New Law Library Blawg from the AALL
The Washington Affairs Office of the American Association of Law Libraries has just announced the launch of its new blog. The blog, named AALL’s Washington Blawg, will highlight bills that the AALL is tracking in Congress, Action Alerts, news, resources, events and more. The blog will will cover legislative, judicial and regulatory activities on the state, national, and international levels and address important topics such as access to government information, digital authentication, copyright, and open government issues. The WAO is located at the Georgetown University Law Library in Washington, D.C., a location that allows them to work closely with the three branches of government. They are involved in several active coalitions, including the Library Copyright Alliance, OpenTheGovernment.org, and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. You can keep receive regular updates by subscribing to the RSS feed, signing up for email updates, or by visiting the blog for the latest news.
Continue readingEconomic indicators will continue!
Last week, we posted about the imminent demise of economicindicators.gov. Evidently, this news travelled quickly and DoC has decided to continue the site!! Below is the notice from the site:
The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA) has decided to continue the economicindicators.gov website. Featuring the economic releases from ESA’s Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the site was started by this Administration in 2002 to give greater awareness to these economic statistics. ESA initially planned to discontinue the service due to cost concerns but given the feedback ESA received, the decision has been made to continue the site and improve its functionality. A popular feature of the site is the calendar that links directly to economic indicators on the Census and BEA websites. By continuing the Economic Indicators (EI) site, the fifteen major indicators released by those bureaus will still be listed, along with links to the full text of each release. EI’s information will continue to be provided free of charge. Many users also subscribe to the site and have economic indicators and the full releases emailed to them. There are a number of technical challenges with this aspect of the EI site – the service often backs up and fails because of bandwidth issues, releases sometimes take hours to reach subscribers, and some subscribers receive multiple copies of the releases while others get none at all. The cost of maintaining the site is almost entirely attributable to operating this feature. To address these concerns we will redesign the subscription feature of economicindicators.gov. The new system, which will remain free of charge, will email an abstract and link so that users can access the full release on the source website. We believe the cost of rewriting the system will, in the long-run, be less than continuing to run the existing system. The new subscription service will be operational in the next few months. Existing subscribers of the economicindicators.gov service were offered a free trial subscription to the STAT-USA/Internet service (http://www.stat-usa.gov). A number of you have already signed up for that and we hope you will make full use of it. Thank you for your responses to last week’s notice. We look forward to continuing to provide economic indicators, in the most efficient way possible.Continue reading
Cataloging the Creative Commons
Michael Sauers, who has the wonderful title of "Technology Innovation Librarian" and blogs for the Nebraska Library Commission, has started cataloging and offering Creative Commons-licensed works at his library. What he did was to take electronic versions of CC titles, post them on his library's Web server, catalog them in the OPAC, and make them available to the public. Additionally, for titles whose license allows for physical printing of the works, they turned the electronic books into spiral-bound books to be added to the physical collection. The result, so far, is that his library now has a collection of 9 CC-licensed electronic titles available through the OPAC along with 7 print versions available to circulate. Also, seven of the nine titles resulted in brand new records in OCLC. Corey Doctorow, one of the authors, has blogged about the project over at BoingBoing.
Continue readingArmy Says It Will Restore Public Access to Online Library
Army Says It Will Restore Public Access to Online Library. by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News. Feb 21, 2008.
Continue readingThe U.S. Army said today that it would restore public access to the online Reimer Digital Library of Army publications, after having blocked the site on February 6.The U.S. Army said today that it would restore public access to the online Reimer Digital Library of Army publications, after having blocked the site on February 6.
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 reading