Law Librarian Blog

Arnold's The Google Trilogy

If you want to know more about how Google delivers its products and services and have $650 laying around for PDFs, you might find Stephen E. Arnold's The Google Trilogy interesting:

• The Google Legacy (2005) concentrates on an overview of Google and of its technology.

• Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator (2007) drills down into Google’s technology as revealed or suggested by its patents.

• Google: The Digital Gutenberg (2009) takes an in-depth look at Google’s potential outside of its traditional search origins.

[JH]

IT Dashboard Provides Details on Federal Information Technology Spending

The IT Dashboard provides details of Federal information technology investments and provides users with the ability to track the progress of investments over time. The IT Dashboard displays data received from agency reports to the Office of Management and Budget, including general information on over 7,000 Federal IT investments and detailed data for nearly 800 of those investments that agencies classify as "major. Agency CIOs are responsible for evaluating and updating select data on a monthly basis, which is accomplished through interfaces provided on the website. Hat tip to beSpacific. [JH]

User-Centered Strategic Planning for Court Libraries in Catalonia

The creation of a charter of court library service goals is described by Ivet Adell Duch and her colleagues of the Xarxa de Biblioteques Judicials de Catalunya del Departament de Justícia, in “The Service Charter of the Network of Court Libraries of Catalonia: A Product of the ‘Share’ Project” [“Carta de Servicios de la Xarxa de Biblioteques Judicials de Catalunya: Un Producto del Programa ‘Compartim,’”], a poster session presented at Interinformación, the 11th Jornadas Españolas de Documentación, held May 20-22, 2009, in Zaragoza, Spain, at p. 327. The authors describe their two-year process of meeting in working groups and utilizing Web 2.0 tools to develop formal service objectives for their network of 18 court libraries.  The librarians also established criteria for assessing achievement of the goals, and developed Web-based forms by which patrons can offer feedback on service quality.  The article describes a thorough and innovative process of user-centered strategic planning for court libraries.  HT Jesus Tramullas in the June 2009 issue of Current Cites. [Robert Richards].

We Are Living in Exponential Times

Did You Know 3.0 is fascinating video on the progression of information technology. Created by Karl Fisch, and modified by Scott McLeod, it's the 2008 edition of the "Shift Happens" video. [JH]

E-Books: Understanding the Basics

Jane Lee, California Digital Library Assessment Analyst, covers e-book essentials in E-Books: Understanding the Basics. In her brief article, Lee observes that "the rise of e-books highlights the struggle to offer services that address the increasing demand for electronic resources while maintaining legacy collections. There will be questions and arguments about the future of books and the role that academic libraries must fulfill, but we must stay focused on the central question. Our materials and methods may change, but our mission remains the same. We exist to support scholarship – whatever form it takes." Hat tip to Digital Koans.

Mark Giangrande (DePaul) observes on Tech Law Prof Blog that the e-book market may open up some if Amazon moves away from linking its own content exclusively with its own reader. See Amazon May Open Up Kindle, e-Book Business To Other Formats. [JH]

Using Custom Search Engines

Check out law librarian and blogger John J. DiGilio's new LLRX article, Bridging the DiGital Divide: Custom Search Engines Put You in Control. [JH]

Staring at Glowing Rectangles

A new report published this week by researchers at Stanford University suggests that Americans spend the vast majority of each day staring at, interacting with, and deriving satisfaction from glowing rectangles. Details at 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles.

