Year archives: 2015

Bens Guide to the U.S. Government: Free, Educational Content from GPO for Children and Adults of all Ages

Kelly Seifert gives us a tour of Ben’s Guide to the U.S. Government, a service of the U.S. Government Publishing Office that presents educational content for children and adults of all ages on the workings of the U.S. Government and U.S. history, with a focus on civics. Recently redesigned, the site features all new site content, a device-friendly infrastructure, and a modernized look and feel that has been optimized for an intuitive learning experience.

Subjects: Business Research, Government Resources, Library Marketing, Reference Resources, Search Engines

New Job De-/script/-ions for Attorneys with Coding and Tech Business Skills

Alan Rothman discusses the growing interest in and need for attorneys who have degrees and skills from another field that serves client requirements, previously focused on areas such as engineering, business and medicine. Already well established in professions that include journalism and economics, the legal arena is increasingly embracing the skills and value added work product associated with technical coding. This is reflected in new course offerings in advanced degree programs as well as in job positions that focus on data management and data analytics.

Subjects: Continuing Legal Education, Legal Education, Legal Marketing, Legal Profession, Legal Research Training, Recruiting, Technology Trends, Training

Deep Web Research and Discovery Resources 2016

Marcus Zillman has a longstanding and comprehensive expertise pertaining to the Deep Web. The Deep Web or Dark Web covers trillions of pages of information held in dynamically generated repositories throughout the global web that remain inaccessible through popular applications and search engines. Searching for this information using deeper search techniques and the latest algorithms allows researchers to obtain a vast amount of information that was previously unavailable or inaccessible, in fields that include the sciences and maths, corporate and financial data, and data only surfaced using file sharing applications. Zillman’s new guide documents a wide range of sources to improve your research results, including articles and paper, cross database search services and tools, peer to peer and file sharing engines, and semantic web resources.

Subjects: Data Mining, Evaluation of Internet Resources, Internet Resources - Web Links, Open Source, Search Engines, Search Strategies, Technology Trends

Competitive Intelligence – A Selective Resource Guide 2015

Sabrina I. Pacifici’s comprehensive current awareness guide focuses on leveraging a selected but wide range of reliable, topical, predominantly free websites and resources. The goal is to support an effective research process to search, discover, access, monitor, analyze and review current and historical data, news, reports, statistics and profiles on companies, markets, countries, people and issues, from a national and a global perspective. Sabrina’s guide is a “best of the Web” resource that encompasses search engines, portals, government sponsored open source databases, alerts, data archives, publisher specific services and applications. All of her recommendations are accompanied by links to trusted content targeted sources that are produced by top media and publishing companies, business, government, academe, IGOs and NGOs.

Subjects: Blogs, Competitive Intelligence, Internet Trends, Legal Technology, Libraries & Librarians, News Resources, Online Legal Research Services, Search Engines, Search Strategies, Technology Trends

Solitary Confinement: Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Ken Strutin’s article surveys notable legal developments, new scholarship, and recent scientific research concerning the administration and effects of solitary confinement. Strutin describes solitary confinement as punishment’s punishment. He states that solitary is where the mind is worn out by pacing the same floor, viewing the same walls, tuning in to the same sounds without relief. He documents how extreme isolation has devastating psychological and physical consequences, collectively described as “SHU syndrome.” Strutin delivers illumination to the heart of legal challenges and legislative reforms now supported by an expanding body of research into the harmfulness of prolonged human isolation.

Subjects: Civil Liberties, Criminal Law, Legal Research

Academically Supporting Entering Freshmen: High School Graduates Unprepared to be College Freshmen

In Part 5 of her 5 part series, Lorette Weldon, Librarian and Educator discusses how high school students are not guaranteed success in college when they have completed college-preparatory courses. In high school English, mathematics and science courses, students have not consistently been taught how “to draw inferences, interpret results, analyze conflicting source documents, support arguments with evidence, solve complex problems that have no obvious answer, draw conclusions, offer explanations, conduct research, and generally think deeply about what they are being taught.”

Subjects: Education

Information Quality Resources and Expert Resources

Marcus Zillman’s guide is a comprehensive and selective bibliography including search engines, world wide web resources, services and sites currently offering free, value added content on the web. As more and more of the global population is accessing the web, making informed choices about what content to use to obtain reliable, accurate, actionable information becomes more critical. This guide provides an extensive range of reliable, relevant information to leverage – whether you are an educator, a librarian, a researcher, a lawyer, a student, a professional working on mission critical organizational objectives, or in the interest of current awareness. Gaining insight into your resources can be a challenging process if undertaken without benchmarks and skillfully researched pathfinders. This guide comprises a wide range of resources for everyone who regularly engages with web content for knowledge discovery, producing work product, and creating value added content related to specific sectors, issues or topics.

Subjects: Business Research, Competitive Intelligence, Information Management, Librarian Resources, Reference Resources, Reference Services, Web Site Evaluation

Digital preservation is hard when older content can fall through cracks

Implementation of new content management systems that govern the web and often render older pages and sites inaccessible create access barriers for researchers seeking to access older content across subject areas. TeleRead Editor Chris Meadows describes the problem, the implications and a possible solution.

Subjects: Information Architecture, Internet Resources, Internet Trends, Technology Trends, Web Management

Summary of the Bitcoin Seminar Held at Kaye Scholer in New York on October 15, 2015

The market quote for Bitcoin on October 15, 2016 at 5:00 pm EST was $255.64 US according to CoinDesk.com on the site’s Price & Data page. At that same moment, Alan Rothman was attending a presentation entitled the Bitcoin Seminar. Rothman expertly documents the facets, vocabulary, instances and key components of the quickly emerging technologies that comprise bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrency, and their impact on the financial sector.

Subjects: Law Firm Marketing, Technology Trends

The True Measure of Bitcoin’s Success

This commentary by financial analyst Ryan Davis supports the position that the price of Bitcoin should not be the primary measure of the state of Bitcoin, nor should any one metric be the primary measure of the state of Bitcoin. The true measure of the state of Bitcoin is a combination of everything from activity in GitHub repositories to the number of daily bitcoin transactions.

Subjects: Legal Research, Technology Trends