The Georgetown University Law Library has received a Law Library Publication Award from the American Association of Law Libraries for developing several Web-based legal research tutorials designed to teach first-year law students the basics of legal research. View all tutorials online on our website

Starting in 2007, the Georgetown librarians created the tutorials by using multimedia elements such as interactive demonstrations of online research, scored review questions, and sound to create a self-paced active learning environment to teach legal research skills. Many of the tutorials also require the user's participation in navigating a variety of legal research database simulations.

The tutorials cover topics such as case law research, statutory research, regulatory research, legislative history, secondary resources, and international law research.

The project coordinators were Kumar Percy Jayasuriya, Sara Sampson, and Sara Kelley. The tutorial authors were Amy Burchfield, Sara Kelley, Margaret Krause, Barbara Monroe, Sara Sampson, and Amy Taylor.

An article about the project is featured in the September 2007 issue of the Edward Bennett Williams Friends Newsletter.

Sara Kelley wrote a short article about the project on page 17 of of the Fall 2007 issue of Law Library Lights.

This past Sunday The New York Times Magazine featured "The Green Issue" and on p. 57 (or under the "Invent" chapter at the web link) the Blackle search engine was featured; the brain child of one Toby Heap, who responded to the claim that "a black version of Google would save 750 megawatt hours per year worldwide."  Apparently mostly black screens use less energy than mostly white ones. It's powered by, well, Google, and even the "about Blackle" section reports some skepticism about its claims. But if you just want a change after

and instead want to see

then try it....if you don't feel overwhelmed by black....as I do...

KeyRules, a new tool just introduced by Westlaw, allows users to locate all applicable court rules in a jurisdiction using a single search.  According to West's recent press release, after running a single search, "KeyRules gathers all applicable rules governing common federal and state court procedures and condenses them in a single easy-to-read document" with links to the cited rules.  KeyRules is available in various locations on Westlaw, including the tabbed Litigation and State Litigation pages and the relevant state jurisdictional pages.  Note, however, that KeyRules is currently only available for all federal district courts, the Court of Federal Claims, and select state and local courts in California, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and Texas.  Click here to see the full press release.

As a follow-up to the earlier post of February 12, 2008, the outcome of the Harvard A & S faculty vote on posting scholarly articles appears on the university's web page, to wit:

"In a move to disseminate faculty research and scholarship more broadly, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) voted Tuesday (Feb. 12) to give the University a worldwide license to make each faculty member's scholarly articles available and to exercise the copyright in the articles, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. "

And you might want to scoot virtually over to Harvard Law, where they are posting a digitization project called "Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders: Crime Broadsides Collected by the Harvard Law School Library." In those days, open access meant ...to executions, from the looks of it. Creepy.

The New York Times is reporting that the arts and sciences faculty at Harvard will vote today on an open access repository as a principal means of publishing their scholarly output, . "Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have them. What distinguishes this plan from current practice, said Stuart Shieber, a professor of computer science who is sponsoring the faculty motion, is that it would create an opt-out system: an article would be included unless the author specifically requested it not be. Mr. Shieber was the chairman of a committee set up by Harvard's provost to investigate scholarly publishing; this proposal grew out of one of the recommendations, he said."

There's a new open source collection of primary law on the Internet, which went live very recently. Now in alpha testing, this site is called: PreCyDent: Open Law Source.

This new site seeks to provide Google-like simplicity for searching cases, while utilizing a novel approach to ranking cases based on citation analysis and methods borrowed from network theory in other disciplines. According to the site, they have more than 335,000 opinions and 2500+ statutes. It's still in an early stage of development. For instance, a search within just the Supreme Court returned "Approximately 5 opinions in 0.05 [seconds]" but no results list was displayed. Nonetheless, the collection looks very promising, and they already have a Facebook Application and code you can use to put the PreCYdent search on your own site. For more background, view the  About PreCYdent Team.

More of the theory behind aspects of their novel case ranking can be found in a paper from Law Professor and PreCYdent CEO Thomas Smith, available on SSRN.

Scientists and mathematicians in recent years have become intensely interested in the structure of networks. Networks turn out to be crucial to understanding everything from physics and biology, to economics and sociology. This article proposes that the science of networks has important contributions to make to the study of law as well. The network of American case law closely resembles the Web in structure and can be studied using techniques that are now being used to describe many other networks, some found in nature, and others created by human action. Studying the legal network can shed light on how the legal system evolves, and many other questions. Read the complete abstract and download the paper at SSRN.

Several web sites by and for librarians and info types are talking about BigThink.com and Harvard's Et Seq. highlights the section where video essays by judges (including Supreme Court justices) appear. The site is billed as a kind of intellectual YouTube where talking heads rule. It is interesting to see the thoughtful and relaxed demeanor of some of the public intellectuals on the site, often seeming to speak more carefully and moderately than we are used to seeing when they appear in sound bytes and "under fire" via the regular media. Justice Breyer is featured today and this site may yield good teaching material.

A senior Google manager testifying before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs last week told them that major search engines miss at least some portion of the information contained on some 2,000 federal agency web sites. The manager, John Lewis Needham, stated that the search engines' "crawlers" miss information on agency web sites because of the way the sites are constructed. According to Needham, even the government's own search engine, USA.gov, misses a lot of information.

Source: BNA E-Commerce & Law Report, Dec. 19, 2007 issue.

Faculty members are posting class resources online, and they may be violating copyright in the process. William Shell, associate director of academic technology and computing services at Eastern Michigan University, asks: How can a university make faculty members aware of copyright law?

Listen to the short audio program online: Tech Therapy: Setting Professors Right on Rights

-From the Chronicle of Higher Education (KPJ)

There's an interesting article in the New Yorker entitled: Digitization and its discontents. by Anthony Grafton. In it the author argues that mass digitization projects may not bring on the research utopia that some predict.

Excerpt:

Google’s projects, together with rival initiatives by Microsoft and Amazon, have elicited millenarian prophecies about the possibilities of digitized knowledge and the end of the book as we know it. Last year, Kevin Kelly, the self-styled “senior maverick” of Wired, predicted, in a piece in the Times, that “all the books in the world” would “become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas.” The user of the electronic library would be able to bring together “all texts—past and present, multilingual—on a particular subject,” and, by doing so, gain “a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don’t know.” Others have evoked even more utopian prospects, such as a universal archive that will contain not only all books and articles but all documents anywhere—the basis for a total history of the human race.

In fact, the Internet will not bring us a universal library, much less an encyclopedic record of human experience. [...] The rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently. It will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.

Available exclusively on the New Yorker site, Adventures in Wonderland that provides a good article summary together with many links to some important digitization projects.
 [spotted by Peggy Fry & Marylin Raisch]