Law Library Technology

Santa Clara Law launches its Digital Commons

David Holt — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 18:49:59 +0000

We are very excited at Santa Clara Law to be launching our new Digital Commons, based on software from BePress. Although we haven’t yet begun our major digitization projects, we already have a number of “born-digital” documents hosted on this digital repository. Some collections include published faculty scholarship, working papers, and some special library collections. These special collections include:

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Litigation Collection (this is a collection of documents produced during litigation over the recent federal healthcare reform legislation)
The Rosetta Stone v. Google Collection (this collection contains exhibits from the un-sealed joint appendix for Rosetta Stone Ltd., v. Google Inc., No. 10-2007, on appeal to the 4th Circuit)
The Watergate Hearings (This is a collection of papers produced during the Watergate Hearings that were donated by Congressman Don Edwards to the Heafey Law Library)

The next generation of integrated library systems

David Holt — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 18:30:09 +0000

The library technology market is entering an exciting phase as libraries are finally moving past the ILS (integrated library systems) model that has been used for decades. Current ILS products, such as Ex Libris’ Voyager, Innovative Interface’s Millennium, and Sirsi’s Symphony, are being slowly replaced by web- and cloud-based systems. These systems unify ordering, acquisition, cataloging, and even the discovery layer into one service. This will undoubtedly have profound effects on the work of library staff. For example, OCLC’s new web-scale management service, OCLC WMS, will essentially replace copy cataloging. Presently, this is still a big task for most academic and public libraries. Although some catalogers may be apprehensive about these changes, I think the end of copy cataloging will actually enable library staff to re-focus their efforts on improving the bibliographic data of their local holdings and have more time for digitization projects — thereby enabling discovery and access to new materials.

The big players in this nascent market include:

Undoubtedly, these products will change as they are developed. Regardless, we are beginning to see where the future of library management software is heading.

Law schools and Digital Commons

David Holt — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 18:13:20 +0000

This has been a very interesting year for institutional repositories among law schools. Over the last few years, there has been a trend for academic institutions to create digital repositories both for archival purposes and to provide greater access to their faculty’s scholarship. Some solutions that have been in the market include Dspace and Fedora Commons. These systems, however, have proven to be difficult to use for most libraries which have affected their adoption rates. Although they are fairly easy to setup, these digital repository systems require maintenance which is problematic as technical support is not offered for these open-source solutions. Seeing an opportunity, Berkeley Electronic Press has embarked on a digital repository project of its own called Digital Commons. This system has a number of significant advantages over the previous offerings. For one, all the back-end and maintenance is done by Berkeley Electronic Press themselves. Secondly, BePress already owns Expresso - the system most law professors (and students) use to make electronic submissions to law reviews and journals. By integrating the repository with the submission system, BePress has created a product that is much more likely to be adopted, and used, by law faculty.

The issue that needs to be confronted, however, is how to convince law faculty that there is added value in using their institution’s digital repository along with SSRN. As you may know, SSRN (Social Science Research Network) is used by a majority of law faculty to host their scholarship before they submit it for publication. The “legal audience” is already there at SSRN. What many law professors fail to realize, however, is that while SSRN has a legal audience, the system itself is not designed for access or discovery. SSRN has very poor search engine optimization which makes finding legal scholarship difficult if users are not already familiar with the author or the title of the article. This is where Digital Commons can provide additional value. The strong point of Digital Commons is that the system is designed for discovery by search engines. The University of Maryland discovered that when materials were hosted on both SSRN and Digital Commons the download rates increased by 400% and the audience from SSRN remained stable – meaning that Digital Commons is bringing in new readers, not cannibalizing them from SSRN.

Law libraries are quickly seeing the value in Digital Commons in promoting their faculty’s scholarship. Just in the last 18 months, we have seen an explosion of law schools purchasing Digital Commons subscriptions. Additionally, many law schools are also purchasing LawKit from BePress which enables them to integrate their student law reviews into Digital Commons, including the submission process via Expresso. Frankly, I think this is very exciting for student law reviews. These journals are now open to a much wider audience, enabling these materials to be used by non-legal academics. If this trend continues, we may see that the Durham Statement (a proposal to enable wider access to legal scholarship) becomes a reality.

Resources:

Santa Clara Law Digital Commons
Institutional Repositories at Law Schools : Trends and Triumphs (CALI Conference 2011 presentation)

Should law libraries purchase Kindles?

