of emphasis and encouragement.
I guess, because I’m a librarian, I just assumed that when a school mounted its law journal up on the web, it would at the very least have a basic search functionality built into their law journal online archives. If they wanted to get really wild and crazy, they’d have an index. This is not the case at all. Again, I’m just 1/6 of the way through my survey, but if trends hold, only about 15-20% of the journals are searchable. And indexed? HA! Maybe 5%?
Just for an example of what I’m talking about, here is the Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal which appears on the Science Commons Open Access site linked above. Unless I want to browse through all of the issues, I’m going to have to use a vendor-based index (which will cost money) or google scholar (which doesn’t always allow for the most sophisticated of searches) to get at the content this journal contains.
So, I guess my point is, I am concerned that these online journals are becoming PDF dumping grounds with little to no metadata or access points contained within them to assist with the “access” part of “open access.” I hope that law schools, in their attempts to becoming compliant with the Durham Statement, don’t forget to include the access points to their journals.
