JSTOR-Free Access to Early Journal Content and Serving "Unaffiliated" Users

http://about.jstor.org/news-events/news/jstor%E2%80%93free-access-early-journal-content Click the link for the Full Letter

Short version of the announcement.
Dear Library and Publisher Colleagues,

I am writing to share exciting news: today, we are making journal content on JSTOR published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere, freely available to the public for reading and downloading. This includes nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals, representing approximately 6% of the total content on JSTOR.

We are taking this step as part of our continuous effort to provide the widest possible access to the content on JSTOR while ensuring the long-term preservation of this important material. To date, we have primarily provided access to people through a growing base of libraries and institutions. In 1995, only ten journals were digitized and available to just a few universities. Today, millions of people from more than 7,000 institutions in 153 countries have access to journals on JSTOR through their universities, colleges, high schools, businesses, research institutions, museums, historical societies, and public libraries. . . .

Laura Brown
JSTOR Managing Director

The National Academies Press Makes All PDF Books Free to Download

Below is an abbreviation of the full press release that can be found at this link:
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=06022011

"As of today all PDF versions of books published by the National Academies Press will be downloadable to anyone free of charge. This includes a current catalog of more than 4,000 books plus future reports produced by the Press. The mission of the National Academies Press (NAP) -- publisher for the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council -- is to disseminate the institutions' content as widely as possible while maintaining financial sustainability. To that end, NAP began offering free content online in 1994. Before today’s announcement, all PDFs were free to download in developing countries, and 65 percent of them were available for free to any user."

"Based on the performance of NAP’s current free PDFs, projections suggest that this change will enhance dissemination of PDF reports from about 700,000 downloads per year to more than 3 million by 2013."

"Printed books will continue to be available for purchase through the NAP website and traditional channels. The free PDFs are available exclusively from the NAP’s website, http://www.nap.edu/, and remain subject to copyright laws. PDF versions exist for the vast majority of NAP books. Exceptions include some books that were published before the advent of PDFs; books from the Joseph Henry Press imprint; and in cases where contractually prohibited, such as reference books in the Nutrient Requirements of Domestic Animals series."

New Pilot Program to Access Federal Decisions

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) and the Federal Judiciary have launched a one-year pilot program to offer federal court decisions via Federal Digital System, FDsys.

Through FDsys you are able to search, browse, access and download government documents.

For now the courts participating in the pilot include:

1. U.S. Courts of Appeals for the second and eighth circuits


2. District Courts
   Minnesota
   Maryland
   Rhode Island
   Idaho
   Kansas
   Northern District of New York
   Northern District of Alabama


3. Bankruptcy Courts -
   Southern District of New York
   Southern District of Florida
   District of Maine

Of course, you can access court decisions from PACER at no cost.

What is Moodle? Will there be one in your future?

Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).

It is a Free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites.

The general website is http://www.moodle.org. Demonstration moodle sites are located at the following URLS:

1. Exhange Glossaries: http://demo.moodle.net/course/view.php?id=604
2. Moodle Features: http://demo.moodle.net/course/view.php?id=5
3. Understanding Moodle: http://demo.moodle.net/course/view.php?id=615

Private law librarians can learn to create learning modules very quickly. The modules can be hosted on the firm's Intranet, can be open or password protected, and can be used to teach summer associates how research is done in a private law firm.

Librarians spread out over vast distances can use a moodle to share research ideas.

If you are interested in learning more about moodles, ask the DALL program chair to consider this through the DALL Tech Committee in the Spring.

Google plans to Sell E-Books in 2010

Google announced that it plans to sell E-books through a new service called Google Editions by the end of June or July 2010. Pricing and publishers have not been identified. Currently, Google is waiting for a decision from Judge Denny Chin about the rights to distribute out-of-print books through its digital book settlement with publishers and authors. Stay tuned!!

PACER Case Locator

Pacer Case Locator is the new interface for accessing PACER records. It has some very useful capabilities. There are the basic and the advanced search screens, topped with tabs for searching all courts, appellate courts only, bankruptcy courts only, civil courts only, criminal courts only, and multi-district litigation. The advanced search screen provides searching by case title, i.e., John Doe. Party name searching is still available, i.e., Doe, John.

With the appellate and the civil tabs, you can do nature of suit searching, and set time boundaries.

There are two interesting links at the very top of the screen. First is the Court Information, which shows the court code, the earliest cases and the most recent cases. Second is the Statistics tab, which has 8 pre-formatted report segments, with multiple reports behind each segment. Prices, number of pages, file type (txt or xls), with a download link are clearly displayed.

1. Request lists of cases for a specified date range by court type


2. Conduct searches based on chapter, discharge date and dismissal date for bankruptcy cases


3. Access case information for the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation


4. Choose result formats, including HTML, delimited text, and XML which can be easily imported to other programs for analysis


5. Change the sort order of the results displayed


6. Conduct refined searches within the results of a previous search
   

The web address for PACER case locator is http://pcl.uscourts.gov/.

Attached is a screen shot of the advanced web searching panel.

Vendor-Neutral Citations in Canada

New information about vendor-neutral citations in Canada can be monitored through the following blogs:

http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/ This is maintained by Robert Richards, a law librarian in Philadelphia. He is also the editor in chief of VoxPopuLII, published by the Legal Information Institute of Cornell University Law School.

http://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2010/03/01/environmentally-friendly-citations/ Ivan Mokanov, Deputy Director of LexUM, begins a very interesting and timely blog about vendor-neutral citations with this paragraph, "Today in Canada, nearly three quarters of citations to recent case law use the neutral citation – an industry-independent, open identifier assigned by courts to their decisions. When we call something a “game-changer” most people assume that it was invented by Apple. Yet even though the neutral citation was not, it definitely is a game-changer in the legal publishing business. Here are some thoughts about why."

