Elaine Billingslea Dockens and Karen Krupka, each of whom has over 20 years of law librarian experience, discuss the field of law librarianship, and key issues and factors that new law librarians are likely to encounter as they enter this unique, and still vital profession.
Conrad J. Jacoby provides an overview of the New York LegalTech show and conference, long one of the preeminent opportunities to catch a glimpse of the future of legal technology. Conrad highlights how the conference provides a surprisingly accurate snapshot of litigation support, electronic discovery, and even the health of the legal industry as a whole.
This guide by Marcus P. Zillman showcases the latest world wide web resources for discovering new knowledge on and understanding about developments with regard to the New Economy. The rapid changes in government transparency policies have resulted in the release of large volumes of data pertinent to researchers that public, advocacy and corporate entities are publishing to the web.
This is Nicole L. Black’s primer for the legal profession on an emerging technology which is defined as a “type of computing that is comparable to grid computing, [and] relies on sharing computing resources rather than having local servers or personal devices to handle applications. The goal of cloud computing is to apply traditional supercomputing power (normally used by military and research facilities) to perform tens of trillions of computations per second.”
Nicole L. Black highlights how our net activities are carefully monitored and meticulously tracked by some of the biggest players, including Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook. Our individual online footprints, from the Web sites we visit, the items we purchase, the people with whom we communicate, to the locations where we access the Internet, are extremely valuable commodities that are increasingly sought after.
With the recent announcement that UK law firm Eversheds will launch its own outsourcing business, Ron Friedmann addresses the question of what exactly is law firm outsourcing, and how does it differ from where lawyers are located.
Sarah Rhodes discusses the monumental challenge of preserving our digital heritage. She argues that law libraries specifically have a critically important role to play in this undertaking as access to legal and law-related information is a core underpinning of our democratic society. Our current digital preservation strategies and systems are imperfect but tremendous strides have been made over the past decade to stave off the dreaded digital dark age, and libraries today have a number of viable tools, services, and best practices at our disposal for the preservation of digital content.
Courtney Minick and David Tsai provide an overview of the new features Google Scholar provides for the legal research market.
Carol A. Watson discusses how effective project management requires considerable thought and preparation before actually initiating the work of the project. Although many of us are eager to jump into the tasks related to a project, it is important to remember that careful planning will provide the groundwork for a successful project outcome. Carol reminds us, “Remember, it takes time to save time,” and she will be writing on this overall topic in forthcoming issues of LLRX.com
On Friday, November 13, 2009, Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers filed an Amended Settlement Agreement (ASA) in the copyright infringement litigation concerning the Google Library Project. The amendments proposed by the parties are designed to address objections made by the U.S. Department of Justice and copyright holders to the original proposed settlement agreement. This paper by Jonathan Band describes the ASA’s major changes, with emphasis on those changes relevant to libraries.