Law Librarian Blog

Twittermania

Nielson Wire is reporting that unique visitors to Twitter increased 1,382 percent year-over-year, from 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to a whopping 7 million in February 2009, making it the fastest growing site in the Member Communities category for the month. Of course, most of the other destinations in the category have been online longer so they have a larger user base but still...

The largest age group on Twitter was 35-49; with nearly 3 million unique visitors, comprising almost 42 percent of the site’s audience. Nielson also found that the majority of people visit Twitter while at work and the ability to twitter via a mobile phone is a driving factor in the social network’s success.

Didn't I characterize Twitter as a web communications sideshow yesterday? Well, yes I did for library work-related activities. As a member of the Over-49 age group, I want to know whether the 35-49 age group Twitterati were writing/reading tweets for work-related reasons. [JH]

New English-Language Law Review in China Seeks Article Submissions

I just learned that my LL.M. alma mater, Tsinghua University Law School in Beijing, is starting an English-language law review and seeking article submissions. Click here and here for details. Tsinghua is one of China's oldest and best universities. Its distinguished alumni include several of the country's top leaders, such as President Hu Jintao, Vice-President Xi Jinping, and National People's Congress Standing Committee Chairman Wu Bangguo. Also, Nobel laureate Al Gore spoke there in the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth. [RLS]

TREC Legal Track Making Progress on E-Discovery Searching

The work of the Legal Track of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC Legal Track) is improving search techniques for electronic discovery, according to Jason Krause’s article, “In Search of the Perfect Search,” ABA Journal, April 2009. Krause reports that researchers in TREC Legal Track have identified the following techniques that appear to yield search results better than those realized by litigators working independently and using traditional Boolean techniques:

• “[L]awyers need to work with opposing counsel to identify good search terms and to negotiate proposed Boolean search strings.” A hypothetical example of such a negotiation is available at http://abajournal.com/files/booleanexample-1.pdf ;

• Lawyers should “use sampling—testing to see whether the search engines are finding documents known to be relevant. That means deploying what e-discovery experts call iterative feedback loops. These involve a team of lawyers and other in-house experts conducting searches in stages, and conferring with counsel and experts from the opposing party to determine whether the process is working”; and

• Lawyers, when designing “a search, [] should identify the data types and then prove that the search tool they’re using works with those data types.”

[Robert Richards]

Law Librarian Guide to RSS Feeds

Diane Murley (Arizon State) explores the reasons that law librarians should be using RSS feeds, both for their own current awareness and to distribute information to library patrons in the latest issue of LLJ. Her article, The Power of RSS Feeds, highlights feeds law librarians can use, compares two feed readers, and makes recommendations for subscribing to and organizing feeds. [JH]

Why Not Harvest Citation Data Before Papers Are Published?

José H. Canós Cerdá, Eduardo Mena Nieto and Manuel Llavador Campos argue that citation analysis needs a transformation because of such important shortcomings as lack of coverage of publications, low accuracy of the citation data and costly process of harvesting citation data after papers have been published. In What's Wrong with Citation Counts? D-Lib Magazine, March/April 2009, the authors propose a brilliant alternative:acquiring citation data automatically from papers before they are published, storing the data in a Global Citation Registry, and making the Registry's data readily available for bibliometic analysis. From the article:

A look at the internal processes of both commercial and free citation management systems shows that citation harvesting, which uses costly techniques such as optical character recognition, machine learning, and others, start after papers have been published. Notice, however, that in a high number of papers, citation information is generated, and hence can be collected, much earlier. In fact, most scientists prepare their papers using word processing systems that have accompanying bibliography management utilities. BibTeX, for instance, is able to generate bibliography lists in LaTeX documents from metadata stored in the so-called ".bib" files. Microsoft Office Word 2007 has a built-in bibliography manager, and users of earlier versions can manage their bibliographies using third-party applications such as EndNote or RefWorks. All these bibliography managers are aware of the citations included in papers, but such information is systematically discarded when the camera ready copies of the papers are sent for publication. At that time, citation records must be built again from scratch, which results in additional costs, errors and delays. Moreover, different companies maintain different citation databases with highly overlapping content, possibly in different formats that complicate interoperability.

