The Ginger (Law) Librarian

At the Ohio Regional Association of Law Libraries (ORALL) Annual Meeting, as I presented on the  duty of technology competence in the algorithmic society , an astute law librarian asked (paraphrasing), "how does fake news play into this?" That question gave rise to a flurry of brain activity, as I considered how Google, for example, ranks relevancy, the rise of fake news, and the ability of users to spot fake news sources -- particularly for legal research. As I was presenting to a group of lawyers at a CLE this week, I polled them asking about the electronic resource that they primarily use for legal research. The overwhelming response was Google. Google uses a trademarked, proprietary – mostly secret – algorithm called PageRank, which assigns each webpage a relevancy score based on factors, such as: The frequency and location of keywords within the webpage. If the keyword only appears once within the body of the page, it will receive a low score for that key...

In 2009, a CNN article noted that the law is "at least five years behind technology as it is developing." In late 2016,  Aviv Ovadya was one of the first people to see that there was something fundamentally wrong with the internet. A few weeks before the 2016 election, he presented his concerns to technologists in San Francisco’s Bay Area and warned of an impending crisis of misinformation in a presentation he titled “Infocalypse.” Ovadya saw early what many — including lawmakers, journalists, and Big Tech CEOs — wouldn’t grasp until months later: Our platformed and algorithmically optimized world is vulnerable — to propaganda, to misinformation, to dark targeted advertising from foreign governments — so much so that it threatens to undermine a cornerstone of human discourse: the credibility of fact. Ovadya — now the chief technologist for the University of Michigan’s Center for Social Media Responsibility and a Knight News innovation fellow at the Tow Center for D...

Librarians and archivists are currently in an ongoing conversation about preserving digital content. What we're finding is that some of the most clever commentary on pop culture and politics is thriving deep in hashtags on Twitter. Social media is as essential to understanding the preoccupations and temperature of our time.  But preserving materials from the internet is much harder than sealing them under glass.  Building an [internet] archive has always required asking a couple of simple but thorny questions: What will we save and how? Whose stories are the most important and why? In theory, the internet already functions as a kind of archive: Any document, video or photo can in principle remain there indefinitely, available to be viewed by anyone with a connection. But in reality, things disappear constantly. Search engines like Google continually trawl for pages to organize and index for retrieval, but they can’t catch everything. And as the web evolves, it becomes ha...

The Law Librarians of Congress blog  In Custodia Legis  recently announced  that Thomas.gov will officially retire as of July 5, 2016. Thomas.gov was launched on January 5, 1995, after Congressional leadership directed the Library of Congress to make federal legislative information freely available to the public. On September 19, 2012  Congress.gov  was introduced to eventually replace Thomas.gov with a more robust, updated system. Congress.gov's beta label was removed in September 2014, and it is set to officially replace Thomas.gov as the official website for U.S. federal legislative information. Congress.gov provides access to accurate, timely, and complete legislative information for Members of Congress, legislative agencies, and the public. It is presented by the Library of Congress (LOC) using data from the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Office of the Secretary of the Senate, the Government Publishing Offic...

The NYTimes announced that it will join the Associated Press this week to change their style rule to lowercase the word "internet." As noted, "while most publications capitalized the word when it first came into widespread use, the lowercase form has become steadily more common in recent years." Changes like these provide insight into how style and usage can change over time: More broadly, modern usage tends to favor less capitalization — along with fewer hyphens and less punctuation in general. Capitalizing words when it isn’t strictly necessary can seem archaic to contemporary readers. The Times used to capitalize “Federal” in phrases like “a Federal judge,” and even “Government” when referring to the national government. Now both of those uses would be lowercase under our rules. Click the link to purchase the full NYTimes style & usage manual.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed ran an article written by a historian about the ever-increasing need to preserve our vast amounts of data. As the historian notes, the radical reduction of barriers to reading and publishing online has resulted in an abundance of cultural expression in audio, video, textual, and numeric formats. Yet paradoxically, in this age of digital abundance it is harder, not easier, to secure knowledge for future generations. How much will future generations know about today’s online culture when the average webpage lasts just 100 days?  One of the biggest challenges of our time is to find a way to archive material. If we learn to manage the abundance of digital information as quickly as we learned to manage print, solutions will come within several generations, approximately when the first few cohorts of digital natives mature, age, and begin to reckon with their own legacies. By that time, though, much will be lost, not by choice but by default. Preserving da...

Check out my new RIPS Law Librarian Blog post on open access initiatives in legal scholarly publishing.

