May ’08 botms: Stanford Law librarians
Happy [w:May Day] (whether you observe [w:International Workers' Day] or the lesser known [w:Loyalty Day])!! This month we have a special treat for you: a group of law librarians from Stanford have agreed to be group bloggers-of-the-month for May, 2008. The group includes Paul Lomio, Brian Provenzale, Erika Wayne, Kate Wilko, and George Wilson -- see the Stanford Law Librarians' bios for more on what they do and where their interests lie. We're really looking forward to reading what's on the minds of these good folks. Thanks also to Frank Lester, our BOTM for April, 2008! Below is the recap of the threads that Frank got started.
- Court Invalidates Part of Copyright Remedy Clarification Act
- HHS Appeals Ruling That Would Give Consumers More Access to Physician Medicare Claims Database
- Consumer Satisfaction with E-Government on the Downturn
Stanford Law Librarians group bloggers for May, 2008
J. Paul Lomio is library director and lecturer at law at Stanford Law School. Paul hates paying for government information twice -- once as a taxpayer, and then again as a library director forced to purchase government produced information. Paul has graduate degrees in law from Gonzaga Law School and the University of Washington and a masters of library and information science from the Catholic University of America. Paul was admitted to the Washington State Bar. He is the author (with Henrik Spang-Hanssen) of Legal Research Methods in the U.S. and Europe (DJOF 2008). Brian Provenzale has been a librarian for a few years (at UCLA and currently at Stanford) and a Web nerd for over ten. He thinks every U.S. citizen should, with minimal effort, be able to find out what the government is doing at all times. Sergio Stone. Sergio is Stanford's first Foreign, Comparative and International Law Librarian. Erika V. Wayne is deputy library director and lecturer in law at Stanford Law School. Along with George Wilson, Kate Wilko and Paul Lomio, Erika Wayne has co-taught Advanced Legal Research for 3 years. Erika's interest in Open Access dates back to the 1996 when she helped in the development of the Securities Class Action Clearinghouse -- the first court designated internet site for public posting of securities litigation filings. And, she hates to pay for *anything* that should be free. She has a JD from Penn, an AB from Duke and a MS from Illinois in Library and Information Science. Kate Wilko is a Reference Librarian and Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School. This Spring marks the sixth time she has team-taught Advanced Legal Research. Within the legal research world and its limited publisher options, open access is quickly becoming a topic of more urgent importance. Kate is very pleased to be able to share thoughts and ideas with other open access community members on freegovinfo.info George Wilson is a reference librarian at Stanford's law library. He started working there in late 2005, after having spent seven years in corporate law practice in Washington, DC and San Francisco, as well as around a decade as a researcher and administrator in various Stanford departments. He has a JD from Georgetown, a BA from UC Berkeley, and will receive his MLIS degree from San Jose State in May 2008. Continue reading
Recycle your PACER documents
Here at Stanford, the campus recently enjoyed the excitement that is Recyclemania. (Stanford actually won the Gorilla Prize!) In the spirit of Recyclemania, I want to share an amazing project for recycling PACER documents. The site, brought to you by Carl Malamud and the good people at Public Resource, gives everyone a chance to liberate PACER case downloads. How do you do it? Here are the simple instructions from the site:
"Just upload all your PACER Documents to our recycling bin. Click on the recycle bin and you'll be presented with a dialogue to choose files to upload. Then, just hit the “Start Upload” button and you'll hear the sounds of progress as your documents get reinjected into the public domain. We'll take the documents, look at them, and then put them onto bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/pacer for future distribution. This is a manual process and you won't see your documents show up right away. But, over time, we hope to accumulate a significant database of PACER Documents. "Interested in helping, but you don't have the time to recycle documents onto the site? Well, lucky for you, the site also allows you contribute with Digital Offsets. The digital offsets are a tax-deductible donation to Public.Resource.Org which will then be utilized to purchase PACER Documents for the site. Are you lucky enough to live near one of the 16 libraries with FREE access to PACER? Perhaps, you want to sign up to join the Thumb Drive Corps, who will go to these locations with a jump drive and download as many PACER documents as possible for the Pacer recycling site. So, what is good for the bottle, is good for the docket.... -Erika Continue reading
Lunchtime listen: Here comes everybody
Maybe I should name this west coast lunchtime listen ;-) Be that as it may, Clay Shirky gave a talk last month (click on the image to get to the video) at the Berkman Center for internet and Society covering some of the ideas from his incredible new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. The focus of the talk is Shirky's notions about the enabling power of the Web and along the way he has a lot of interesting things to say about sharing, conversation, collaboration and collective action. There's a lot of power in sharing and Shirky points to several interesting examples of that power.
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Event Video/Audio) Continue reading
Agencies not complying with record preservation policies
Agencies not complying with record preservation policies, By Jill R. Aitoro, NextGov, April 24, 2008.
At the hearing, Linda Koontz, director of information management issues at the Government Accountability Office, released preliminary results from an ongoing GAO study of how four agencies managed e-mail and electronic records. ...Koontz said the agencies print and then file e-mails, but about half of senior officials were not following these procedures, and the e-mails for these officials were maintained in e-mail systems that lacked record-keeping capabilities, such as the ability to group the e-mails using a classification system.The House is considering the Electronic Communications Preservation Act, which would strengthen policies for preservation of government records including White House e-mails. Gary Stern, general counsel for NARA said that the legislation's potential cost to agencies could be "astronomical," and noted the bill's requirement that the National Archives would maintain authority over the White House's electronic records might be unconstitutional. Patrice McDermott, director of OpentheGovernment.org, said:
"I understand the constitutional issues, and I don't have a good answer for that.... But one of the concerns is that there is no way to enforce accountability [of] records management in the White House. We understand it's a difficult dance [for NARA]. They're there at the invitation of the White House in many cases, but there needs to be some way for the outside community to hold the White House accountable."Continue reading