Category «Intranets»

Manhattan grand jury votes to indict Donald Trump, showing he, like all other presidents, is not an imperial king

Following news that a Manhattan grand jury had voted to indict Donald Trump, CNN’s John Miller announced on Thursday evening March 30, 3023: “I am told by my sources that this is 34 counts of falsification of business records, which is probably a lot of charges involving each document, each thing that was submitted, as a separate count.” Prof. Shannon Bow O’Brien, a presidency scholar, takes on the concept of the imperial presidency: “Throughout history, many presidents have pushed the boundaries of power for their own personal preferences or political gain. However, Americans do have the right to push back and hold these leaders accountable to the country’s laws. Presidents have never been monarchs. If they ever act in that manner, I believe that the people have to remind them of who they are and whom they serve.”

Subjects: Accounting, Business Research, Criminal Law, Government Resources, Leadership, Legal Research, Public Records, United States Law

2023 Finding People MiniGuide

This guide by Marcus P. Zillman is a selected list of free and fee based (some require subscriptions), people finding resources, from a range of providers. A significant number of free sources on this subject matter are sourced from public records obtained by a group of companies who initially offer free information to establish your interest, from which point a more extensive report requires a fee to obtain. It is important to note that can be many errors in these data, including the inability to correctly de-duplicated individuals with the same common names. Also note that each service targets a different mix of identifying data such as: name, address, date of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives, education, employment, criminal records. social media accounts, income. As we conduct research throughout the day it is useful to employ both impromptu and planned searches about individuals that are referenced.

Subjects: Business Research, Competitive Intelligence, KM, Public Records, Search Engines, Search Strategies

You don’t have to be a spy to violate the Espionage Act – and other crucial facts about the law Trump may have broken

Joseph Ferguson, Co-Director, National Security and Civil Rights Program, Loyola University Chicago and Thomas A. Durkin, Distinguished Practitioner in Residence, Loyola University Chicago are both attorneys who specialize in and teach national security law. While navigating the sound and fury over the Trump search, this article highlights important things to note about the Espionage Act.

Subjects: Criminal Law, Digital Archives, Government Resources, Legal Research, Public Records, United States Law

A bit about PURLs

Ed Summers, librarian, metadata expert, teacher, and computational expert, delivers an insighful lesson on the Persistent Uniform Resource Locator. PURLs were developed to make URLs more resilient and persistent over time. You could put a PURL into a catalog record and if the URL it pointed to needed to change you changed the redirect on the PURL server, and all the places that pointed to the PURL didn’t need to change. It was a beautifully simple idea, and has influenced other approaches like DOI and Handle. But this simplicity depends on a commitment to keeping the PURL up to date.

Subjects: Archives, Cataloging, Digital Archives, Information Architecture, Information Management, Information Mapping, Internet Resources - Web Links, KM, Reference Resources, Search Strategies

Finding People Resources and Sites 2022

This guide by Marcus Zillman identifies a wide range of free and fee based resources from which to choose to conduct people searches as well as brand and company reputation research, for business or personal reasons. It is important to note that the largest and most prominent data aggregators resell their content to other sites. In addition, data on free and some fee based sites may not be cleansed and can include inaccuracies that range from minor to critical. Also, many sites offer free search but charge a fee to review the results. It is therefore advisable to use multiple sources in your research and compare and contrast results before pursuing the use of these data.

Subjects: Big Data, Business Research, Competitive Intelligence, Data Mining, KM, Legal Research, LEXIS, Reference Resources, Search Engines, Search Strategies, Social Media, Westlaw

RSS Feeds, PACER, and the Fight for Access to Federal Docket Information

What is RSS and how do federal courts use it? Rebecca Fordon informs us that courts vary in the types of documents they provide via RSS feeds – only about 70% of bankruptcy courts and 50% of district courts provide full feeds. The effort urging courts to fully enable RSS feeds has many advocates and would have a significant positive impact for legal researchers in all sectors.

Subjects: Court Resources, Courts & Technology, Freedom of Information, Government Resources, Legal Technology, Public Records, RSS Newsfeeds, United States Law

Book Review: A Short And Happy Guide To Advanced Legal Research

Nicole L. Black’s review highlights this book’s breadth of coverage and its format, information about a variety of free online tools, including public records databases, newsletters, and encyclopedias, and case law and statutes, fee-based legal research tools, as well as traditional case law and statutory research tools, and cutting edge AI-based legal research and data analytics software.

Subjects: AI, Book Reviews, Legal Research, LEXIS, Online Legal Research Services, Reference Resources, Westlaw

Hands On with Lexis+, New Premium Research Service from LexisNexis

Robert Ambrogi has authored the definitive review of Lexis+. His precise and expert review of the site, accompanied by relevant screen shots, is a must read guide for legal researchers as they consider whether to transition to this new platform. Ambrogi states: “The basic experience of conducting legal research in Lexis+ is not all that different from Lexis Advance. But the added features that I described above — Search Tree, Missing and Must Include, Search Term Maps, and Ravel View — are valuable in that they give researchers more control over their searches and results without requiring them to be power researchers.”

Subjects: KM, Legal Research, LEXIS

COVID-19, Copyright, and Library Superpowers Part II

If you work in any of the higher ed institutions that are preparing to move online – maybe your copyright world has exploded in a range of questions on fair use, e-reserves, online access, scanning, digitization, and more! Many in the library community are working towards the best solution for students, faculty, staff, and patrons in this time of crisis. To help you navigate this process, lawyer, librarian, copyright academic Kyle K. Courtney’s Two Part article offers a wealth of guidance on the legal tools libraries have for copyright as “stewards of access” in our communities. [See Part 1]

Subjects: Copyright, Document Delivery, Education, Health, KM, Law Librarians, Legal Education, Legislative, Licensing, Reference Resources, United States Law