Criminal Law Library Blog” Let’s face it, during the reign of Bill Gates, Microsoft hasn’t exactly been Xerox Parc when it comes to inventing and creating new technologies. For the most part, Microsoft has been content to buy or copy new technologies and focus on incremental improvements to its products. But that doesn’t mean that Bill Gates and Microsoft weren’t innovative. In the areas of business strategies and cutthroat competition, Microsoft has used a combination of unique and very effective innovations to make itself the dominant tech company of the PC era.”
Articles Posted in Commentary and Opinion
Analysis and Response – On the Record: Report of the Library of Congress Working Group and the Future of Bibliographic Control
From the Introduction:
“On the Record, the report from the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, describes a new technological environment in which libraries have exciting opportunities for making information resources available and useful to new and demanding audiences. The Working Group has spent a year studying how best to exercise bibliographic control within this environment. The opening sentence of the report’s introduction sums up conclusions with which the Library of Congress agrees: ‘The future of bivbliographic control will be collaborative, decentralized, international in scope, and Web-based.”
This Response to the report was prepared under the supervision of Deanna B. Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress.
Pet Peeves at the U.S. Supreme Court*
[From an article in the March 17, 2008 The National Law Journal by Tony Mauro of the Legal Times]
There’s a video out there you may want to see – a web site called “LawProse Inc” on which 8 of the 9 U.S. Supreme Court justices speak about answering questions, writing briefs, arguing before the Court, and their own relationships with written words. For instance, Chief Justice Roberts thinks “lengthy citations to Web sites that are now common in briefs are an ‘obscene’ distraction ‘with all those letters strung together.’ ” Also he doesn’t like overly-long briefs, “I have yet to put down a brief and say ‘I wish that had been longer.'” Justice Breyer is bothered by the same thing, “If I see (a brief that is) 50 pages, it can be 50 pages, but I’m already going to groan,” but “If I see 30, I think, well, he thinks he has really got the law on his side because he only took up 30.”
“Justice Kennedy hates it when lawyers turn nouns into verbs by tacking on ‘-ize’ at the end, as in ‘incentivize.’ Such showy, made-up words, he sniffs, are ‘like wearing a very ugly cravat.”
Deep Indexing: A New Approach to Searching Scholarly Literature*
From: “This Week’s News”, Library Journal.com (May 29, 2008).
Close to 200 attendees took part in a May 20 Library Journal webcast Deep Indexing: A New Approach to Searching Scholarly Literature, sponsored by ProQuest. While a majority of those participating were from the United States, librarians and electronic resource coordinators from 17 other countries also joined in, making it the most “international” of webcasts so far in the LJ series. An archive of the webcast will be available for year from the Library Journal web site, and can be found here.
Carol Tenopir, editor of LJ’s Online Databases column, kicked off the panel by providing background on the research behind the development of “tables and graphs” indexing, now known as deep indexing. Her partner in research, Robert Sandusky from the Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago, offered his insights on the relevancy of types of searching and indexing for various disciplines, particularly the sciences.
Harvard Professor Stuart Shieber Downplays the Role of “Revolutionary”
From: “This Week’s News”, Library Journal.com (May 29, 2008).
Last week, Harvard University professor Stuart Shieber made history-he was named the first director of Harvard’s newly minted Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC). In his new role, Shieber will oversee the implementation of the university’s groundbreaking open access mandate, which he helped author, and which many suggest could have wide-ranging implications for the future of scholarly communication. “Let’s not go overboard,” Shieber says with a laugh and an audible wince when asked if he views his new role as a historic opportunity. “People like to extrapolate that [the mandate] will have a revolutionary effect. But you can’t make a policy based on that extrapolation. Sometimes there’s too much talk about momentous, revolutionary effects, it gets too far in front of what is really happening. There are lots of things going on, and there will be changes. We’re just trying to do our part.”
That sober approach should be heartening to observers concerned with getting the implementation rolling. In a conversation with the LJ Academic Newswire this week, Shieber embraced a straightforward mission “to support the efforts of the Harvard faculty to make their collective scholarly output as broadly available as possible.” It’s a big job, Shieber conceded, and one he didn’t necessarily expect to fall to him, despite his role in authoring the policy. “Certainly, there was no lobbying effort,” he laughed, when asked if he had expected to be tapped to lead the OSC. “But I have spent lots of time and effort on these issues, so it was a natural fit.”
ABA Journal Weekly Newsletter May 30, 2008
Top Stories of the Week:
Layoffs Sonnenschein Acknowledges Layoffs of 37 Lawyers, 87 Staffers
May 28, 2008, 05:29 am CDT
New York Unified Court Law Librarian Association Newsletter
May 2008 issue:
The May 2008 Pro Se Newsletter, the newsletter of the New York State Unified Court System Newsletter, is being distributed because it contains at least two articles of possible interest. One article “Web-Based Services at the Supreme Court Criminal Term Library New York County” by me describes various web-based services to improve library service including access to online subscriptions to library materials. This article also mentions the backup support provided by the Public Access Library for public patrons.
A second article by my colleague Julie Gick at the Supreme Court Civil Term Library at 60 Centre St. discusses the use of records and briefs.
Chorley Lecture 2008: Self-Subservice Justice: Contingency or Transcendence Formula of Law?
CHORLEY LECTURE 2008
The 37th of a series of annual public lectures given under the auspices of The Modern Law Review, in honour of the late Lord Chorley of Kendal
GUNTHER TEUBNER University of Frankfurt Professor of Private Law and Legal Sociology London School of Economics Centennial Visiting Professor
Report: 2008 Internet Security Trends
“For a time, security controls designed to manage spam, viruses, and malware were working. Loud, high-impact attacks abated. But, as a result of this success, the threats they protected against were forced to change. In 2007, many of these threats underwent significant adaptation. Malware went stealth, and the sophistication increased.”
Computerworld Resources, May 26, 2008
To highlight and address these threats and related issues in 2008 and to offer suggestions as to how to cope with them, Cisco and Ironport, two specialists in these areas, have recently published a comprehensive report: 2008 Security Trends: A Report on Emerging Platforms for Spam, Viruses, and Malware.. According to the Introduction to the Report: “This report is designed to help highlight the key security trials in 2008 and suggest ways to defend against the sophisicated generation of internet threats certain to arise in the future.”
John Baldoni: Don’t Lead With Your Ego
“A big ego can be a bad thing when it comes to leadership. Here’s how to keep yours from getting in the way”
To see John Baldoni’s complete May 21 posting on the CIO Insider Newsletter, click here.