Law Librarian Blog

LexisNexis Alert Replaces ECLIPSE Feature

The LexisNexis ECLIPSE feature becomes LexisNexis Alert. From LexisNexis:

On August 13, your current ECLIPSE will automatically become LexisNexis Alert. On this day, you will find your current ECLIPSE by selecting the ALERT tab at the top of the lexis.com screen.

With LexisNexis Alert, you can automatically receive the current news that impacts everything you are doing. Monitor news coverage of your current and prospective clients, relevant businesses, court cases and more. LexisNexis Alert offers the convenience of news delivered directly to your desktop, as well as coverage from more than 20,000 news sources.

OT: I'm 59 Percent American

According to the How Amercian Are You? quiz I'm only 59 percent American and that's with selecting Reagan over Carter or Clinton as "the best late 20th century president."

My score would have risen to 61 percent if I prefered Amercan cheese over Blu cheese but it would have declined to 56 percent if I picked Brie over American cheese, clearly an anti-French bias.

The automated summation of my answers states

Most times you are proud to be an American. Though sometimes the good ole US of A makes you cringe Still, you know there's no place better suited to be your home. You love your freedom and no one's going to take it away from you!

Well, we're all just hopeful monsters, now aren't we?

Take the quizz, How Amercian Are You. And if you want comment back your score.

Approval Ratings for All 100 U.S. Senators as of August 2005

From SurveyUSA.com:

Approval Ratings for All 100 U.S. Senators as of August 2005:

• Sorted Alphabetically by State
• Sorted Alphabetically by U.S. Senator's Last Name
• Sorted from Highest "Net Approval" Score to Lowest
• Sorted from Highest Approval Rating to Lowest

Ron Jones, Unv Cin Law Lib

National Institute of Standards and Technology Provides Free Database of CVE's

For all you techies out there wondering about the next worm that hasn't been reported by the national press, the NIST has created a free database of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE's).  NIST describes the page this way:

NVD is a comprehensive cyber security vulnerability database that integrates all publicly available U.S. Government vulnerability resources and provides references to industry resources. It is based on and synchronized with the CVE vulnerability naming standard.

The database content is not for the squeamish, or the easily bored, but can be highly valuable as a tool to discover vulnerabilities in software we use on a daily basis.  According to statistics, approximately 8 vulnerabilities are published daily.  Yikes!

Mark Giangrande, DePaul Law

University of Michigan Law Library Publishes Largest Faculty Bibliography

"The University of Michigan's Faculty Publications Web site, , is the first complete bibliographic record of the intellectual history of a major law school on the Internet," says Law Library Director Margaret Leary. "It contains over 7,000 entries, from the Law School's founding in 1859 through forthcoming publications."

"We have always known that our faculty consistently produces an incredible array of cutting-edge scholarship for the legal and academic community," says U-M Law School Dean Evan Caminker. "This bibliography shows the depth and history of this tradition."

Quoted from U of Michigan Law Library webpage. Originally posted on Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites.

Lee Peoples, Oklahoma City University Law Library

GPO Access Adds the Permanent Edition of the Congressional Record to its Site

Tucked away on GPO Access is a new page that offers text and PDF copies of the Permanent Edition of the Congressional Record.  There is no link from the main Congressional Record page.  However, you can find it if you click the link for View All under Legislative Resources on the main page.  Only Volume 145 (1999) is available.  But hey, you have to start somewhere.  According to a note, additional volumes will be added in the future.

Find the page at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/crecordbound/index.html.

Mark Giangrande, DePaul Law

Open Access Webliography

A preprint of the article "Open Access Webliography" by Adrian K. Ho and Charles W. Bailey, Jr. is now available. The article aims to present a wide range of useful freely available internet resources (e.g. directories, e-journals, FAQs, mailing lists, and weblogs) that allow the reader to investigate the major aspects of the important open access (OA) movement.

The internet resources included in this webliography were identified during the course of one of the authors writing the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-prints and Open Access Journals. The authors evaluated, selected, categorized, and annotated these resources to construct this webliography, which complements the bibliography.

The most useful resources have been annotated and organized into webliography sections. For example, the "Starting Points", "Debates", and "General Information" sections list resources that orient the reader to OA and the issues involved. The different "Directories (and Guides)" sections alert the reader to useful finding aids on relevant subjects.

This article appears in the volume 33, no. 3 (2005) issue of Reference Services Review, which is a special issue about "the role of the reference librarian in the development, management, dissemination, and sustainability of institutional repositories."

A preprint of Charles W. Bailey's "The Role of Reference Librarians in Institutional Repositories" article in this issue is also available.