New Jersey Law Librarians Association (NJLLA)
A Chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries
Legal publisher Fastcase released a mobile version of its legal research tool Friday, making it available at Apple’s App Store for free download to the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
For the full story in the South Florida Business Journal, Click Here.
Carol A. Watson at LLRX.com has written a helpful article on the importance of project management to law librarians. To read it, click here.
Daily Record.com reports that “Internet and automated technology is claiming another casualty — the law libraries in the Morris and Sussex County Superior courthouses.”
For the full story, click here.
A follow up story is available here.
The Copyright Advisory Office of Columbia University in the City of New York, a leading provider of copyright resources for the educational community, has launched a fully revised and updated website of copyright issues and information. The new site is publicly accessible at http://copyright.columbia.edu, and offers expanded pages on copyright ownership, fair use, publication agreements, the Google Books settlement, and much more.
For the full story, click here.
The Google Blog reports –
Starting today, we’re enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases…or by topics…or other queries that you are interested in.
For the full story, click here.
Resource Shelf reports that the Law Library of Congress now has a Twitter feed and the Center for the Book has a Facebook page. For the details, click here.
The ABA Journal reports –
An increasing number of law firms are cutting their law library budgets, spurring some librarians to buy new usage tracking software to make decisions about resources.
Forty-six percent of law librarians surveyed reported that their budgets had been cut, a substantial increase from 9 percent who reported lower budgets last year, the American Lawyer reports. Fifty-seven percent said their firms had cut their library payroll, up from 18 percent last year. The average library budget is now $5.8 million, down from $5.9 million last year.
Law librarians trying to hold the line on costs are using new “hot stuff” software to track usage, according to the American Lawyer story. Armed with the results, law librarians can tell vendors they deserve a price break because they aren’t getting enough bang for the buck. Said one law librarian, “There are a lot of bizarre and complex pricing models out there, and we need to know if they are justified.
For the full story, click here.
The United States government, unlike Canada and many Western European countries, does not have legislation mandating universal health care coverage to its citizens. While the elderly, persons with disabilities, veterans, military service families and the poor are often eligible for government health care assistance, health insurance is often obtained through the work place. In a few instances, states have attempted to pass their own laws to provide health care to cover all residents or all uninsured residents. Four states–Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont–provide examples of differing legislative approaches to providing such broad based care.
For more details from the Law Library of Congress, click here.
Thomson-West, the staple supplier of resources for law librarians, for the first time in recent memory wasn’t a gold sponsor ($75,000+) at the recent American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) annual meeting, July 10-13, in Denver.
The reason? Not because of budget cutbacks. According to Joe Hodnicki, an editor of the Law Librarian Blog (LLB), AALL’s executive board decided not to accept any sponsorship dollars from Thomson-West. At issue is West’s refusal to provide pricing information for AALL’s annual Price Index for Legal Publications (available to AALL members only).
For the full story, click here.
West, the foremost provider of integrated information solutions, software and services to the U.S. legal market, is launching a nation-wide campaign to salute law librarians and the critical role that law librarians play in managing knowledge and information on behalf of the organizations they represent.
For the full story, click here.