Meanwhile (but related) the latest findings of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project mark a departure from the stagnation in home high-speed adoption rates that had prevailed from December, 2007 through December, 2008. During that period, Project surveys found that home broadband penetration remained in a narrow range between 54% and 57%. An April 2009 survey, Home Broadband Adoption 2009, shows 63% of adult Americans now have broadband internet connections at home. The growth in home broadband adoption occurred even though survey respondents reported paying more for broadband compared to May 2008. Last year, the average monthly bill for broadband internet service at home was $34.50, a figure that stands at $39.00 in April 2009. [JH]

CS-SIS Web 2.0 Challenge 2009

The CS-SIS is rolling out their Web 2.0 Challenge again this summer, a fantastic opportunity to learn about and play with new technologies that can be implemented in any kind of law library. The official announcement is below:

Announcing the Web 2.0 Challenge 2009: A Free, Online Course to Introduce Law Librarians to Web 2.0 Technologies

Last year the AALL Computing Services Special Interest Section sponsored the first Web 2.0 Challenge, an online course to introduce law librarians to social software and how to use it in their libraries.  The course was so popular CS-SIS is sponsoring it again in 2009.

The Web 2.0 Challenge will provide a free, comprehensive, and social online learning opportunity designed for law librarians that incorporates hands-on use of these technologies. The course is intended for law librarians who have little experience with these technologies but are interested in learning more.

The online course will take place between August 3 and September 6.  The five week course will cover these areas:

Week 1: Blogs & RSS
Week 2: Flickr & Social Bookmarking Software
Week 3: Social Networking Software and Twitter
Week 4: Wikis and LibGuides
Week 5: Web 2.0 @ Your Library

Participants will be required to complete a series of weekly activities, including viewing an instructional screencast; completing hands-on exercises based on the lesson; weekly blogging about their experience; and participating in a weekly small group chat session.  The course will culminate with each participant developing a proposal for implementing a specific social software tool in their library.

Full enrollment will be limited to approximately one hundred participants.  However, course content will be freely viewable to anyone who wishes to follow along.  Enrolled participants who complete all activities are eligible for final prize drawings (prizes provided by CS-SIS).  Certificates will also be awarded to all participants who complete the course.

We anticipate opening enrollment June 22nd.  There is no charge for this course and enrollment will be offered on a first come first served basis. 

For more information, visit the CS-SIS website.  If you have any questions, you can contact Meg Kribble (mkribble AT law.harvard,edu) or Sally Irvin (irvinsa AT wfu.edu).

[EF]

Who's Running the Most Web Servers?

From publicly available data:

1&1 Internet: 55,000 servers
Rackspace: 50,038 servers
The Planet: 48,500 servers
Akamai Technologies: 48,000 servers
OVH: 40,000 servers (company)

But according to Rich Miller in Who Has the Most Web Servers? there are much larger server farms, including Google (a three-year old estimate at 450,000 servers) and Microsoft was running about 218,000 servers as of mid-2008 and Company’s new Chicago container farm will hold up to 300,000 servers, so the count will change rapidly when that facility is deployed. [JH]

Attend the CALI Conference Virtually – for Free!

The CALI Conference for Law School Computing always has an interesting mix of sessions for librarians, IT folk and law faculty, and new this year, all the sessions will be webcast live! Using the open source web meeting software Dimdim, each session will have a live video feed and chat room.

The conference kicks off this Thursday, June 18, and runs through Saturday, June 20. The links for all the conference session webcasts are available on the conference program website. While all the sessions look fantastic, the following may be of particular interest to librarians:

• Authentication and Online Document Repositories
• Critical Mass is Critical – A View Into the Changing World of Scholarly Communications
• Firefox Add-ons for Legal Research
• No Carrot No Stick No Budget No Problem:Tools for the 21st Century Library
• A Holistic Approach to Academic Computing: Librarians and Instructional Technologists Are Better Working Together
• Introducing and Integrating Free Internet Legal Research Into Classroom
• Crowdsourcing and Open Access v2.0: Harnessing the Power of Peer Production to Disseminate Historical Records and Legal Scholarship
• Kindle for Law Schools
• Using LibGuides to build Legal Research Guides
• Building awesome library web apps with open source
• Coursecrafting: (def.) Mashing up legal research, moot court, skills training and instructional technology into something new and innovative!
• Thinking Outside the (Glass) Box: Digital Displays in Law Libraries

[EF]

The Next Frontier of Search

Developers are entering the "next frontier of search" by trying to add structure to the mass of unstructured electronic data. Computational search engines like Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared aim to construct a database of factual information based on user search logic and present that data is some structured way, like "squares" akin to a spreadsheet display produced by Google Squared where rows of output represent attributes/characteristics related to the user's search terms.

