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Law Library of Congress announces the availability of RSS feeds and e-mail delivery
The Law Library of Congress has announced that they now offer RSS feeds and e-mail delivery of LLOC information. Library feeds consist of a headline, brief summary, and a link that leads back to the Library's website for more information. Available feeds cover Law Library News and Events, Law Library Webcasts, Legal Research Reports, and the Global Legal Monitor. go to this page on their website to add the RSS feeds or to sign up for email notification.
Continue readingNew website Omeka helps in publishing online collections
"Omeka" is a newly launched website geared towards "cultural institutions, enthusiasts, and educators." Developed by The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University in partnership with the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS), Omeka's purpose is to provide a free online display platform that museums, historical societies, scholars, libraries, etc. can use for publishing collections and exhibitions online. Inside Higher Ed today reports that Omeka allows users to curate items professionally by offering easy creation of online collections.
Features that Omeka offers for online collections include:
- A Dublin Core metadata structure and standards-based design that is fully accessible and interoperable
- Professional-looking exhibit sites that showcase collections without hiring outside designers
- Theme-switching for changing the look and feel of an exhibit in a few clicks
- Plug-ins for geolocation, bi-lingual sites, and other possibilities
- Web 2.0 Technologies, including tagging, blogging and syndicating.
The beta code for Omeka is being made available to the general public today. The developers envision itas a relatively simple way to produce a rich, well-designed site that meets the common needs of librarians and archivists.
The Omeka site has a showcase of several current projects. One example of a site that has used an earlier version of Omeka is the April 16 Archive, created by Virginia Tech after last year’s shooting attacks. Another project is collecting the stories and digital record of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Is PBS passé?
A prominently featured article in Sunday's New York Times dares to ask the question "Is PBS Still Necessary? " Public broadcasting is once again threatened with budget cuts; the article's author, Charles McGrath, suggests that maybe public television isn't necessary in these days of hundreds of cable channels. He distinguishes public television from public radio, which has a growing audience: there are more than 30 million listeners now, compared to just 2 million in 1980. In contrast, he points out, the average PBS prime time show has about as many viewers as "the wrestling show “'Friday Night Smackdown'”.
I can't muster up much indignation at his article. In my house I don't think we've watched the PBS station since the kids outgrew Sesame Street (though Sesame Street was on all the time when the kids were little) a decade ago. I tried to watch one of the Ken Burns programs but there were so many pledge breaks I gave up and just rented it from the video store. Frankly, I find pledge breaks far more annoying than commercials. On the other hand, the only radio I listen to is the three public radio stations in Pittsburgh and I would be bereft without NPR.
Is public television still an important cultural source for less urban, eastern parts of the country? Or has it outlived its usefulness? Do chime in with your opinions.
Wikileaks whistleblower site shut down in the U.S.
According to a report from the BBC, a US federal court has shut down Wikileaks (it used to be at www.wikileaks.org but you won't find anything there now), a controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to post corporate and government documents anonymously. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco issued an injunction ordering Dynadot, which controls the site's domain name, to remove all traces of Wikileaks from its servers. The court also ordered that Dynadot should prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website and demanded that details of the site's registrant, contacts, payment records and "IP addresses and associated data used by any person...who accessed the account for the domain name" be handed over.
However, the site remains online in other countries, including Belgium, India and Germany. The order came because Swiss banking group Julius Baer filed a lawsuit after "several hundred" documents were posted about its offshore activities. Some of those documents allegedly reveal that Julius Baer was involved in offshore money laundering and tax evasion in the Cayman Islands. Wikileaks was founded in 2006 by dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and technologists from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.
UPDATE:
Legal Blog Watch also posted on this story today; the posting points to an excellent writeup at the Citizen Media Law Project that in turn mentions a press release from Wikileaks responding to the injunction which states that "The order is clearly unconstitutional and exceeds its jurisdiction. Wikileaks will keep on publishing, in-fact, given the level of suppression involved in this case, Wikileaks will step up publication of documents pertaining to illegal or unethical banking practices."
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Continue readingJudicial Misconduct in State and Federal Courts
For the federal judiciary, Congress has created a procedure that permits any person to file a complaint in the courts about the behavior of federal judges in every federal jurisdiction, according to the Courts website.
In the states, each state has a process for dealing with complaints about judges' conduct: independent judicial-conduct commissions have been established by state constitution in 28 states, by statute in 15 states and the District of Columbia and by court rule in seven more, according to the American Judicature Society (AJS). The AJS website is a good place to find information about how states deal with judicial misconduct including a list of the organizations from each state established to investigate allegations of misconduct by state court judges; the composition of state judicial conduct commissions; and at what point confidentiality ceases in judicial discipline proceedings in the different states. AJS also provides information about federal judicial misconduct.
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