LLOPSCited

by Kristine Lloyd

Walking through Nordstrom is a heavenly experience. Gliding from architecturally aligned rack to rack, you feel as though you are in a museum. There are items that you should not touch. Items that famous people wear. You may be accosted by security for touching these items without permission if you are not carrying a Birkin bag. Sweaters are folded as soon as they’re touched and hangars are realigned after being pulled out, examined and rehung asymmetrically. A tour through Macy’s (at least some of the stores) is like walking down an alleyway. Clothes often litter the floor, hangars jut out like elbows, the mannequins look like they’ve had a rough night, and everything is 25% off. Macy’s carries many of the same designers as Nordstrom, that is, if you can find them.

What exactly am I getting at here? Well, such is the difference between two court docket alert services: Westlaw’s CourtWire and Courthouse News Service. CourtWire is, as my grandma would say, real purdy, but it does a lot of the same things that Courthouse News does, which is basically to give you access to complaints before anyone else can, by what I imagine are people who wait like the post-Thanksgiving sales shoppers to get into the courts first thing in the morning. Continue reading »

by Sue Mecklem

In the past year, our firm’s librarians have had a goal of figuring out how we can assist our attorneys more effectively. There are many approaches to gleaning this information, from casual water cooler conversations to electronic surveys to educated guesses. One idea we decided to explore was  attending practice group meetings to figure out how we could assist our attorneys in their work. The experience has been a productive learning experience for me.

My approach to attending practice group meetings at first was to ask the practice group meeting organizer if I could attend an upcoming meeting to listen and learn. For my first visits I did not prepare formal presentations or ask to be included on the agenda but gave the group a quick spiel on how we librarians were looking for ways to assist them and how we were interested in learning more about their practices. I always had positive responses to my sitting in on practice group meetings. Continue reading »

by Philippe Cloutier

The Federal Register’s enhanced online presence is up and running. It is certainly dazzling, and in comparison to the black and white, impersonal, and sometimes too technical print document, the new web 2.0 version proves engaging. FR 2.0 adds photos, sections/categories, friendly navigation and interface, and digital bookmarks (see photo-click to enlarge).

It definitely feels like a web newspaper and represents itself as such, displaying the current date, latest issue, and a focus on browsing. The little things within each document make the experience better: font size and color control, easy access to PDF and XML versions, shortened links, and citation information. Also welcomed are RSS feeds by section, allowing us to stay on top of healthcare and banking systems in flux. Continue reading »

by Kerry Fitz-Gerald

Before heading to AALL, I will be in Boulder, attending the second annual Boulder Conference on Legal Information: Scholarship and Teaching. The goal of this conference is to create a pedagogy in support of the Boulder Statement on Legal Research Education.

In preparation for the conference, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about information literacy and teaching legal research. As a teacher, I find there is a real conflict between the need to teach particular skills, like how to find a case or a statute, and the need to teach broader skills, like how to identify and use an unfamiliar database.  Usually, by the time one’s taught the basic skills, there’s no time to teach anything more ambitious. Continue reading »

by Erin Hoffrance

During my time working in the law firm library arena, I have also been enrolled in the University of Washington Information School’s online MLIS program. Working full-time and going to school can be quite an overwhelming experience, so in order to make sense of it all, I would try to find overlap in both areas as often as possible . I experimented with tools I learned about in school to see how they would translate into the work world. There is one tool that kept coming up in my mind as a great way to bridge this gap – and that tool is Jing!

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by Kerry Fitz-Gerald

For this month’s post, Rick Stroup at the King County Law Library (KCLL) graciously agreed to share what he‘s reading. His print professional reading includes the major law librarianship journals—Law Library Journal and Legal Reference Services Quarterly (LRSQ)—as well as Library Journal. He finds the latter particularly useful because public librarianship is such a big part of KCLL’s mission and because it provides a window into other types of libraries’ developments. Lately, he’s been reading about new technology programs, such as libraries loaning Kindles and laptops, and is always interested to read user study information. While the general tenor, he said, is that user studies are time and labor intensive, most libraries report that the studies are ultimately useful.

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by Kristine Lloyd

It’s been a long time coming, renovations to the look and feel of PACER. Didn’t we all love the pastel color schemes, like an Easter egg surprise every time you clicked on a court’s homepage? Well, thankfully, all the spirit and personality of the individual court homepages are still there, but the PACER landing page and the US Party / Case Index, now called the PACER Case Locator, have been updated to a chicer, more mod look. Even the url is now pacer.gov: simple as a little black dress.

The PACER Case Locator:

No one besides a librarian gets too excited about an Index, so the name change was a good decision. The tabs across the top are handy and alleviate clicking through multiple screens to get to a page where you can actually do something. Get out your “Marion the Librarian” reading glasses though, because the font has gone from Large Print Books to micro-fiche sized. Here are a few pros and cons about the new PACER Case Locator:

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by Philippe Cloutier

It all started with the Kindle and Amazon, now the flames are fanning with Apple and the iPad, and this summer an enveloping cloud of smoke and fire will take shape with Google’s e-book endeavor. A significant difference between these competitors is apparent, Amazon and Apple sell hardware and content, where Google looks to sell only content. Google tried their hands in the physical realm of cell-phone devices with the Nexus One and in short: flopped. Their business model rests in the clouds of data they control on the Internet (thanks in part to libraries around the world who offered their collections for scanning). With a hardware lesson and a digital book archive like no other in hand, Google will become a powerhouse in the e-book era.

While a new age of e-books is beginning, we must remain aware of existing privacy issues with Google in general, and specifically, with Google Books. The policies surrounding their upcoming foray are unknown. However, we do know Google’s privacy/copyright history leaves room for improvement. We’ll find out this summer, as Google rolls out their book market, if the right privacy pieces and policies are in place. Yet, no matter how the legal battles take shape or are resolved, e-books are shifting out of niche markets and towards more accessible and easier to use forms. More importantly, consumer options are abounding from proven tech companies with billions to spend. E-books may not affect us today but tomorrow will be a different story.

by Tania Schriwer

Back in January, Greg Lambert of 3 Geeks and a Law Blog made ten projections for the year 2010, one of them being that this would be the year of social media acceptance in the legal field. Many others have echoed the expectation that law firms would start to embrace the world of Facebook and Twitter, particularly as a cheap and effective marketing tool. Right on cue, back in January, Kristine Lloyd found this chart from myCorporateResources.com which showed the various social media AmLaw 100 firms had started using. As Kristine noted, many firms had signed up for a Twitter account, but had yet to tweet. I decided to investigate whether, at this stage in the year, any of these tweet-reluctant firms had joined the tweeting bandwagon and, if so, what were they tweeting about.

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by Kristine Lloyd

A combination of curiosity and disdain piqued my interest and led to my subsequent purchase of This Book is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save us All by Marilyn Johnson. The exceedingly lengthy subtitle is so very librarian-esque, but more importantly, what’s up with the term “cybrarian?” Does anyone actually use this term, without irony? On the cheesy scale, it ranks right up there with Guybrarian.

The cover of the book features a superhero librarian. With her svelte bod, ample bosom, and kindle in hand, she leaps bounds, books and buildings to save us all. Throughout the book, Johnson compares us to navigators, miners, jockeys and Girl Scouts. In sum: we are information saviors, which frankly, may be a lofty load for any of us to bear. Despite the smarmy exhortations about our greatness, Johnson does highlight the heroism of our profession, with inspiring tales of information visionaries creating complex and innovative library services on Second Life, standing up for patrons’ privacy rights, linking students across the globe and fighting to save artifacts of both the commoner and the exalted.  Continue reading »