Early reviews of both computation search engines are mixed and for a variety of reasons. Comparisons abound. See, e.g. Google Squared vs. Wolfram|Alpha … FIGHT! and What Is Google Squared? It Is How Google Will Crush Wolfram Alpha. Expectations are high, far higher I think than what these SEs can deliver. As information professionals, we must also be mindful of fundamental differences in their scope. Google Squared for example searches the Web while Wolfram Alpha's data is not drawn from the Web but from a database that is "curated" by Wolfram Research, meaning its data is drawn only from sources that are edited and checked. There is a huge difference between filtered and unfiltered data and search results will reflect this in addition to the differences in the algorithms used by Google Squared and Wolfram Alpha.

Law librarians have been testing Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared and rightly so -- it's what we are supposed to do. See, e.g., LLB's Early Reviews of WolframAlpha for Legal Research. Greg Lambert is the first (or at least one of the first) law librarians to write about a test drive of Google Squared for legal research purposes. See his Google Squared - Better Than Wolfram Alpha on Legal Searches? In my opinion, both computational search engines eventually will be tools law librarians turn to for factual research of legal documentation, like patent research (Greg's idea, not mine), but these tools will be additions to, not in lieu of, search engines we already use, and they probably will be more useful for business and scientific research than for legal research.

The Next Frontier of Search for Legal Research. I don't believe anyone in legal informatics is claiming otherwise about Wolfram Alpha and Google Squared but the point I want to make here is that the next frontier of search for legal research is replacing the aging search engines we current use regularly in LexisNexis and Westlaw and the only new search engine I have seen in recent years that offers the prospect of doing that is PreCYdent. Right now, the PreCYdent search engine is so closely and unfortunately associated with the free online legal research movement (see, e.g., Bob Ambrogi's Get Your Free Case Law on the Web and his earlier post, Sophisticated Search for Public Domain Law) that we tend to forget how innovative the PreCYdent algorithm is. That will change if/when LexisNexis or Westlaw admit that PreCYdent is better than their own search engines and license it.

It's time to replace the antiquated SEs in our fee-based online legal research services with ones that incorporate modern principles and techniques of information retrieval. Looks to me like a San Diego law prof and his team of software engineers have already accomplished this. For more, see Steven Robert Miller's PreCYdent: A New Search Engine Enters the Legal Research World and LLB's Law Prof as Toolmaker:  An Interview with PreCYdent’s Thomas A. Smith. [JH]

Internet Use Triples in Decade, Census Bureau Reports

New data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2007 Internet and Computer Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey show that 62 percent of households reported using Internet access in the home in 2007, an increase from 18 percent in 1997, the first year the Bureau collected data on Internet use. [Press Release]

Sixty-four percent of individuals 18 and over used the Internet from any location in 2007, while only 22 percent did so in 1997. When looking at age groups, the percentage of 18- to 34-year-olds who accessed the Internet was more than double (73 percent) that of people 65 and older (35 percent). Among children 3 to 17, 56 percent used the Internet.

Internet usage also varied by race and Hispanic origin; 69 percent of whites lived in households with Internet use, while the same was true for 51 percent of blacks, 73 percent of Asians and 48 percent of Hispanics.

Among households using the Internet in 2007, 82 percent reported using a high-speed connection, and 17 percent used a dial-up connection. Among the states, Alaska and New Hampshire residents had among the highest rates of Internet use from any location (home, work or public access) for those 3 and older in 2007. Mississippi and West Virginia had among the lowest rates of Internet use at about 52 percent. [JH]

ALA TechSource's New Website Now Online

ALA TechSource has launched www.alatechsource.org, a new electronic archive and delivery platform for Library Technology Reports (LTR) and Smart Libraries Newsletter (SLN). For more, check out the announcement post on ALA TechSource Blog. [JH]

Will Google Wave Redefine Web Communications?