David Holt — Mon, 09 May 2011 19:39:03 +0000

With the drop in prices for e-readers, there is a lot of discussion about what role e-books and other electronic media will play in law libraries. Although e-readers have been on the market for a number of years now, it has only been recently where the prices on these units have dropped to a point where there is widespread appeal. There has even been movement by large legal publishers, notably WestLaw, to integrate e-readers into their products. For example, users of WestLaw Next can export all printable materials to their Kindle e-mail address. This is very convenient for reading long law review articles or cases – although the ability to annotate or make notes is still very rudimentary.

This column aims to answer two basic questions about these e-readers: should law libraries think about purchasing e-book/e-readers and how can we improve the experience of reading legal materials electronically?

For the first question, it seems that libraries would be well advised to wait until this nascent market further stabilizes. As e-ink based e-readers compete with multi-function devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers, we may find that e-readers will decline in popularity. This does not, of course, mean that there will also be a decline in electronic materials – just that these materials will be read with other devices.

Additionally, although legal publishers seem eager to integrate e-readers and smartphones into their services, they are notably less eager to actually produce e-book legal materials. WestLaw is experimenting with electronic casebooks but they are presently viewable only on computers and not mobile devices. Essentially these “e-books” produced by Westlaw are scanned copies of their print titles. As they are also protected by DRM technology, that are not exportable to any mobile device or e-reader.

Consequently, much of the value in using an e-reader for legal research is reading documents exportable from WestLaw Next and PDF documents. WestLaw has made exporting documents to a Kindle rather easy and straight-forward. Users just simply click on the Print icon and select “Send to Kindle” as the export option. They then enter the Kindle’s email address (remember, to use XXXX@free.kindle.com to avoid 3G network charges) and the document is sent wirelessly and automatically synced with the Kindle. I find the experience of reading law review articles or cases on the Kindle to be rather pleasant as long as you don’t need to make annotations or highlight text.

One of the nice features of the Kindle, however, is the ability to read PDF files natively. This is a great feature because you can send PDFs to your Kindle knowing that the formatting will remain the same. A problem, however, is the size of the Kindle screen (this applies to the Nook as well). The cheaper unit has only a 6” screen which makes the text of a PDF quite small and difficult to read. Fortunately, this problem can be alleviated by cropping out the margins from the PDF file. This gives more room for the actual text and will make it easier to read. Sadly, the Kindle or the Nook doesn’t do this automatically to PDF files. However, there is a tool called BRISS (yes, it is a circumcision joke) that will automatically crop the edges off the PDF file and make it much more appropriate for reading on an e-reader.

In summation, it appears much too soon for law libraries to seriously consider purchasing e-readers. Because this market is moving so quickly, it would be wise for libraries to wait and see where it goes. However, there is present value in using e-readers for legal research and librarians can help their patrons to improve the reading experience on these devices.

Excellent article on WestLaw Next and searching for esoteric legal materials

David Holt — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 02:23:04 +0000

There is a new article available via SSRN that discusses the new features within WestLaw Next and how these may impact legal research in academia. Written by Ron Wheeler, the library director at the University of San Francisco School of Law, the article is a great discussion about this new legal research product and addresses some of its strengths and weaknesses. Professor Wheeler has an in-depth analysis of the impact of “crowd searching” and how this technology may be ill-suited for law school environments. He argues that WestLaw Next may be valuable for firm environments, where a small number of legal materials are used frequently, compared to law school environments where scholars write on emerging and novel legal areas. Professor Wheeler is one of the foremost law librarians, and legal research experts, in the country. I highly recommend this article.

Does WestlawNext Really Change Everything: The Implications of WestlawNext on Legal Research — SSRN

SB 1070 : New research guide from UCLA

David Holt — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 18:45:26 +0000

The controversial immigration bill in Arizona, SB 1070, has received lots of media attention and has spurred a debate on how governments should confront undocumented immigrants. The librarians at Santa Clara Law have written a research guide on this topic. However, a research project at the law library at UCLA has developed an extensive and nearly comprehensive guide on SB 1070. If you are doing research on this subject, we strongly recommend you take a look at this excellent resource.

