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Category New Tools and Databases

KSL Summon: A First Glance from a Law Librarian

0 comments By . February 9th, 2012

KSL Summon, a new search service, is a “web-scale discovery tool” that has been adopted primarily by academic libraries. It is designed to compete with Google Scholar by providing quick access to scholarly full-text resources available from selected scholarly databases to which the library subscribes. Summon is programmed to simultaneously search the campus libraries’ Library Catalog using a Google-like search bar or an optional advanced search template. It is more efficient for finding interdisciplinary academic materials than Google Scholar, especially for non-law schools. Google Scholar has an advantage for law school users because it searches the law journals available via the legal full-text database, Hein Online.

Strengths:

  • The Library Catalog and some subscription databases, electronic journals, e-books and other materials are searched simultaneously.
  • Summon allows for more complex searching than Google Scholar. Similar to WestlawNext and Lexis Advance, it offers pre-search and post-search filtering of search results. Though, of course, the filtering options are broader and are not law-material-oriented.
  • It is based on an indexing system which makes Summon faster and enhances its ability to retrieve more precise results than traditional federated search tools. It is the next generation of such tools.
  • KSL Summon searches for relevant results in LexisNexis Academic journals, law reviews and news content. It also discovers legal periodical results from JSTOR.
  • The content that is covered includes many business, management and economic literature resources. This makes it useful to those interested in the business law or law and economics literature.
  • It limits results to scholarly resources.
  • It is a more sophisticated tool than OhioLINK’s QuickSearch (multi-database search) which is being phased out.

Weaknesses:

  • KSL Summon does not truly search all of the research databases available campus wide. Many online providers do not permit access to their content by discovery search services. This can mislead users into thinking they have searched all the available content for their research.
  • During my initial experiences with KSL Summon, it did not seem to search primary law in LexisNexis Academic. When pre-selecting “case” as a Content Type, Summon yielded some relevant case names and indicated that they provided “Full-Text Online.” Unfortunately, Summon unsuccessfully attempts to open these case references within the E-Journal Portal, not LexisNexis Academic. There is something amiss here.
  • LexisNexis Academic has fewer legal periodicals than Hein Online, which also provides PDF versions of articles (giving Google Scholar, which finds Hein content, an edge over Summon). JSTOR also covers fewer legal periodicals than Hein Online.
  • It seems to only search the law review, journal and news content available in LexisNexis Academic.
  • KSL Summon does not indicate the research databases it is searching; therefore users cannot tell which databases they must still check to perform comprehensive searches. It currently seems that Summon does not search Hein Online, Legal Trac, EBSCO Legal Collection, or EBSCO Index to Legal Periodicals, for instance.

Conclusion:
It remains to be seen if the resources covered by KSL Summon will increase to cover more law-related content. In the meantime, users might find it Summon useful to search for integrated content but it is not yet the quickest method to locate all appropriate legal resources. We can best make use of this tool as a second level search to look for materials in multidisciplinary sources.

While KSL Summon is the most complete one-stop search tool on campus, Law School users must remember that it is not comprehensive and that several databases pertaining to law must be independently searched. It is probably not the best starting point for most legal research queries.

Lexis Advance Goes Live: No Longer in Beta Mode

0 comments By . December 8th, 2011

LexisNexis launched a new release of Lexis Advance on Monday, December 5, 2011. It is no longer in beta test mode. See the press release. The release of this new platform has expanded existing content and additional content will be provided through a series of future releases. We recommend that you read the in-depth critiques of the new launch provided by a couple of popular law blogs:

Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites: Lexis Launches Advance, its Next-Generation Research Platform.

3 Geeks and a Law Blog: The Lexis Advance Platform Launch — Two Things Lexis is Doing Right.

It may also be useful to note the comments of those readers who disagree with their positive reviews.

For information and videos about Lexis Advance: www.lexisnexis.com/newlexis/advance/

 

Cambridge Books Online (CBO) E-Book Platform Goes Live Campus Wide

0 comments By . November 17th, 2011

Cambridge Books Online (CBO) is the e-book platform for the world’s oldest university press. The Law Library has begun subscribing to selected e-books from CBO. Access is available campus wide and remotely with VPN. All the titles can be found in the Library Catalog. The Law Library recommends using the Library Catalog to identify titles available from CBO and then connect directly to the e-book from the catalog record.

Users may opt to connect directly to the Cambridge Books Online website which provides search and browse tools. Once a book is found, click on the title to open the contents or book description. Each chapter on CBO has a chapter landing page, which displays key information about a chapter and the book in which it appears, along with tabs for the Chapter Extract (if available), References (if available), and the book’s Table of Contents. From the chapter landing page, users can access an image view or a full-text PDF file of that chapter, if a campus library has purchased access. Try connecting to Case Law Professor Peter M. Gerhart’s book, Tort Law and Social Morality, to explore how finding titles on the CBO platform works.