Google has announced Google Wave, an open source real-time communications and collaboration platform that will launch later this year. It combines features of email, instant messaging, wikis, web chat, social networking, and project management in one in-browser communication client. Mashable's Ben Parr writes "[Google Wave] is already being hailed by some as the next evolution of email. Yes, Google Wave is potentially that disruptive."

In Google Wave: A Complete Guide, Parr has compiled key information, definitions, and links related to the launch of Google Wave. This in-depth guide provides an overview of Google Wave, discusses the terminology associated with it, details information on Google Wave applications, and provides resources for staying current on Google Wave developments. Highly recommended.

Will Google Wave redefine web communications? Watch the video demo from the Google I/O conference. [JH]

Google Wave Demo

Context Awareness Widget Supports Text Composition

James E. Powell, Linn Marks Collins and Mark L.B. Martinez (all Los Alamos National Laboratory) describe their Context Awareness Tool (CAT) which supports text composition by providing awareness of relevant content and references proactively and non-intrusively in The Fierce Urgency of Now: A Proactive, Pervasive Content Awareness Tool, D-Lib Magazine, May/June 2009. As a user composes text, CAT automatically searches multiple sources, retrieves results, and displays links to the results. A working prototype of the tool has been implemented using Web 2.0 and Digital Library 2.0 technologies, and is flexible and highly configurable for both Web search engines and deep web targets. This enables near instant querying and aggregation of results from a nearly infinite combination of resources, tailored to tasks, situations, users, and communities. Very interesting. [JH]

Early Reviews of WolframAlpha for Legal Research

Call it a fact search engine or a knowledge search engine, WolframAlpha is creating quite a buzz and rightly so. [Blog | Community] The recently launched computational search engine creates data sets from search results on the fly. The results are impressive. Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian, Jenkins Law Library, calls it his new favorite business search tool. But early reviews indicate WolframAlpha isn't ready for legal research, at least not yet. Legal Informatics Blog reports:

Currently, WolframAlpha seems unable to answer legal questions, whether they concern identifying primary law or applying law to facts.

Currently, WolframAlpha seems unable to answer most factual questions (even statistical questions) about U.S. courts or U.S. judges.

Search Examples. In a comment to a Legal Informatics Blog post, LLB Contributing Editor, Rob Richards reported that WolframAlpha could not answer four questions he put to the SE:

(1) What is the rule against perpetuities?
(2) What is the statute of frauds in the uniform commercial code?
(3) What is the statute of limitations for murder in Pennsylvania? and
(4) If I am a director of a Delaware corporation, can my liability for breach of duty of care be limited?

Greg Lambert received similar results to questions including:

(1) Number of lawsuits filed against Exxon
(2) Patents held by IBM
(3) General Counsel of Wal-Mart
(4) Chairman of Skadden Arps

On 3 Geeks and a Law Blog, Lambert writes, "in fairness, WolframAlpha is in its infancy and isn't claiming to be a legal research tool at all. No one should expect it to answer all of these questions right out of the box, but I'm hoping that it can develop and expand its data collection abilities to begin answering some of these types of questions. To me, the 'patents' question seems like something that can be integrated into the WolframAlpha database without much difficulty."

Patents, a great idea. Plus all sorts of topical litigation and compliance statistics generated by federal and state agencies and courts. Citation indexes? For more, follow the discussion of WolframAlpha & legal research on the Law Libraries and Librarians Ning Forum.

