Libraries are bridges to information and knowledge.

From: News Release-March 3, 2009:

Des Moines, IA – March 3, 2009 – In an editorial in the January-February 2009 issue of its journal, Judicature, the American Judicature Society has called on the new administration to make the restoration and reinvigoration of the Department of Justice a major priority.

The editorial notes that the Department’s reputation for political impartiality and the morale of its personnel are at their lowest ebb since the Department’s nadir in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Recent events, the editorial says, have done serious damage to public confidence in the even-handed administration of justice.

The following link leads to the Spring 2009 list of new books that can be found on the new book shelf of the New York Appellate Division Fourth Department Library:

http://www.nycourts.gov/library/ad4/datas/newbklst.pdf

BY:Lynch, C.G. CIO , February 19, 2009.

Excerpt:

“As potential employers or recruiters peruse your work experience on LinkedIn, recommendations from past and present colleagues can be one of the most helpful features to help communicate your value. Here’s five tips for doing the most good for yourself with LinkedIn recommendations.”

The Future of Today’s Legal Scholarship:

A Symposium in Honor of Bob Oakley July 25, 2009 Georgetown University Law Center Georgetown Law Library About The Future of Today’s Scholarship: A Symposium in Honor of Bob Oakley

The time to debate the role of blogs in legal scholarship has passed. As we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century, one of our oldest and most conservative disciplines has clearly embraced the era of electronic publishing. Blogging has indeed transformed legal scholarship. Now it’s time to move the dialogue forward.

The New York Appellate Division Fourth Department Law Library has just announced in the Spring 2009 issue of their Law Library Newsletter rolling the introduction of a new online catalog. It will be rolled out during the month of March.

The move to a new system was prompted by the end of vendor development and support for the Horizon software, which has been in use by the library since 2000. The Appellate Division Law Library will launch its own system, CeLLO (Court Law Library Online), and the Supreme Court libraries around the state will launch a different system.

According to library staff, one key advantage to having their own system is that when searching the catalog, users will be able to only pull up titles owned by their library. In the current setup, users often found titles that were not owned by their library, but owned by other law libraries around the state

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) Research Committee is accepting applications for research grants from the AALL Research Fund: An Endowment Established by LexisNexis®. A single grant of up to $1,425, or multiple grants totaling $1,425, may be awarded. The committee will award one or more grants to library professionals who wish to conduct research that supports the research and scholarly agenda of the profession of law librarianship. The deadline for applications is Friday, March 27, 2009.

For more information, consult the Research and Publications Committee website at http://www.aallnet.org/committee/respub/.

The Internet in 2009 is undergoing the most significant set of changes of its entire history, ccording to one of the men who helped create it, Dr. Vint Cerf. At the official opening of the Internet Society’s (ISOC) new offices in Geneva, on 26 February, Dr Cerf explained that

technical developments in the Internet’s addressing system and the introduction of internationalised domain names are significant milestones.

Such statements carry weight, coming from the man who, in 1972, was one of the inventors of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), two critical technologies that remain at the heart of the Internet today. In addition to his technical

Legal Information Systems & Legal Informatics Resources, http://home.comcast.net/~richards1000/LegalInformationSystemsBibliography.htm , has been updated with new content. This site aggregates resources of interest to those conducting research on legal information systems. Materials listed include the following:

• Articles, Preprints, Journals, Blogs, and Indexes • Conferences and Conference Proceedings • Dissertations & Theses • Departments, Research Centers, Research Projects, and Organizations • Copyright, Licensing, and Open Access • Metadata, Knowledge Representation, and Systems Design • Preservation • Digital Libraries & Institutional Repositories • CALR & Publishers • Knowledge Management • Court Technology • Law Practice Technology
Comments and suggestions are welcome. Richard can be contacted at richards1000@comcast.net .

RICHARD ZORZA

As you may know, the economic crisis is having a major impact upon courts, self-help programs, and indeed litigants.

A major focus of selfhelpsupport in the next year will be working to make sure that courts and their access partners continue to innovate in access to justice, even when times are tough and resources are tight.

Secret legal opinions issued by the Bush administration lawyers after the September 11, 2001 attacks were among the nine that were released and disclosed publicly by the U.S. Department of Justice on Monday March 2, 2009.

In a Department of Justice Press Release announcing this action, Eric Holder the current U.S. Attorney General is quoted as saying: “Americans deserve a government that operates with transparency and opennes…it is my goal to make OLC [Office of Legal Counsel] opinions available when possible while still protecting national security information and ensuring robust internal executive branch debate and decion-making.”

March 2, 2009 U.S. Department of Justice Press Release.

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