Cornell Law Library's InSITE Website Reviews

Reviews published in the February 25, 2008 issue of InSITE:

• Iraq: the War Card
• Legacy Tobacco Documents Library
• Lincoln and His Circle
• OAKList Database
• State of Public School Integration

[RJ]

Iraq: the War Card
http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/

Iraq: The War Card is a product of the Center for Public Integrity, “a nonprofit organization dedicated to producing original, responsible investigative journalism on issues of public concern.” Beginning with a detailed overview, which includes a chart of false statements by month, the project analyzes every public statement made by eight top Bush administration officials leading up to the U.S. war on Iraq, from September 11, 2001 through September 11, 2003.  Every direct and indirect false statement, defined in the site’s Methodology section, made during this time relating to Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and potential links between Iraq and Al Qaeda was counted.  The result is a searchable database of “380,000 words of Iraq-related public pronouncements by top Bush Administration officials.”  The site also features information on the officials at issue, highlights key false statements, provides an interactive timeline, reports public opinion poll results, and includes a bibliography.  The project has been extensively covered by the news media and should be of interest to anyone concerned with the U.S. war in Iraq. [JJ]

Legacy Tobacco Documents Library
http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/

The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL) is a digital collection within the Tobacco Control Archives at the University of California at San Francisco.  With more than forty-three million pages, the LTDL offers documents "created by major tobacco companies related to their advertising, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and scientific research activities."  The collection provides documents dating from the late 1800s, with the bulk of the material from the latter half of the twentieth century.  The collections in the library are organized by company or industry group, including Lorillard, Philip Morris, and the Tobacco Institute.  The site offers basic, advanced, and expert searching options with all three allowing searches to be narrowed by collection.  Basic searches can be limited to author, document type, text, metadata, and title.  Advanced searching provides additional features of basic Boolean operators and date restrictions.  Expert searching allows more complex search queries with the notable addition of searching by field.  The number of fields available is extensive so users will want to consult the Field Descriptions page.  Another way to access material is through the Popular Documents section.  In this section, selected documents are made available under the categories of Industry Activity, Marketing to Women, Secondhand Smoke, and Smoking in Movies. [MM]

Lincoln and His Circle
http://www.library.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=379      

Lincoln and His Circle is a project of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of Rochester (New York).  The project is digitizing for online access the “letters to, from, and about Abraham Lincoln” held in the Department’s collections.  Project materials have been taken from the papers of William Henry Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, as well as materials donated by the Fred L. Emerson Foundation of Auburn, New York.  The collection includes letters written by Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury, and Edwin M. Stanton, who served as Secretary of War.  The index to the collection may be browsed or searched by writer of the letter, recipient of the letter, or date.  Each index record includes the place of writing and the name of the collection from which it was drawn.  Each page of the letter is a separate image file linked from the index record.  The project is a work-in-progress and will be expanded in the future. [MM]

OAKList Database
http://www.oaklist.qut.edu.au/

The OAKList (Open Access to Knowledge), led by a team of law professors at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, aims to "facilitate better access to research, especially that which is publically [sic] funded … "  The OAKList database allows anyone to search for a publisher or particular publication to discover that organization’s open access archiving policy, i.e. whether authors may also publish or "archive" their work in an open access repository, such as SSRN or an institutional repository.  Policies are color coded: green allows both pre- and post-print archiving, blue allows post-print archiving, yellow allows pre-print archiving, and white indicates archiving is not formally supported.  The database draws upon a number of sources for information, including SHERPA/RoMEO and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).  For academic authors interested in open access to their work, this is a great resource to help them select OA- friendly publishers.  Currently, there are few U.S. law reviews included in the database, so its usefulness to U.S. law faculty is limited. [JJ]

State of Public School Integration
http://www.s4.brown.edu/schoolsegregation/

Brown University’s interdisciplinary initiative, the American Communities Project, provides information to scholars and the public about trends that affect neighborhoods, cities, and regions around the country.  It utilizes data from the U.S. Census and other specialized sources to provide visitors with demographic information over time.  The "State of Public School Integration" web pages provide analysis of trends in court-ordered desegregation in relation to the racial and ethnic composition of U.S. public school districts between the years 1968 to 2000.  Visitors may browse the site by school district to view ethnic and racial composition data along with cases (if any) that involved that district.  The visual representation of the demographic data allows for quick comprehension of changes over time.  This site also provides several reports on the state of school segregation in the present time.  Researchers and educators interested in the Brown decision will appreciate the site’s history and timeline of this landmark court case. [BWK]

InSITE contributors: J. Jones, B. Kreisler, M. Morrison, J. Pajerek (editor)

InSITE highlights selected law-related Web sites in two ways: as an annotated publication issued electronically and in print; and, as a keyword-searchable database. The law librarians at Cornell
evaluate potentially useful Web sites, select the most valuable ones, and provide commentary and subject access to them. This information can be accessed via the channels below,  in addition to this mailing list:

1. Searchable database or by browsing current and archived
   issues on the web:

        InSITE home page ( http://library2.lawschool.cornell.edu/insiteasp/)

2. RSS feed ( http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/lawlibrary/insiteasp/public/rss.asp )

3. Print format for the Cornell Law School community.

***A note to our readers: The InSITE website has been revamped and now features a quick search on the home page, in addition to the advanced search previously available.  We've also added a great new feature that allows anyone to search all the websites ever annotated by InSITE with a single click.   It's updated with each new issue of InSITE.  We hope you enjoy these new features of InSITE.