Articles Posted in Library News and Views

David Badertscher

The New York Supreme Court Criminal Term Library (New York County) is pleased to announce a major enhancement regarding access to those Temporary Commission on Revision of New York Penal Law and Criminal Code (1961-1970) papers held by the New York Supreme Court Criminal Term Library (New York County). During the past year we in the library have been working with professional interns, archivists, and especially Philip Yow and his web design team at the State of New York Unified Court System to find ways to preserving these materials, many of which were beginning to deteriorate significantly. After confronting various obstacles, technical and otherwise, we settled on digitizing the material as a number of separate and searchable pdf files and then placing all of them on the library website with an overlay of google searchability. Although this may not be perfect it does make the documents accessible on the web in a cost effective manner.

A word of further explanation. these papers primarily consisting of documents submitted to and documents produced by the Temporary Commission on Revision of Penal Laws and Criminal Code (1961-1970) were collected by our former Administrative Judge Peter Mcquillan who served on the staff of the Commission. Justice Mcquillan left the Papers in my custody when he retired and we first put up an index to the papers on the web and now the full text of these materials. In addition we have included The Proposed New York Criminal Procedure Law of 1969 because in addition to the text of the proposed law, it includes valuable additional materials related to the work of the Commission and derivation tables for use in comparing the current Code with the earlier Code. Special permission was obtained from Thomson Reuters before publishing the latter segment.

Volume 14, No. 4. September 1, 2010 ISSN 1489-954X

Published and Distributed by the Office of Lesley Ellen Harris. 2010 is the 15TH year of publication of the LEH Newsletter. All back issues are archived at http://epe.lac-bac.gc.ca/100/202/300/copyright-a/

1. Studies, Legislation and Conventions

BY: Claire M Germain, Edward Cornell Law Librarian and Professor of Law Cornell University and Director, Dual Degree Programs, Paris & Berlin

Publishers Note:

Claire Germain is interested in all aspects of legal information, from rare books to digital libraries, and often writes on these topics, most recently “Digitizing the World’s Laws: Authentication and Preservation.” the topic of this posting. For several years she has been actively advocating for effective measures to bring about authentication and improved preservation of digital law locally, nationally, internationally, and globally.

On JUly 28, 2010, Skyriver Technology Solutions, LLC and Innovative Interfaces, Inc. filed a complaint against Online Computer Library Center, Inc.(OCLC) in the District Court Northern District of California alleging federal and state antitrust violations and unfair competition. More specifically the complaint states that OCLC “…is unlawfully monopolizing the bibliographic data, cataloging services, and interlibrary lending markets and is attempting to monopolize the market for integrated library systems by anticompetitive and exclusionary agreements, policies and practices.”

OCLC has responded though a Statement from Larry Alford, the Chair of the OCLC Board of Trustees and Jay Jordan OCLC President. The Statement reads in part:

“We at OCLC believe the lawsuit is without merit, and we will vigorously defend the policies and practices of the cooperative .

Like others who have expressed their condolances, I felt both saddness and a sense of loss upon hearing that Gloria Dinerman, a prominent Information Sepecialist and business person, had passed away in New Providence, NJ on Sunday July 17, 2010. As mentioned in the obituary below, Gloria will be remembered by all of us for her “….unique style, sharp wit, and cultural savvy”. I also remember her as a person of humanity and caring who was always ready to lend assistance when needed.

David Badertscher

Below is an obituary from the Home News Tribune July 21, 2010. followed by links to two articles by Gloria.:

Many thanks to Jonathan Stock, recently retired as Supervising Law Librarian at the Connecticut Judicial Branch Law Library at Stamford, for writing this fine, thought provoking article. It has been published in the July 2010 issue of AALL Spectrum and we have linked to the Spectrum article with Jonathan’s permission.

Jonathan’s article is truly an allegory which can be considered from many perspectives, not the least of which are Jonathan’s impressions of recent efforts to help save many of the court law libraries in Connecticut from possible oblivion.

Before linking to the actual article, I would like to share a bit of our e-mail exchange after his article first appeared in AALL Spectrum

Catherine Lemann, President of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) has announced the winners of the 2010 AALL awards that will be presented at the AALL Annual Meeting in Denver. These awards provide recognition to achievements of law librarians based on services to the library profession and contributions to legal literature and materials. AALL is to be commended for this Awards Program. We offer our congratulations to all the winners.

Here is a list of the AALL Awards and nmes of the recipients::

The Marian Gould Gallagher Distinguished Service Award

According to George Prager, Head of Cataloging at the NYU Law Library, the examples offered by the Library of Congress illustrate differences between Anglo American Cataloging Rules Second Edition (AACR2 )and Resource Description and Access (RDA). Some examples have only a few fields; others are more complete. Some are made-up examples. Some examples illustrate more than one category but only appear in one category. RDA citations and other comments accompany some examples.

To see the various categories of examples offered, with commentary, go to:

http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/RDAtest/rdaexamples.html

Jaclyn McKewan, Virtual Services and Training Librarian at the Western New York Library Resources Council in Buffalo writes:”People not picking up instant messages is continuing to be a problem, so I created a 7-minute Camtasia video that shows people what to do when they get that message on the screen saying “New IM has arrived.” It covers receiving the message, sending, and a bit of info on transferring patrons. I originally created it for our Ask Us 24/7 librarians, but figured that everyone else may find it useful as well”

Actually Jaclyn is being very modest regarding her efforts. As important as the Instant Messaging component is it is only a small part of this fine resource that she has created. Areas covered include receiving and sending instant messages (IM), finding articles online, finding books online, reference sources, and search techniques. It is a multi-featured resource, useful to all librarians (both experienced and inexperienced) involved in any type of virtual reference and research. After reviewing her material I contacted Jaclyn and am posting it here with her permission.

David Badertscher

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