From: Associated Press:
Judges Raise Ordered
June 11, 2008 at 2:17 pm by Rick Karlin
Microsoft’s Top Ten Innovationss by James Rapoza
” Let’s face it, during the reign of Bill Gates, Microsoft hasn’t exactly been Xerox Parc when it comes to inventing and creating new technologies. For the most part, Microsoft has been content to buy or copy new technologies and focus on incremental improvements to its products. But that doesn’t mean that Bill Gates and Microsoft weren’t innovative. In the areas of business strategies and cutthroat competition, Microsoft has used a combination of unique and very effective innovations to make itself the dominant tech company of the PC era.”
Conference: Court Leadership and Self Represented Litigation: Solutions for Access, Effectiveness and Efficiency
Self-Represented Litigation Network Leadership Package Launch Conference Baltimore MD, September 8-10, 2008
In September 2008, the Self-Represented Litigation Network will be launching its leadership package entitled: Court Leadership and Self-Represented Litigation Solutions for Access, Effectiveness, and Efficiency.
Following the model of last years successful judicial conference at Harvard, the launch, to be held at the Court Solutions Conference sponsored by the National Center for State Courts, held in Baltimore on September 8-10 will provide an opportunity for groups of leaders to come together and learn about, and practice the use of leadership tools for innovation for the self-represented.
Analysis and Response – On the Record: Report of the Library of Congress Working Group and the Future of Bibliographic Control
From the Introduction:
“On the Record, the report from the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, describes a new technological environment in which libraries have exciting opportunities for making information resources available and useful to new and demanding audiences. The Working Group has spent a year studying how best to exercise bibliographic control within this environment. The opening sentence of the report’s introduction sums up conclusions with which the Library of Congress agrees: ‘The future of bivbliographic control will be collaborative, decentralized, international in scope, and Web-based.”
This Response to the report was prepared under the supervision of Deanna B. Marcum, Associate Librarian for Library Services at the Library of Congress.
Pet Peeves at the U.S. Supreme Court*
[From an article in the March 17, 2008 The National Law Journal by Tony Mauro of the Legal Times]
There’s a video out there you may want to see – a web site called “LawProse Inc” on which 8 of the 9 U.S. Supreme Court justices speak about answering questions, writing briefs, arguing before the Court, and their own relationships with written words. For instance, Chief Justice Roberts thinks “lengthy citations to Web sites that are now common in briefs are an ‘obscene’ distraction ‘with all those letters strung together.’ ” Also he doesn’t like overly-long briefs, “I have yet to put down a brief and say ‘I wish that had been longer.'” Justice Breyer is bothered by the same thing, “If I see (a brief that is) 50 pages, it can be 50 pages, but I’m already going to groan,” but “If I see 30, I think, well, he thinks he has really got the law on his side because he only took up 30.”
“Justice Kennedy hates it when lawyers turn nouns into verbs by tacking on ‘-ize’ at the end, as in ‘incentivize.’ Such showy, made-up words, he sniffs, are ‘like wearing a very ugly cravat.”
Conference: A Reference Renaissance: Current and Future Trends
The complete program for A Reference Renaissance: Current and Future Trends is now available on the conference website.
This exciting two-day event features keynote speaker David W. Lewis, Dean of the University Library at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, who will talk about Reference in the Age of Wikipedia, Or Not… and the implications of the technological and social transformations brought on by Google, Wikipedia, and answer services such as ChaCha. On day two of the conference, a plenary panel discussion, Theory Meets Practice, made up of educators and library directors will highlight what’s being taught in schools of library and information science and what’s being implemented in libraries. This panel features Dr. David Lankes (Information Institute of Syracuse), Dr. Marie L. Radford (Rutgers University), Jamie LaRue (Douglas County Libraries, CO), and Carla J. Stoffle (University of Arizona).
Other sessions cover the full gamut of reference and information services in public, academic, and special library settings. Learn about “predatory reference” techniques, screencasts for distance reference, gathering meaningful statistics, the impact of serious leisure on reference services, new staff training initiatives, widgets, IM, marketing in-person services – and more! Meet and network with your colleagues from all over the U.S., Canada, and other countries, and spend time with exhibitors showcasing a variety of reference focused products.
Deep Indexing: A New Approach to Searching Scholarly Literature*
From: “This Week’s News”, Library Journal.com (May 29, 2008).
Close to 200 attendees took part in a May 20 Library Journal webcast Deep Indexing: A New Approach to Searching Scholarly Literature, sponsored by ProQuest. While a majority of those participating were from the United States, librarians and electronic resource coordinators from 17 other countries also joined in, making it the most “international” of webcasts so far in the LJ series. An archive of the webcast will be available for year from the Library Journal web site, and can be found here.
Carol Tenopir, editor of LJ’s Online Databases column, kicked off the panel by providing background on the research behind the development of “tables and graphs” indexing, now known as deep indexing. Her partner in research, Robert Sandusky from the Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago, offered his insights on the relevancy of types of searching and indexing for various disciplines, particularly the sciences.
Harvard Professor Stuart Shieber Downplays the Role of “Revolutionary”
From: “This Week’s News”, Library Journal.com (May 29, 2008).
Last week, Harvard University professor Stuart Shieber made history-he was named the first director of Harvard’s newly minted Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC). In his new role, Shieber will oversee the implementation of the university’s groundbreaking open access mandate, which he helped author, and which many suggest could have wide-ranging implications for the future of scholarly communication. “Let’s not go overboard,” Shieber says with a laugh and an audible wince when asked if he views his new role as a historic opportunity. “People like to extrapolate that [the mandate] will have a revolutionary effect. But you can’t make a policy based on that extrapolation. Sometimes there’s too much talk about momentous, revolutionary effects, it gets too far in front of what is really happening. There are lots of things going on, and there will be changes. We’re just trying to do our part.”
That sober approach should be heartening to observers concerned with getting the implementation rolling. In a conversation with the LJ Academic Newswire this week, Shieber embraced a straightforward mission “to support the efforts of the Harvard faculty to make their collective scholarly output as broadly available as possible.” It’s a big job, Shieber conceded, and one he didn’t necessarily expect to fall to him, despite his role in authoring the policy. “Certainly, there was no lobbying effort,” he laughed, when asked if he had expected to be tapped to lead the OSC. “But I have spent lots of time and effort on these issues, so it was a natural fit.”
New York Chief Judge Judith Kaye to Receive Dwight D. Opperman Award for Judicial Excellence
Judith S. Kaye, chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, has been selected as the recipient of the Fifth Annual Dwight D. Opperman Award for Judicial Excellence. Chief Judge Kaye was chosen by a three-member panel: JudgeEllen Rosenblum, Oregon Court of Appeals; Judge Lorenzo Arredondo, Lake Circuit Court for Indiana; and Chief Justice Pascal Calogero, Jr., Louisiana Supreme Court. The Award will be presented later this year.
Press Release: New York Chief Judge Judith Kaye to Receive Fifth Annual Dwight Opperman Award
Monthly Calendar of Probono net/NY – June 2008
A calendar arranged by topic of CLE trainings and other public legal events. To see the calendar click here.