| Gmail’s Smart Compose will write emails for you |
Smart Compose, a feature now available in the new Gmail re-vamp, “suggests complete sentences in your emails so that you can draft them with ease.”
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| Use Google Scholar’s Advanced Search for Narrow Case Law Searching |
This Texas Tech Law Library’s blog post provides interesting “tricks” for getting the most out of Google Scholar, a free case law search tool. These tricks “will help you narrow your search results to relevant cases.”
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| From Slip Law to United States Code: A Guide to Federal Statutes for Congressional Staff |
A CRS Report released on May 2, 2018 “provides an overview of federal statutes in their various forms, as well as basic guidance for congressional staff interested in researching statutes.”
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| 3 Easy Ways to Convert Webpages Into PDFs |
If you could convert a webpage into a .pdf, “you could read any webpage offline in no-internet zones, making it easy to read articles and other pages offline.” This blog post details three easy, user-friendly ways to complete such a task! (Now, we can take even more reading home with us when we leave the office each weekday!)
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| Guide to Gmail’s new ‘confidential mode’ |
According to Business Insider and beSpacific, “[c]onfidential mode is available to users with personal accounts who opted into the new version of Gmail last month, when Google announced the latest changes to its email application.”
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| How To Improve Pennsylvania’s Tax System |
As noted by a professor at George Mason University, “Pennsylvania ranks near the top in tax burden and near the bottom in business friendliness in the nation. While much good can be said about the state’s personal income tax rate and relatively low sales tax rate, Pennsylvania’s business taxes are in serious need of reform.” This blog post reflects on potential improvements.
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| New on LLRX – 2018 New Economy Resources and Tools |
Linked by beSpacific, this guide “provides researchers in multiple disciplines – law, economists, academia, government, corporate, and journalism – the latest, most reliable web resources for discovering sources to meet the multifaceted needs of time sensitive, specific, actionable work product.”
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| Paper – Cutting through the Fog: Government Information, Librarians, and the Forty-Fifth Presidency |
Reflecting on “an increasingly polarized electorate, concerns about ‘fake news,’ and a greater use of social media” as well as the Trump Administration’s utilization of “disintermediation of information consumption by communicating directly to the public and going around the ‘experts,'” this new book examines the impact on government information librarians especially their concern “with the production, distribution, consumption, and preservation of government information, and impact the public’s understanding of—and trust in—government information.”
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| Public can now search UK government’s entire digital archive |
For the first time, “[t]he British government’s entire online presence comprising billions of web pages has been indexed and digitally archived to the cloud for the first time. Manchester tech firm MirrorWeb has devised an all-new indexing to create an accessible, searchable and user-friendly resource for the public.” This web archive collection is 120TB and includes every government department website and social media account from 1996 to the present.
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In a May 21, 2018 email, Rita Young shared her response from the Office of the Mayor of Philadelphia regarding the redistribution of civil filing fees (thus imperiling the Jenkins Law Library). The stinging message read, in part, “law libraries, including Jenkins, do not serve the same function today as they did years ago.”
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| CRS – False Statements and Perjury: An Overview of Federal Criminal Law |
The Mueller investigation’s interest in potentially investigating President Trump begs the question: “whether a sitting President, consistent with the separation of powers and Article II of the Constitution, may be required to comply with a subpoena for his testimony as part of an ongoing criminal investigation.” This CRS Report goes into detail about the type of subpoena Mueller could issue and thoughtfully questions issues regarding separation of powers between the various branches of government.
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| INSTANTLY CREATE AND SHARE A BIBLIOGRAPHY WITH ZOTEROBIB – EVEN IN BLUEBOOK |
A helpful post from the WisBlawg (the University of Wisconsin’s Law Library Blog) recommends “Zotero,” “an incredibly powerful citation manager that helps you collect, organize, cite, and share research.” The site is open source (so it’s free!), “perfect for large research projects where you’re researching over a period of days, weeks, [or] months,” and supports multiple citation styles, including Bluebook. The post also includes info on other citation sites, including EasyBib and ZoteroBib.
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| New edition of Zotero: A Guide for Librarians, Researchers and Educators published by ACRL
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Follow the links provided in this Law Librarian Blog post for a “thorough introduction to Zotero.” |
Western Pennsylvania Law Library Association 