According to an NBC report on MSNBC, use of library has gone “way up” during the present economic downturn; circulation is “skyrocketing”. All of this at a time when the budgets of many of these libraries are being cut..
When you go to the above link, be patient, You will first need to listen to a brief commercial before getting to the report about libraries.
“GPO’s Authentication initiative focuses on the primary objective of assuring users that the information made available by GPO is official and authentic and that trust relationships exist between all participants in electronic transactions. In furthering GPO’s mission to provide permanent public access to authentic U.S. Government publications, GPO is working to afford users further assurance that files are unchanged since GPO authenticated them.
The Beta release of an Authenticated Congressional Bills application provides digitally signed and certified Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files for a sample set of Congressional Bills from the 110th Congress. GPO has signed and certified the House and Senate bills PDF files within this application as part of GPO’s initiative to reassure users that the online documents are official and authentic.
The documents in this database are available as ASCII text and digitally signed and certified Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files.”
From: The New York City Bar Library December 15, 2008.
The New York City Bar has finalized an agreement with Google and LLMC-Digital to digitize the remaining print volumes of Records & Briefs in the City Bar’s collection. This project will preserve court cases from the New York Court of Appeals (1823-1929) and all four departments of the Appellate Division (1896-1940). The project will also include scanning very scarce cases from the Superior and Appellate Term courts in the mid-late 1800’s. The trial transcripts and briefs will be available free of charge from Google and in an enhanced format in the LLMC-Digital database available through the City Bar’s web site (www.nycbar.org ).
The City Bar expects to transfer 1,000 volumes per week to Mountain View, California starting this week. Other New York area libraries may also become involved in this project in order to create a comprehensive online collection of New York Records and Briefs.
QUESTION:
What are libraries with existing Thomson West Library Maintenance Agreements (LMAs) planning to do when those Agreements come up for renewal? Responses, arranged by type of library are quite varied. All names have been removed to protect privacy but we are especially grateful to the person who both submitted the question originally and compiled the responses below:
RESPONSES:
By: Raneta Lawson Mack
“This NEW work from William S. Hein & Co., Inc. will take readers one step further than other texts on the market. Most other comparative works in the area of criminal justice are primarily dedicated to the issue of reforming criminal procedure. This work, on the other hand, forgoes a reform-oriented analysis in favour of clarifying the criminal process in other countries as they exist today. Mack offers readers a deeper look into five international legal systems: France, Russia, Spain, Germany and England. This work is unique and distinctive as it provides readers with a retrospective launching point from which to understand and compare current processes. Comparative Criminal Procedure is not just another criminal procedure casebook!” Continue to brochure.
List Price: $95.00 Published: Buffalo; William S. Hein & Co., Inc.; 2008
From the ABA Science and Technology Section:
Science for Lawyers
By Eric York Drogin, Editor
The Federal Register has announced the launch of a new Electronic Public Information Desk to Provide free public access to public documents.*
To view these documents, go to www.federalregister.gov (link opens in a new window). See “View Documents on Public Inspection” (link opens in a new window) on the left hand side. This new desk grants the public access to documents that will be published in the next day’s Federal Register as early at 8:45 a.m. EST. Previously, such documents could only be seen by viewing the documents physically located at the Office of the Federal Register in Washington, DC.
See Press Release at: http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2009/nr09-06.html
“About 450 librarians and library supporters rallied against budget cuts at the New York State Capitol in Albany November 18. Gov. David Paterson has proposed $20 million in cuts to libraries, which the New York Library Association says will reduce library aid for the state’s 73 library systems to a level not seen since 1993. State aid to libraries was flat between 1998 and 2006. Paterson called lawmakers into an emergency session to make mid-year budget cuts, but legislators did not take any action…”
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White Plains (N.Y.) Journal News, Nov. 18; New York Library Association
For the Announcement check the press release at http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2008/08-190.html..
Questions have been raised as to how this might impact law cataloging. Here is a response from AAron Wolfe Kuperman at the Law Catagoging Section of the Library of Congress:
The impact on the LAW team is limited. We are renamed the “Law Section”,
On Thursday November 6, 2008 the Law Library Association of Greater New York (LLAGNY) presented in conjunction with the Electronic Legal Information Access and Citation Committee of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) a program at the New York County Lawyers Association in New York City regarding how findings of the 2007 authentication report published by AALL and its ELIAC Committee can be adopted in the State of New York.
The program consisted of a panel of representatives of AALL, its Electronic Legal Information Access and Citation (ELIAC), and two agencies of New York state government, the New York State Reporting Bureau and the Office of General Counsel of the New York State Department of State discussing the AALL Authentication Report, published in 2007 and approaches, strategies, and challenges to adopting its findings to authenticating and otherwise validating in accordance with accepted standards New York State primary source legal information published on the web.
The following are links to the opening remarks of the moderator, David Badertscher, Slides frm the presentation of Mary Alice Baish,and a summary of the program kindly provided by Theodore Pollack, Senior Law Librarian at the New York County Public Access Library, who attended the program, and to the program announcement from LLAGNY. Other links will be added if they become available.
Criminal Law Library Blog