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What To Do With All That Space: Librarians Without Libraries
(photo copyright 2014 National Assembly for Wales) As we know—and have probably lived—the library industry has been transitioning toward a primarily digital existence: this has profoundly changed the responsibilities of librarians and is starting to change the purpose of the actual, physical library. Giant buildings holding vast inventories of books have given way to desktops…
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The Implications of Bestlaw
On September 24th, Joe Mornin, a Berkely Law School student, released Bestlaw to the public-at-large (see the The Lawyerist‘s and The Recorder‘s admirable coverage of this story). In a nutshell, Bestlaw is a browser extension that improves upon the Westlaw Next interface. Remarkably, Joe Mornin designed the browser extension himself, and makes this piece of software freely available…
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Perla Makes a Point on PACER
Few things have raised such hue and cry in our industry this year as the announcement that PACER was going to be without certain courts’ materials. The concern expressed by law librarians and legal researchers clogged newsfeeds for weeks and made its way – all the way – into the halls of politics. Yet while…
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Starting in October: Tell us your favorite apps – get featured!
iBraryGuy is excited to announce a new crowdsourced feature starting in October. Let’s hear your APPlause! It seems like there is an app for everything these days. Just within the realm of information alone, there are apps for staying updated on the news, conducting research, managing your time, communicating with your team, and even billing…
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Screencasting in the Library
The Cool Tools Café program at this year’s AALL Annual Meeting showcased–like it always does–many great presentations concerning implementing technologies to improve library offerings. For those unfamiliar with the format of the Cool Tools Café, the program features a variety of demonstrations set up in different stations inside a large conference room—attendees are given free rein to…
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A Compilation of Secretary of State Sites: Making State of Incorporation Searches Easier
One of the great things about the U.S. is the uniqueness of each individual state. Beyond cultural, political, historical and artistic variances, this truism (fortunately or unfortunately) applies to Secretary of State corporation search interfaces. Each state’s agency handles the design and offerings of their interface their own way—some allow for free corporate status reports, free corporate…
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Will PACER’s records removal motivate use of software alternatives?
Earlier this month, PACER announced court documents for closed cases from the last decade in the U.S. Courts of Appeals of the Second, Seventh, Eleventh, and Federal circuits, as well as documents from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California will no longer be electronically available. More details, including the specific date ranges of…
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Vendor Trends: Interactive Data Visualizations
The Exhibit Hall at AALL showcased a clear trend towards vendors offering visualization tools to improve the process of legal researching. From a macro level, legal research has transitioned from being a chiefly print-based medium to a primarily electronic-based medium, and, encouragingly, vendors have developed tools to really exploit this shift.
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SLA Offers 2014 Contributed Papers
Original scholarship is an often over-looked part of many annual conferences. It tends to get lost iin the chaotic shuffle between presentations, continuing education, time in the exhibit halls, and, of course, the need for social interaction with colleagues. It often seems that the heroes who work so hard on contributed papers end up having…
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Tracking Legislation: GovTrack.us & LegiScan
As legal information professionals, I am sure you have received requests to track proposed legislation. Changes in statutory law are obviously fundamentally important to the practice of law. The potential for legislative change creates an information need requiring a method of monitoring the status of proposed legislation as it bounces around the legislature. Thankfully, monitoring proposed laws/bills can be done…
Got any book recommendations?
iBraryGuy 