WolframAlpha Reviews. More generally, see Danny Sullivan's review, Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine" and Read/Write Web's Wolfram Alpha in Action: Our Screenshots. The Berkman Center posted the below video of Stephen Wolfram's public demo of WolframAlpha. [JH]

2009: The Year of Hunkering Down in Legal Technology

In the ABA's Law Practice Today, Dennis Kennedy identifies eight key trends in legal technology for 2009. His forecast is grim. Kennedy writes, "I’m actually quite pessimistic about what we’ll see in legal technology, even though I’ve tried to take a more positive outlook in this article than what I might say to you in private."

Kennedy's Legal Technology Trends for 2009

1. Technology budgets get decimated
2. Making do with what you have or doing more with less
3. The mobile phone as platform
4. Looking to the cloud
5. Using tech to get the word out and the money in
6. Focus on client-focused technology
7. E-Discovery in still waters
8. The perfect storm for collaboration

Kennedy's conclusion: "while many hunker down with eyes closed and narrow their perspectives, big changes will be taking place under the surface and this is the year to take some time and think some bigger thoughts. Hunker down, but keep your eyes and ears, and your mind, open." [JH]

DRM and Copyright Exceptions for Libraries: Empirical Assessment of Article 6(4) of the Information Society Directive

Article 6(4) of Information Society Directive made illegal the circumvention of DRM, while attempting, simultaneously, to ensure that the legal protection of DRM does not prevent certain entities (such as, libraries, the visually impaired, teachers, students and researchers) from carrying out certain acts of copying. Studies devoted to DRM under Article 6(4) and these copyright exceptions have noted, theoretically, its legal implications.

In Technological accommodation of conflicts between freedom of expression and DRM: the first empirical assessment, Patrícia Akester (Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law, Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge) fills an existing gap by unveiling, through empirical lines of enquiry, (1) whether certain acts which are permitted by law are being adversely affected by the use of DRM and (2) whether technology can accommodate conflicts between freedom of expression and DRM - linking, thus, policy conclusions to empirical findings. The answers to these questions were studied in the context of the UK legislation implementing the Information Society Directive. Based on a series of interviews with key organisations and individuals, involved in the use of copyright material and the development and deployment of DRM, Akester provides a sober assessment of the current state of affairs.

Akseter's findings:

1. Although DRM has not impacted on many acts permitted by law, certain permitted acts are being adversely affected by the use of DRM;

2. This is in spite of the existence of technological solutions (enabling partitioning and authentication of users) to accommodate those permitted acts (privileged exceptions);

3. Beneficiaries of privileged exceptions who have been prevented from carrying out those permitted acts (because of the employment of DRM) have not used the complaints mechanism set out in UK law;

4. Article 6(4) of the Information Society Directive put an onus on content owners to accommodate privileged exceptions voluntarily. Voluntary measures have emerged in the publishing field, but not all content owners are ready to act unless they are told to do so by regulatory authorities.

See Akseter's proposed solutions and recommendations starting on page 100 of her report. [JH]

Running Windows 7 on a Frankenbox

Dan Giancaterino (Internet Librarian, Jenkins Law Library) reports on his experience installing and running Windows 7 on his Win7 specs-not friendly "Frankenbox" (part Compaq, part Dell desktop with 512 MB of RAM and an old Pentium 3 processor running at 730MHz). Brave soul. It actually works, sort of.

For other brave souls, here's the Win7 Release Candidate downloads and instructions. According to the Windows 7 Blog, "Windows 7 RTM, or release to manufacturing, is the final stage for the engineering. If the telemetry we receive from the Windows 7 RC meets our expectations in terms of quality, then we expect to hit RTM in 3 months or so."

Windows 7 Features Reviewed. Betanews is running a series on the top 10 Windows 7 features. First one here. And with every new Microsoft OS release, comes a look back to the early days. See Flashback 1990: The debut of Windows 3.0. on Betanews. [Click on image, above left, for a screen capture of File Manager circa 1990]. [JH]

WolframAlpha Available Later Tonight

WolframAlpha, the computational search engine that creates data sets from search results on the fly will hp live tonight at 7 PM CDT.  More from ChannelWeb.  The previous "go live" was scheduled on May 18.  [MG]