We've seen that publishing in open access avenues such as SSRN or an institutional repository result in a higher scholarly impact for articles . But some publishers are reluctant to adopt the model in favor of restrictive publication agreements that protect the bottom line. InsideHigherEd posted about Elsevier's newly established hosting and sharing policy created in 2015. Academic, library and technology organizations are denouncing a new sharing and hosting policy adopted by publisher Elsevier, saying it undermines open-access policies at colleges and universities and prevents authors from sharing their work. Many librarians and open-access advocates, however, see the policy as an attack on institutional repositories, where colleges collect and make available research their faculty members produce. The new policy does not allow authors to share their journal article manuscripts publicly through those repositories, only privately “with a colleague or with an invitation-...

The NYTimes reported that UC Davis spent upwards of $175,000 to have any negative search results about the university scrubbed from Google. After a pepper spray incident at a protest, the University of California David paid at least $175,000 to two public relations firms to suppress the negative search results generated by its name, and the name of its chancellor, Linda P.B. Katehi, according to a report by The Sacramento Bee . The news has caused some California lawmakers to call for her resignation . One of the firms, Nevins & Associates, based in Maryland, said it would “launch an aggressive and comprehensive online campaign to eliminate the negative search results for UC Davis and the Chancellor through strategic modifications to existing and future content and generating original content as needed,” according to its contract, which was obtained by The Bee through a freedom of information request. Under the contract, signed in January 2013, more than two years after the ...

In what is a boon for the concept of a " World Library, " the Supreme Court on Monday  declined  to hear a challenge from the Authors Guild and other writers claiming Google's scanning of their books amounts to wanton copyright infringement and not fair use. The guild urged the high court to review a lower court decision in favor of Google that the writers said amounted to an " unprecedented judicial expansion of the fair-use doctrine ." At issue is a June  decision  by the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals.   Google urged the justices to side against the writers because, in the end, their works would be more readily discovered. "Google Books gives readers a dramatically new way to find books of interest," Google's brief  said . "By formulating their own text queries and reviewing search results, users can identify, determine the relevance of, and locate books they might otherwise never have found." With this decline, the Sup...

Ashley Ahlbrand over at the RIPS Law Librarian Blog posted some great information about browser add-ons for legal research efficiency. For anyone unfamiliar with Lexis Views , it is a browser add-on for Chrome or Safari (Firefox coming soon) that allows you to search and access Lexis Advance content while you’re researching on other websites. For instance, if you have Lexis Views activated while running a search on Google Scholar, results from Lexis Advance will also display in your results list. If instead you were reading an article in Wikipedia, a pop up at the top of the screen might tell you that Lexis Views has found a matching document for you. If you like beginning your research in Google (and have a Lexis subscription), Lexis Views could prove a useful tool for getting you to reliable legal information once you’ve used Google to get a preliminary framework for the research topic. Bestlaw is a browser add-on for Chrome or Firefox that integrates into both Lexis Advance an...

The Telegraph recently reported on Roly Keating, the head of the British Library, who argues that libraries could outlast the Internet. He said that he is shocked at how many "smart people" still questioned whether libraries were still viable in the modern age. He added, "This feels a pretty brutal choice that we are allegedly confronted with. And it won't surprise you that I think it's a false contradiction and an utterly false choice to make." Librarians are confronted with this question often - from inquiring acquaintances to unassuming loved ones. As Keating continued, "When we talk about libraries, I'm told about the old values, the traditional values of these institutions. Some believe they are being replaced by new ones about being more open and connected and virtual. And of course our belief, passionately, at the British Library is that it's about both. And that's the great richness of what a library is and can be." Spe...

The Law Librarians blog posted about a paper by James Donovan, Carol Watson, and Caroline Osborne on SSRN called The Open Access Advantage for American Law Reviews . From the article: In answer to law faculty questions about how participation in an open access repository will affect the works’ impact, the present research offers a definitive reply. When looking at citation by other law reviews to all the author’s work, the averaged increase in citations in flagship journals is 53%. In general, half of these cites will be dispensed in the first six years after the article’s publication. OA articles will attract more attention earlier in the lifecycle of the publication, and endure longer on the intellectual stage. … For authors, the message is clear: The open access advantage is real, sizable, and consistent. The minimal effort to upload an article onto an OA platform such as SSRN or a school’s repository pays rich dividends in the currency of subsequent citations in law reviews a...