Better management of the citation data throughout the lifecycle of a paper will improve data quality and significantly reduce the cost of citation generation. Instead of viewing scientific publishing as a number of disconnected activities, we claim that a framework should be defined for a global workflow, from document creation to publication, involving different actors who would participate collaboratively. Citation data would be generated only once – at the time of document creation – after which such data could flow from one activity to the next. Consequently, there would no longer be a need to harvest citation data again after a paper's publication. The citation records thus generated should be stored in a Global Citation Registry (GCR), maintained by independent organizations similarly to the way in which Internet domain names or ISBN codes are managed. As envisioned, the GCR would be freely accessible for queries; and updates to it would be made by the entities responsible for the publications of papers, that is, companies or organizations acting as publishers.

[JH]

New on LLRX.com for March 2009

From LLRX:

• FOIA Facts: What Now?, by Scott A. Hodes 
• Through the Labyrinth: Real Answers on How Women Become Leaders, by Diana Philip 
• Researching Australian Law, by Nicholas Pengelley and Sue Milne 
• New Economy Analytics, Resources and Alerts, by Marcus P. Zillman 
• Guide to International Refugee Law Resources on the Web, by Elisa Mason
  

Opening: Assistant Director of Public Services and Legal Research, Pacific McGeorge School of Law Library

The Gordon D. Schaber Law Library seeks an enthusiastic candidate to be our next Assistant Director of Public Services and Legal Research. The Assistant Director of Public Services and Legal Research is responsible for coordinating and overseeing the overall Public Services operations of the Gordon D. Schaber Law Library, and participates actively in the Law School’s Global Lawyering Skills course. As head of the public services department, the Assistant Director oversees a talented and experienced professional staff with duties encompassing reference services, research and instructional support, computer services, interlibrary loan, circulation, and collection maintenance; the Assistant Director of Public Services also provides reference, instructional, and outreach services. Candidates should have a global perspective on legal education, have the capacity to teach in the School of Law’s expansive Global Lawyering Skills course (legal process, legal research, legal writing, advocacy and lawyering skills), and the ability to work collaboratively in creative curriculum development, with a primary focus on legal research.  The ideal candidate will teach in the Global Lawyering Skills class or may teach Advanced Legal Research.  The Assistant Director for Public Services and Legal Research serves on the Library’s Collection Development Committee, works closely with the Assistant Dean of the Law Library and the Assistant Director of Technical Services on general library administration and management, including space planning, and generally is part of the Law Library management team.

Compensation: Competitive and commensurate with experience, with a full benefits package.

Minimum Qualifications:

• M.L.S., M.L.I.S., or equivalent from ALA-accredited school, and J.D. degree from an accredited ABA law school, or equivalent
• Strong academic credentials
• Knowledge of legal research in all formats
• At least five years of relevant professional experience in a law library
• At least three years of experience supervising library staff, preferably in an academic law library
• Substantial experience teaching legal research or clearly demonstrated ability to gain prowess as a classroom instructor
• Law practice experience
• High quality communication, interpersonal and organizational skills
• Self-starter who undertakes projects and meets deadlines 
• Understanding and familiarity with library related technology 
• Substantial experience using computer-based research tools
• Service-oriented and able to work well in team environments
• Collaborative management style, team player, open to creative approaches to librarianship and legal education generally
• Commitment to scholarship

To Apply: Send a letter of interest, resume, and the names, addresses, and phone numbers of three references to Human Resources, Pacific McGeorge School of Law, 3200 Fifth Ave., Sacramento, CA 95817. Electronic applications may be sent to: mcgeorgehr@pacific.edu.
 
Pacific McGeorge School of Law is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

The Best Academic Publishers in Law?

Brian Leiter (Chicago) is running a poll to determine which academic press publishes the highest quality legal scholarship. The poll ends March 31, 2009. [JH]

Do Law Librarians Twitter? Results of the LLB Poll

Prompted by a story about Twitter use in law schools and academic law libraries, LLB launched an informal poll earlier this month to estimate Twitter use as a web communications medium by law librarians for library-related and personal reasons. The results, displayed below, are now in. Most law librarians who participated in the poll do not use Twitter for law library-related activities and have no plans on doing so.