The titles we have purchased access to date are:

Analysis of Evidence (2005).

‘Armed Attack’ and Article 51 of the UN Charter (2011).

Comparative Corporate Governance of Non-Profit Organizations (2010).

Criminal Law, Tradition and Legal Order (1997).

Cyber Criminals on Trial (2004).

Developing Countries in the GATT Legal System (2010).

Elements of War Crimes under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (2003).

Fault in American Contract Law (2010).

The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation in Rwanda (2010).

Gene Patents and Collaborative Licensing Models (2009).

Human Rights in the ‘War on Terror’ (2005).

Humanitarian Intervention: Ethical, Legal and Political Dilemmas (2003).

The Impact of Human Rights Law on Armed Forces (2006).

Incentives for Global Public Health (2010).

International Criminal Law Practitioner Library: Forms of Responsibility in International Criminal Law (2008).

International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (2002).

The International Law of Belligerent Occupation (2009).

Is the Death Penalty Dying? (2011).

Legal Publishing in Antebellum America (2010).

Necessity, Proportionality and the Use of Force by States (2004).

On Philosophy in American Law (2009).

Piracy and the State: The Politics of Intellectual Property Rights in China (2009).

The Protection of Cultural Property in Armed Conflict (2007).

Reading Humanitarian Intervention (2003).

Tort Law and Social Morality (2010).

War Crimes in Internal Armed Conflicts (2008).

Authorized Case Western Reserve University students, faculty, and staff may access any of these titles, make limited printed copies, and copy and paste limited amounts of each title or the total collection per month. See the Terms of Use for the legalese and the details: http://ebooks.cambridge.org/terms_of_use.jsf.


Free Federal Rules eBooks from CALI and LII

0 comments By . October 6th, 2011

One of the more promising initiatives in the arena of electronic publishing for law is CALI’s eLangdell project. And one of the most important non-profit providers of primary legal materials has long been Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute.

This Fall, the two have teamed up to release a set of ebook editions of the Federal Rules of Evidence, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, published by CALI on the eLangdell platform from rule text gathered, processed, and adapted by the LII.

These eBooks are free to the user, and are available for download in both the .mobi format usable on the Amazon Kindle and the ePub format used by the Nook and other non-Kindle e-readers and most easily used on the Apple iPad and (via Adobe’s Digital Editions software) on the PC and Mac.

I’ve long recommended the free texts from the Legal Information Institute for “reading copy” of Codes and other primary sources. For the kind of extended parsing of statutes and rules where full case-law annotations and other extensive editorial enhancements merely get in the way, it has been a long time since I’ve seen a good argument for paying for the old commercially-published “desk copies.” These ebooks potentially add a new level of portability and ease of use beyond the connectivity-tethered access through LII’s website. Therefore, I hope that these eBooks of the Federal Rules will only be a start, and we’ll see a similar treatment brought to statutes and other primary sources. For instance, a free ebook edition of each title of the U.S.Code. Or ebook editions of collected securities laws.

Here are links to the books:

Federal Rules of Evidence–2011 Edition
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure–2011 Edition
Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure–2011 Edition

New Resource: Hein Online’s New York Legal Research Library

0 comments By . June 1st, 2011

The Judge Ben C. Green Law Library recently acquired access to the Hein Online Collection, New York Legal Research Library. It is available campus-wide.

Below is an overview of the contents of this specialized collection with examples of just a few of the gems that can be found in these materials.

The Reports and Opinions of the New York Attorney General:

  • Opinions of the Attorneys-General of the State of New York, from the Formation of the State Government to February, 1872.

New York State Reports

  • Select Cases of The Mayor’s Court of New York City (1674-1784).

The New York State Register

New York Tax Cases

New York State Session Laws

New York Law Journals

New York Bar Journals

  • Bulletin of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (1920-1922) (All Published)
  • New York State Bar Association Journal (1928-2009) (Title Varies)
  • Record of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (1946-2009)

New York State Comptroller Opinions (1988-2011)

Classic legal books from or about New York

New York Trials

  • Including:

    • Rutgers v. Waddington (New York City Mayor;s Court, 1784), famed for creating a precedent for the concept of judicial review. Alexander Hamilton represented the defendant, Joshua Waddington.

    Trials with melodramatic and colorful titles:

    • Full Report of the Highly Interesting Breach of Promise Case. George G. Barnard, vs. John J. Gaul, and Mary H. His Wife. Tried before Ogden Edwards, Esquire, One of the Circuit Judges of the Supreme Court, at the City Hall of New York, on the 8th, 9th and 10th Days of July, 1835, Containing the Whole of the Correspondence between the Plaintiff and Mrs. Gaul, Together with the Charge of the Judge, and the Eloquent Speeches of the Counsel on Both Sides (1835).

