| Digitized Bound Congressional Record 1941-1950 Now Available | The U.S. Government Publishing Office, in partnership with the Library of Congress, has made digitized versions of the Congressional Record (Bound Edition) from 1941-1950 available on govinfo. This release covers debates and proceedings of the 77th through the 81st Congresses.
|
| JSTOR launches updated design and navigation | JSTOR has a new look, and the logo has also been modernized to better suit the variety of digital environments in which users interact with the service.
|
| Elsevier acquires bepress – leading showcase of academic research | Elsevier, the global information analytics business specializing in science and health, acquired bepress on August 2, 2017, a Berkeley, California-based business that helps academic libraries showcase and share their institutions’ research by allowing institutions to collect, organize, preserve and disseminate their intellectual output.
|
| JournalTOCs current awareness service for updates on latest subject matter specific articles | JournalTOCs is a Current Awareness Service (CAS) where users can discover the newest papers coming directly from the publishers as soon as they have been published online. Useful for researchers, librarians, and students, it highlights papers published in the scholarly literature with international coverage and is free for individual users.
|
| School property tax elimination doesn’t mean it’s over | If a planned voter referendum passes this fall and the Pennsylvania Legislature does away with school taxes, it doesn’t mean property owners would stop paying all school taxes immediately. And a pending Pennsylvania Senate bill — The Property Tax Independence Act — calls for increasing personal income and sales taxes as replacement revenue for school districts.
|
| Can Law Librarians Help Law Become More Data Driven? | An online presentation describing new innovations in legal research, with an emphasis on data collection and analytics.
|
| Free Law Project details vulnerability and possible exploits of PACER | PACER/ECF is a system of 204 websites that is run by the Administrative Office of the Courts (AO) for the management of federal court documents. In February 2017, the Free Law Project reported a major vulnerability in PACER/ECF to the AO. This issue has been properly addressed, and the Free Law Project’s investigative report has more more details about the issues.
|
| ALCTS e-Forum: The State of eBooks in Libraries | An email from Cindy Cicco directed WPLLA’s attention to an e-forum held on August 15-16, 2017 discussing the complexities of e-books and the requirements of new workflows. While the date(s) for this forum have passed, a recap of the presentation may be available through ALCTS.
|
| Another view on the Google book scanning project | New information on the “Google Books corpus” and how to conduct computational analysis (e.g., looking for patterns in large amounts of text, etc.) without breaching copyright.
|
| Report – Disruptive innovation in the courts | A new paper, recognizing courts will not remain untouched by disruptive innovation, advocates for embracing (rather than resisting) the opportunities to improve business processes and make justice more readily available to a wider audience.
|
| Massive new searchable database of federal court opinions, including ones that haven’t been formally published | The Free Law Project, famous for its RECAP browser extension for PACER users, has now scraped all the federal court opinions available for free on PACER, and put them in a free database with a fairly powerful search engine: https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/
|
| GPO and LC partner on release of digitized Congressional Record 1931-1940 | The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) has partnered with the Library of Congress to release the digital version of the bound Congressional Record from 1931-1940 on GPO’s govinfo. This release covers debates and proceedings of the 72nd thru the 76th Congresses.
|
| “Vroom” Is Researchers’ Answer To ‘Blazing Fast Internet’, Loads Pages 50% Faster | Vroom, new software developed at the University of Michigan and MIT, is designed to reduce the time required for mobile devices to load web pages. During tests, researchers have observed pages loading almost two times faster.
|
| Podcast – Interview with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden | An interview with Carla Hayden, the 14th librarian of Congress. She is the first African American and first woman to hold the position.
|
| CRS – Presidential Pardons: Frequently Asked Questions – Along with news updates | Legal Sidebar, published by the Congressional Research Service, states in part: “… The Framers did not debate this question at the Convention, and it unclear whether they considered whether the pardon power could be applied in this manner. No President has attempted to pardon himself…Accordingly, this is an unsettled constitutional question, unlikely to be resolved unless a President acts to pardon himself for a criminal offense.”
|
| Fisher on the Supreme Court’s Expansion of Presidential Power | Professor, scholar, and prolific author Louis Fisher’s latest book analyzes Supreme Court decisions from 1936 to the present time, helping the reader understand how the Court has greatly expanded independent executive power in external affairs. Fisher posits that the result is a weakening of the basic system of checks and balances, and damage to the principle of self-government.
|
| GPO issues digital release of Federal Register for 1980s | The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) and the National Archives’ Office of the Federal Register (OFR) has released digital issues of the Federal Register from 1980-1989. The complete collection of issues of the Federal Registers from 1980 to present is now available digitally on GPO’s govinfo.
|
Western Pennsylvania Law Library Association
A chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries.
Western Pennsylvania Law Library Association 