I wonder if the lack of interest in Twitter for library-related work will be permanent. Upon reflection, I think I should have added some age-related questions: age groups for those who Twitter and age groups for patron populations. As more young law librarians enter the field and more Google generation patrons enter the practice of law will Twittering for work-related communications increase?

My personal opinion is that the use (or the perceived use) of RSS feeds by patrons trumps Twitter and the job at hand for law librarians is to identify and communicate to library patrons helpful feeds including, I guess, Twitter sources instead of alerting patrons to news and developments in 140 characters or less. For law library/librarian communications, I find Twitter to be a harmless web communications sideshow. Perhaps that's all Twitter was intended to be. But see Twitter, the Most Important Website Since Google? Then again I just might be suffering from the too-much-social-media syndrome. (Note to readers who have "befriended" me on Facebook (or is it MySpace?): sorry for not replying back.)

Readers suggested additional questions for this poll, including (1) listing reasons why one has never used Twitter and (2) asking if one tried Twitter and then stopped, and if so (a) how long did one use Twitter before stopping and (b) why did one stop. All excellent questions and I invite readers to respond to them by commenting to this post.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to participate. [JH]

Vague But Exciting... Video of CERN Conference Celebrating 20th Anniversary of the Web

Twenty years ago this month, Tim Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled "Information Management: a Proposal". "Vague, but exciting" is how Sendall described it, and he gave Berners-Lee the nod to take his proposal forward. By December, the World Wide Web was born, running first as a content management system on CERN computers. Here's the video of the conference. Note the demo of the NeXT computer on which Tim Berners-Lee developed the Web and which was also the first Web server.

Agenda

• Welcome by Professor Rolf Heuer, Director General of CERN.

• The history of the Web with Ben Segal, Jean-Francois Groff and Robert Cailliau

• Questions to the panel: Ben Segal, Jean-Francois Groff, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau

• Demo of the NeXT computer on which Tim Berners-Lee developed the Web and which was also the first Web server.

• Keynote: Tim Berners-Lee

• The future of the Web with Chris Bizer, Stephane Boyera, Dan Brickley and Tom Scott.

[JH]

Call for Papers: Natural Language Engineering of Legal Argumentation

A call for papers has been issued for a “Workshop on the Natural Language Engineering of Legal Argumentation: Language, Logic, and Computation” (NaLELA), to be held June 12, 2009, at the Institute of Law and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, in conjunction with ICAIL 2009, the Twelfth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law.  Submission deadline is April 3, 2009.  “[T]he workshop focuses particularly on the language, logic, and computation of legal argumentation such as that found between lawyers arguing a case before a court or found in legal briefs and decisions where justifications are given for and against a decision.” Recommended topics include:

• Corpus development
• Corpus analysis and text mining
• Logical analysis of legal language
• Automated parsing and translation of natural language arguments into a logical formalism
• Legal argument schemes
• Pilot implementations of tools
• Defeasible reasoning systems for the law with natural language interfaces
• Burden of proof in argumentation
• Consistency, inconsistency, and compatibility of statements in the law
• Coherence in legal argumentation
• The identification of enthymemes (missing premises due to presupposition with respect to common knowledge and shared knowledge)
• Legal argument modification
• The generation of legal arguments
• Linguistically-oriented XML mark up of legal arguments
• Dialogue protocols for argumentation
• Legal argument ontology
• Legal Ontologies with associated lexical information
• Computational theories of argumentation that are suitable to natural language.