    And

    • Very Interesting and Remarkable Trial of Matthias, at White Plains, Westchester County, New-York, for the Alleged Murder of Mr. Elijah Pierson. Reported Expressly for This Publication, Which Contains (Unabridged) the Opening Speech of Counsel; the Testimony of Mrs. Folger, with the Questions That Were Propounded; the Judge’s Charge, &c. &c. &c. Matthews, Robert (1835).

    Includes the landmark suffrage case:

    • Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony, on the Charge of Illegal Voting, at the Presidential Election in Nov., 1872, and on the Trial of Beverly W. Jones, Edwin T. Marsh and William B. Hall, Anthony, Susan B. (Susan Brownell) (defendant); United States. Circuit Court (New York: Northern District)(1874).

    From early intellectual property matters, such as:

    • Arguments of William W. Hubbell, Esq., of Philadelphia, and William Whiting, Esq., of Boston, on Behalf of the Defendants, before Mr. Justice Nelson, at Cooperstown, N.Y., Aguust, 1853, in the Case of Ross Winans vs. Orsamus Eaton, et al., in the Circuit Court of the United States of the Northern District of New-York, against a Motion for an Injunction to Restrain the Defendants from Constructing and Vending the Railroad Cars, Commonly Known as the Eight Wheel Car, Alleged to Infringe Ross Winans’ Patent of Oct. 1, 1834 Hubbell, William Wheeler, et al. (1853).

    To the more contemporary antitrust matter:

    • Conclusions of Law and Order: United States of America v. Microsoft Corporation, C.A. 98-1232; State of New York, ex rel. Eliot Spitzer, et al., v. Microsoft Corporation, C.A. 98-1233 (2000).

So, those students planning to practice in New York or interested in legal history may immerse themselves in this database if they have spare time this summer.

PACER:RECAP — Plug-in to assist with court dockets and filings

By . July 7th, 2010

Wednesday is usually our day for profiling a subscription resource. Today, instead, we’ll tread the line between “freesearch” and a subscription profile, and address both a fee-based resource and a tool designed to leverage much of its content into the realm of the free.

PACER is the system used by the federal courts to allow access to case and docket information. While run by the courts themselves, PACER is not free (and in fact has a rather cumbersome paywall mechanism). RECAP is a project of Princeton researchers, and aims to augment PACER in ways that should make the use of federal dockets and filings cheaper for the researcher while also putting pressure upon a business model for PACER that the RECAPpers view as excessively closed and proprietary and arguably in violation of the E-Government Act.

PACER (for what it is worth, it is an acronym, and it stands for “Public Access to Court Electronic Records.”)is more a protocol than a site — each federal district, bankruptcy, and circuit court operates its own PACER site. Through the PACER systems, researchers can gain access to the docket sheets for cases in the federal courts and, increasingly, download pdf copies of the actual party filings and court orders in those cases (as well as judicial opinions). PACER does have several major limitations. Searching is very limited – i.e. there is no full-text indexing of the docket sheets, much less of the actual party filings available through the system, so effectively the only way to access the system is to search on a known docket number or, at the very least, a known party name (and let’s hope that name is neither common nor the one of a particularly litigious legal entity). And – this goes to the heart of the matter – it is not free. The federal courts charge 8 cents per page for downloads from PACER sites – an amount that the CITP researchers estimate far exceeds the actual cost to deliver the service. PACER fees are thus used not only to maintain the PACER service, but to fund other technology initiatives within the courts.

Additionally, PACER “accounts” are completely individual and credit-card based. There is no way we could subscribe to a site license or global access for all law school users, even if we wanted to.
RECAP is a project of several researchers at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. Heavily promoted within the law library community by Stanford’s Erika Wayne, RECAP is based on a Firefox browser plugin that harvests documents that the user downloads from PACER and places them in the Internet Archive. In “exchange” when a Firefox user with the plug-in installed navigates the PACER services, she will be alerted when a document is (freely) available within RECAP and thus spared the 8 cents per page download costs.

The RECAP folks don’t, yet, allow full search-engine indexing of the documents they harvest, and the searching outside of PACER that this would enable, on account of lingering privacy concerns. Thus, for now at least, RECAP remains a tool for active PACER users rather than a stand-alone tool for putting court documents into the searchable, indexed, (Googlefied?) Web.

Good background (with a lot of advocacy) can be found in the many Legal Research Plus posts regarding RECAP. Judge John Tunheim, a district court judge in Minnesota, has defended PACER in the National Law Journal.

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