The Law Librarians blog posted about new proposed legislation that will make it easier to access the valuable Congressional Research Service reports. The Equal Access to Congressional Research Service Reports Act of 2016 ( S 2639 and HR 4702 ) directs the GPO to establish and maintain a public website containing CRS Reports, and an index, that are searchable, sortable, and downloadable (including downloadable in bulk), for which no fee may be charged. Coverage includes CRS Authorization of Appropriations Products, Appropriations Products, and any other written CRS product containing CRS research or CRS analysis available for general congressional access on the CRS Congressional Intranet. Coverage excludes any custom product or service prepared in direct response to a request for custom analysis or research and not available for general congressional access on the CRS Congressional Intranet. Any researcher knows about the treasure trove of information available in the CRS reports...

BBC News is reporting that Google is about to launch a new algorithm that will predict user searches. A group of programmers at Google claim that their new algorithm knows what you are going to search for even before you enter your query. Starting April 1, 2016, you will be able to click on the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on the Google search page without entering a query and Google will return the results you were looking for. "There's  no magic or mind reading involved," explained one of the programmers working on the not-so-secret algorithm. "We already know a lot about users from previous searches, and it's pretty easy to predict what kinds of information they will be searching for at any given time." While it's an interesting concept, some users are a bit uncomfortable with this technology. Some users fear the new algorithm may violate privacy and security by using data analytics to predict user behavior, but Shirley Holmes, a ...

Popular Mechanics posted an article discussing the humble beginnings of classifying information using index cards and how that system foresaw the creation of the Internet. For thousands of years, if you wanted to find the best and most comprehensive information about anything, you headed to a library. You just had to check two things first: whether the library had the information you're looking for, and, if so, where to find it. These days we can get [a lot of] this information from our computers in seconds, but as recently as the 1990s, online catalogs were new and mostly unavailable, and that meant combing through the card catalog to track down a book. Librarians originally handwrote the bibliographies on each card. But in 1971, the Ohio College Library Center began printing the text onto the index cards for them. The OCLC distributed about 1.9 billion cards before shutting the service down in 2015—with today's online catalogs, there was little need to make more cards. T...

Last week, I had the pleasure of hearing Linda K. Enghagen, a national expert on copyright compliance, discuss copyright issues in distance education. As more law schools enter the distance-education game, these principles are extremely important. Enghagen specifically discussed copyright and fair use in the educational realm but also made sure to mention university policies that come into play. Her presentation on course design was intriguing and highlighted many important concepts for copyright and distance education, including fair use considerations and the TEACH Act. She discussed the threshold inquiry for a fair use analysis and discussed each of the four fair-use factors to weigh when deciding if permission must be granted to use a copyrighted work. A few of many key principles include: For many things that we do, the qualifying purpose is met through teaching or research Fair use factor 1 generally requires restricted access - make sure to password protect content on...

The Ginger Law Librarian has been following the Google Books case since 2013 - here , here , here , and here . It's culminated the point where is has finally landed in front of the highest court in the land. The Washington Post reported that the Authors Guild has officially asked the Supreme Court to hear its case against Google for its Google Books service. The group filed a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court on December 31, 2015. If you are not familiar with the suit, here's the gist: Google's free service allows users to search for particular lines or quotes in books through the company's main search engine, and also displays parts of scanned pages of books. The Authors Guild and Google have fought for 10 years over whether that qualifies as "fair use." The Authors Guild first complained in 2005 that this violates copyright and undermines the value of authors' work by providing their books online and for free.  The group has argued that Goo...

Our profession's resident awesome law librarian Sarah Glassmeyer is currently a fellow at Harvard's Library Innovation Lab, and she just released an important census of state legal information .  Why perform this census, you might ask? For a variety of reasons, as Glassmeyer points out : First of all, the United States is facing an access to justice crisis in its legal system.  A 2005 study by the Legal Services Corporation showed that 80% of the civil legal needs – legal needs in which there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to an attorney –  in the United States are going unmet.  The United States ranks 66th out of 98 countries in a ranking of access and affordability of civil legal services.  Individuals are relying on self-help resources, either provided by a library or the web. Secondly, due to the relative ease of web-based publishing, states are increasingly making the Internet the primary place of publication for their legal information m...

There's a new online newspaper aggregator in town. It's called Elephind . From the website : The goal of Elephind.com is to make it possible to search all the world’s online historic newspapers from one place.  With Elephind.com it is now possible for family historians, genealogists, and researchers to search historic digitized newspaper archives from around the globe. Elephind.com is much like Google, Bing, or other search engines but is focused on only historical, digitized newspapers. It enables you to search, for free, across many newspaper sites simultaneously, rather than having to visit each site separately. By clicking on the Elephind.com search result that interests you you'll go directly to the newspaper site which hosts that story. Many of the smaller newspaper sites are not well known and may be difficult to find with the usual search engines but are searchable from Elephind.com. Elephind also provides useful information for maximizing searches , includ...