Blog – Page 160

Emerging Legal Issues in Social Media: Part II

This is the second installment of an examination of notable and new developments in social media and legal practice. Part One highlighted important statutes, case law, ethics opinions, along with extensive news media coverage of law-related social media issues. Part Two focuses on recent items that have appeared in professional journals and blogs, 1 law reviews, reports, books and secondary resources, along with references to current awareness sources. 2

Subjects: Features

FOIA Facts: Funding FOIA

Scott A. Hodes contends that reducing FOIA Operations any further is the wrong way to go if the objectives of increasing government transparency are to be pursued. The actual process of searching for records in response to FOIA requests and processing those requests requires human interaction – in other words, while the documents themselves can be digitized, a person will always be required to search for and process responsive records.

Subjects: Congress, E-Government, FOIA Facts, Government Resources, Legal Research

SharePoint, Training Not Required

Lorette Weldon’s research has identified that librarians are using SharePoint in the corporate, government, and non-profit sectors. She expertly identifies and illustrates how to leverage the power of this application through an understanding of the site templates that Microsoft bundles in SharePoint “out-of-the-box”. These templates are based on social networking abilities and not program coding. Through “plug and play” efforts librarians can find the features in SharePoint that will assist them in managing their multifaceted “collections.”

Subjects: Features, Libraries & Librarians, Library Marketing, Library Software & Technology

Knowledge Discovery Resources 2011 – An Internet MiniGuide Annotated Link Compilation

This new guide by Marcus P. Zillman focuses on the most current and reliable resources for knowledge discovery available on the Internet. With the constant addition of new and pertinent information to the web, it is very easy to experience information overload. A critical requirement for researchers is finding the best knowledge discovery resources and sites in both the visible and invisible World Wide Web. These carefully selected knowledge and information discovery sources will help you accomplish your research goals.

Subjects: Features, Legal Research, Search Engines

Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive’s Examination of URL Stability*

This guide for researches by Sarah Rhodes focuses on the highly significant impact of “link rot”, which refers to the loss or removal of content at a particular Uniform Resource Locator (URL) over time. When an attempt is made to open a documented link, either different or irrelevant information has replaced the expected content, or else the link is found to be broken, typically expressed by a 404 or “not found” error message. This is not an uncommon occurrence. Web-based materials often disappear as URLs change and web sites are changed, updated, or deleted.

Subjects: Digital Archives, Information Management, Legal Research, Libraries & Librarians, Library Software & Technology, Technology Trends, Web Management, Web-Based Training

Basic Search Set-up in “Out of the Box” SharePoint

IT Librarian and SharePoint expert Lorette Weldon provides guidance on requisite questions for staff and other users to ask for content in Microsoft SharePoint out of the box (OOTB). The research requires you to ask the four “W”‘s: What; Who; Where; When. What type of SharePoint item do you wish to obtain? Who contributed and/or created the SharePoint item? Where did the SharePoint item come from (the source)? When was the SharePoint item created and/or modified? This would work for Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. WSS is the basic compilation of applications.

Subjects: Intranets

Emerging Legal Issues in Social Media: Part I

In Part 1 of his commentary, Ken Strutin discusses how the growth of social media and social networking applications has permeated and extended the range of legal investigation, discovery and litigation. The materials he highlights represent a current sampling of notable developments in law enforcement, law practice, civil and criminal litigation, and technology’s influence on human behavior.

Subjects: Features, Internet Trends, Law Firm Marketing, Legal Ethics, Legal Research, Legal Technology, Privacy

Deep Web Research 2011

Internet research guru Marcus P. Zillman’s comprehensive, extensive guide focuses on how expert search engines have written algorithms to mine the deeper portions of the web by targeting file formats such as .pdf, .doc, .xls, ppt, .ps. and others. These files are predominately used by businesses to communicate information both within their organization and to those outside enterprise systems. Searching for this information using deeper search techniques and the latest algorithms empowers researchers to obtain a vast amount of corporate information previously unavailable or inaccessible. Research has also shown that even deeper information can be obtained from these files by searching and accessing the “properties” information on these files.

Subjects: Features, Internet Resources - Web Links, Internet Trends, Legal Research, Search Engines, Technology Trends

The Risky Business of Information Sharing: Why You Need to Care About Copyright

Copyright is an essential tool in the spread of new ideas, and the workplace has become ground zero for infringement. Ask employees up and down the corporate hierarchy, and they’ll tell you that whisking information electronically to co-workers is integral to their jobs. Their employers will emphatically agree. But unauthorized swaps of information also carry enormous potential risk: Ordinary office exchanges, so natural to the digital world, can easily violate the copyright rights of others and bring costly lawsuits or settlements. Now the same technology that has dramatically defined the Internet age is drawing a new roadmap to compliance, with software tools that simplify adherence to copyright requirements.

Subjects: Copyright, Features, Internet Use Policies, Law Library Management, Technology Trends

Juror Behavior in the Information Age

Ken Strutin focuses on the impact of social media on jurors who increasingly try to stay connected to work and home while performing their civic duty, and the resulting impact of the power of individual jurors to virtualize a trial by going online. His article collects recent and notable examples of juror online misbehavior and highlights scholarship and practice resources concerning its implications for voir dire, trial management and the administration of justice.

Subjects: Features