Google Book Settlement

http://www.mediabistro.com/baynewser/google_book_settlement/

This site presents a useful timeline with pros and cons about the settlement.
Includes links to documents and other stories of note.

Further, richly detailed information is found at http://thepublicindex.org/.
The Public Index is a project of the Public-Interest Book Search Initiative and the
Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School.

Madoff Documents

The Wall Street Journal has gathered most open-source documents and links about the Bernard Madoff Fraud Case. The URL is http://online.wsj.com/public/page/bernard-madoff.html

There are links to resource lists, and articles in the Wall Street Journal.

Resources

• Madoff's allocution (March 12, 2009)
  
• Department of Justice information for victims
  
• SEC Dec. 11, 2008 press release on Madoff
  
• U.S. attorney's statement on Madoff's arrest
  
• SEC memorandum for a preliminary injunction
  
• Criminal complaint
  
• Cox's Dec. 16 statement on SEC failures
  
• SEC inspector general's Jan. 5, 2009 testimony
  

Markopolos's Documents

• Documents Harry Markopolos submitted to the SEC in fall 2005, making a case that Bernard Madoff's business was a Ponzi scheme.
  
• Asset Firms Dispute Markopolos Documents (1/16/09)
  
• The response Mr. Markopolos received from an SEC official in response to his case against Mr. Madoff.
  
• An email Mr. Markopolos sent to a SEC official in April 2008.
  
• See the SEC's case opening and closing recommendations.
  

PatentSurf

Patent Surf (http://www.patentsurf.net/) identifies itself as a discovery engine of U.S. Patents.

What does it do?
According to their web site, "This site empowers you to surf patents made available by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. As a starting point, please type a natural description of what you are interested in. Patents that are related to your description will be presented for your review. You may then surf (not search!) related patents, where you will discover interesting and unexpected relationships.There are currently 6,858,357,960,636 relationships in the PatentSurf.net database."

How do you use it?
You can use it only with natural language (apple pie). Boolean won't work (apple AND pie). Results are produced in a list or a grid. In a grid format, you can click on links Related Patent Hold Ignore. The Related link will re-focus your search around that patent. The Patent link will open the patent in a new window from the USPTO. The Hold link will change the background color and allow you to collect only those patents in a new window. The Ignore link will filter out those patents into a new window. In a list format, the list of patents is listed in the left column, with a view of the patent in the right column. The patent is in html format, from the USPTO.
In either "list" or "grid" format, you can sort the results by "relevance" or by "patent number."

This website is evolving and will allow you to search a patent by patent number, either from the search window, or by pasting the patent number at the end of link. For example, http://www.patentsurf.net/4,771,554.

Why use it?
It is pretty good in finding related patents, and fairly easy to use. At this time, there is no search fee.

Footnoted.org - A cheat sheet for reading key SEC filings

Footnoted.org is a blog authored by Michelle Leder. As you recall, Ms. Leder also wrote an interesting book, Financial Fine Print: Uncovering a Company's True Value. It is available at most bookstores. ISBN 0471433470.

Her "How To" section presents a useful cheat sheet for reading key SEC filings. Many will find this applicable for business analysis. http://www.footnoted.org/how-to/

A lot of her information is categorized in a drop down window. The category, "Legal Woes," is very interesting. So is the category, "Perk City."

I evaluate this as a 10/10 for legal research, and the cheat sheet for reading key SEC filings.

Harvard Law School Corporate Governance Blog

This well-received blog about corporate governance presents fresh ideas about shareholder activism, discussions about relevant recent cases and their future impact, fiduciary duties, and other relevant issues. The main contributors are Harvard Law professors.

Try http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/

You can "mine" the links to access relevant documents that support the perspectives of each blog.

I evaluate this as 10/10 for useful research.

A useful free PDF document maker

You don't have to have a Google account in order to access the free PDF document maker. I added the pdf24.org link to my iGoogle page, in order to save time.

If I didn't want this on my iGoogle page, http://www.google.com/ig,
I could simply go to http://www.pdf24.org/

This converter is easy to use. There are 2 steps: Browse a document from the web and set an email address to send it to. You can also download this tool to your computer.

Please note that it only creates; it does not edit.

Your Private Facebook Pages May Not Be Private

Security researchers gained access into Private Facebook Pages with unusual search strings to get around search restrictions where "search preferences, or "search settings" were not changed.

Even if the page was marked private, by not changing the "search settings," spiders were able to index and catalog the pages.

One of the search strings reported in Wired include "Women interested in Women." Facebook claims that a change has been made, but this breach has been known since September 2006.

http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/news/2007/06/facebookprivacysearch

Searchmash.com - A Beta from Google

Google has a new interface, searchmash.com, which uses the Google search engine, but provides the results in interesting ways.

The left column has all the web links with a brief paragraph about what was found. This can be minimized to just the links by cliking the "hide" button. What is really exciting about this is you can drill down further on each web link to discover additional "hits."

The right column has expanding links to images, video, blogs and wikipedia.

I give this five stars out of five stars.

For further information, click on the information link below.

http://www.searchmash.com/about/features.html