SB 1070 — Santa Clara Law (LawGuides)
Arizona and National Immigration Crisis — UCLA Law

New ebooks from Westlaw on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Evidence

David Holt — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 18:43:58 +0000

The new updated Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Evidence are not yet available from Westlaw in the print pocket-book format. However, Westlaw has made available e-books versions of both of these. You can’t send these to an e-reader, such as a Kindle or Nook, but you can view them in their entirety on your web browser.

Federal Rules of Civil Procedure — Westlaw
Federal Rules of Evidence — Westlaw

How to submit a law review article

David Holt — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 18:42:48 +0000

If you’re a student, or even a faculty member, who has questions about the process of submitting publications to law reviews you may find a new article on SSRN to be informative. Written by two law librarians at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, the article details information about submitting articles to law reviews and journals, including the methods for submitting an article, any special formatting requirements, how to contact them to request an expedited review, and how to contact them to withdraw an article from consideration. It covers 202 law reviews.

Information for Submitting Articles to Law Reviews & Journals — SSRN

How I learned to stop worrying and love LibGuides

David Holt — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 23:02:15 +0000

If you’re a past reader of this blog, you may already know about my antipathy towards LibGuides. I felt that having a separate CMS (content management system) for research guides was counter-productive as it worked against the principle of having one CMS for all your web content. Additionally, I felt that the system was a “crutch” of sorts for librarians who lacked the sufficient technical skills to create Web 2.0 savvy research guides. Well, after nearly 10 months using LibGuides I have to confess I have been converted. Our traffic has gone up considerably since we made the move. Additionally, we are now creating class guides quickly and easily that can be used for both class presentations and later as a research guides for students.

I do have, however, some suggestions on how to make the best of your LibGuides subscription and a few suggestions to LibGuides itself on how to improve their product:

1. Create a “template” guide for content that you are going to reuse. Frequently you may want to reuse content such as how to find journal articles or locate books in the catalog. Rather than re-creating this content with each guide, simply copy it from a template guide. You don’t need to publish this template guide to copy content from it.

2. Avoid “white” space on your guides. When you adjust the columns widths on a page you may be left with some white space. Make sure you enter in the width values correctly to avoid this. Leaving white space on a guide makes it look unfinished or makes students think that something didn’t completely load.

3. This may seem overly basic, but remember to link citations back to the source they came from. If you have a entry for a state/federal code, make sure it links to LII (Cornell) or your state legislative website.

4. Keep in mind that your most popular guides are going to be the ones that are the most “basic” and fundamental. Students often use these research guides for questions that they are embarrassed to ask their librarian or professor. Our most popular guide is on how to read a legal citation.

Suggestions to Libguides:

1. Don’t make users enter in pixel values for column widths. This is confusing and not user friendly. Instead, give users an option of one-, two-, or three-columns.

2. Why can’t links in text fields be included in the dead link checker? This doesn’t make much sense. It is very time consuming to convert a list of links into the proper “Simple Web Links” or “Link and Lists” content box. Most users are just going to copy and paste these lists into the standard text content box. Why not include these in the link checker?

3. Make it easier for users to create multiple word tags associated with a guide. This is particularly true for law librarians who may instinctively tag a guide as “Federal Law” or “California Family Law”.

School Bullying and LGBT Adolescents

David Holt — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 19:35:19 +0000

There has been considerable media attention lately on the issue of school bullying and LGBT adolescents. The librarians here at the Heafey Law Library have created a research guide for students and attorneys doing work in this subject area. The guide, entitled “Sexual Orientation and the Law: School Bullying“, includes journal articles, cases, federal and state statutes, and media resources.

Additionally, the campus is organizing a panel discussion on school bullying and gay teens that is schedule for October 14th at Noon in Bannan 135. Participants include local social workers and attorneys from the National Center for Lesbian Rights. If you’re on Facebook, more information about the event is available here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=152537378115368.

Some topics that may be discussed include:

- A discussion about the Tinker standard and student expression. Particularly on how a homophobic school environment is a substantial disruption and interferes with the right of LGBT students to learn (Harper v. Poway may be discussed)

- The pertinent CA state statutes which apply to school bullying including the Bulling Prevention for School Safety and Crime Reduction Act of 2003 (SB 719) (2003)

- The proposed federal legislation on school bullying, H.R. 2262, to amend the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act

- How LGBT adolescents are particularly vulnerable to homophobia in a school environment. How this impacts educational achievement and mental well-being

- A discussion on LGBT adolescent suicides