New Jersey Law Librarians Association (NJLLA)
A Chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries
STR Responsible Sourcing (STR RS), a leading provider of ethical sourcing consulting services for Fortune 500 companies, announced that it has launched the most comprehensive and up-to-date online reference tool for labor laws and employment standards.
For more information, click here.
At a flashy, live music and multimedia event this week, at LegalTech in New York, Thomson Reuters Legal (TRL) formally introduced what it is calling “the next generation in legal research.” The new platform, called WestlawNext, aims to simplify and streamline the front-end search experience and provide superior results using new back-end algorithms. The goal is to make legal professionals more efficient and give them the confidence that they’ve explored every relevant document.
For the full story, click here.
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.