For more details, see the complete call for papers. [Robert Richards]

A Nielsen Report on Social Networking’s New Global Footprint

According to Global Faces and Networked Places, two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit a social network or blogging site. The sector now accounts for almost 10% of all internet time. Social networking and blogging has overtaken personal Email to become the world’s fourth most popular online sector after search, portals and PC software applications. [JH]

State of the News Media 2009

This year’s report , from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, offers a general overview of the state of journalism as well as detailed examinations of the state of eight separate sectors (newspapers, online, network television, cable television, local television, audio, magazines, and ethnic media). The report also includes an in-depth content analysis, based on a study of nearly 80,000 news stories and television and radio segments in A Year in the News, which this year includes an Interactive Topline where people can explore the data for themselves.  [RJ]

Coalition Presses the Obama Administration To End "Ideological Exclusion" in Visa Applications

More than 70 legal groups are urging the Obama Administration to end the practice of practice of “ideological exclusion,” refusing visas to foreign scholars, writers, artists, and activists not on the basis of their actions but on the basis of their ideas, political views, and associations."  The letter, addressed to Attorney General Holder, Secretary of State Clinton, and Secretary of Homeland Security Napolitano, also urges the officials to revisit seven specific cases of exclusion. See also:  Obama Must Tread Fine Line on Scholars Barred From the U.S. for Their Views, The Chronicle.  [RJ]

Law and Justice with Antonin Scalia

National Review Online has posted a 5 part series with Justice Scalia discussing his his "career, his family, his opinions, his faith, his colleagues, his legacy, and the fate of the Constitution."  [RJ]

Please Repeat the Question Because I Was Surfing the Web

Here's the 2009 NYU Law School Law Revue promotional video, addressing the most controversial issue of our time, laptop use in the classroom. Hat tip to Above the Law. [JH]

Please Repeat the Question from Amanda Bakale on Vimeo

Columbia Law School Conference on the Google Books Settlement

Execellent summaries of the Conference proceedings on LibraryLaw Blog here and here. [JH]

Recent Dissertations on Legal Information Systems

We've come across the following recent dissertations on legal information systems that do yet appear to be cataloged in WorldCat:

DATE: 2008
AUTHOR: Wyner, Adam Zachary
TITLE: Violations and Fulfillments in the Formal Representation of Contracts
PUBLISHER: King’s College London, School of Physical Sciences and Engineering, Department of Computer Science
URL: http://www.wyner.info/research/Papers/WynerPhDThesis2008.pdf
DESCRIPTION: 276 p. ; PDF
ABSTRACT: http://www.wyner.info/research/Papers/WynerPhDThesis2008.pdf
SUBJECTS: Deontic logic; Contracts - Data processing

DATE: 2008
AUTHOR: Riveret, Régis
TITLE: Interactions Between Normative Systems and Software Cognitive Agents: A Formalization in Temporal Model Defeasible Logic
PUBLISHER: Università di Bologna, Centro Interdipartimentale de Ricerca in Storia del Diritto e Informatica Giuridica (CIRSFID)
URL: http://defeasible.org/PhD/RegisRiveret.pdf
DESCRIPTION: 10, 227 p. ; PDF
ABSTRACT: http://defeasible.org/PhD/abstract/RegisRiveret.html
SUBJECTS: Intelligent agents (Computer software); Deontic logic; Law - Methodology - Data processing; Information storage and retrieval systems - Law; Defeasible reasoning

DATE: 2008
AUTHOR: Lima, João Alberto de Oliveira
TITLE: Modelo genérico de relacionamentos na organização da informação legislativa e jurídica
PUBLISHER: Universidade de Brasília
URL: http://eprints.rclis.org/13107/
DESCRIPTION: 290 p. ; PDF
ABSTRACT: http://eprints.rclis.org/13107/
SUBJECTS: Legislation; Law reports, digests, etc.; Ontologies (Information retrieval); Telecommunication Law and legislation; Topic maps ; Judicial decisions ; Legislative information ; Administrative law; Brazil.
LANGUAGE: Portuguese with English abstract

[Robert Richards]

Legal Planet

Legal Planet is a new environment law and policy blog launched by UC Berkeley and UCLA. Great to see law schools collaborate in the law blogoshere. [JH]

Lieberman Urges Better Public Access To CRS Reports

Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, ID-Conn., urged the new Chairman of the Senate Rules Committee to help foster greater public access to the expert reports produced by the Congressional Research Service. In a letter to Rules Committee Chairman Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Lieberman criticizes the pay for play model and highlights the "need for an officially-sanctioned system"  to "ensure that those with power and those without have equal access to this important resource."   [RJ]