Year archives: 2010

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

Open Source Tools for Tutorials

Nicole C. Engard continues her series on best practices for libraries to leverage open source tools with a guide on publishing tutorials for using library resources. Rather than creating a printed pathfinder, she suggests creating a video tutorial instead, as the learning experience is often more engaging and has deeper impact when users see something done versus reading about it.

Subjects: Continuing Legal Education, Distance Learning, Legal Marketing, Presentation Skills, Virtual Library, Web-Based Training

Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Financial Protection Act: A Brief Legislative History with Links, Reports and Summaries

The “craft” of legislative history construction is practiced with unique and outstanding expertise by law librarian Rick McKinney. This history is designed in a streamlined fashion so as to allow users to more easily check when provisions in the law got into bill and then check for related remarks concerning those provisions. It also has links to earlier legislation related to different titles of the Act, to the Administration’s proposed legislation in 2009, to related CRS reports, and to various summaries and commentaries of the law on the Web.

Subjects: Congress, Features, Government Resources, Law Librarians, Legal Research, Legislative

Actual Innocence and Freestanding Claims for Relief

Ken Strutin has written extensively for LLRX.com on criminal law issues. He argues that false confessions, bad eyewitness identifications, and faulty forensics, among other problems, have shown that seemingly iron clad adjudications can reach the wrong result. A ‘guilty’ verdict only indicates that the government has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed each and every element of the crime, and not that the defendant actually committed the crime. A freestanding claim of actual innocence is a potentially powerful tool to assail a verdict that points to the wrong person. Still, courts have made only small gains in recognizing actual innocence generally as a basis for contesting a wrongful conviction. This article collects selected scholarship on “actual innocence” and litigating post-conviction claims that go beyond the procedural metrics of the trial process.

Subjects: Criminal Law, Features, Legal Research

The FDsys: the new GPO Access

“GPO Access will be going away soon as the U.S. Government Printing Office rolls out the Federal Digital System (FDsys), an advanced digital system that will enable GPO to manage Government information from all three branches of the U.S. Government. Learn about the new system and its features, what content is available through it, and search strategies. Not only is FDsys a powerful tool for the public to access online, authoritative Federal information, but it also serves as a preservation repository for the content and a content management system for Federal agencies.”

Subjects: Government Resources

FOIA Facts: High Profile FOIA Requests

Scott A. Hodes comments on recent reports that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) added a new layer of scrutiny for FOIA requests that came from what it considered high profile groups (basically political non-profits and media organizations). The argument is that this review did or could potentially deny these requesters material they should receive and these denials (or potential denials) were only for political purposes.

Subjects: FOIA Facts

Using the Kindle in Library Settings – A Survey, Updated

Recently Montrese Hamilton wrote a summary of responses to her survey of three Special Libraries Association discussion lists about using the Kindle in library settings. The questions were well-received and more replies arrived after her wrap-up was published so she returns with the new comments plus insights gathered from her own Kindle-lending experiment.

Subjects: Features

The Way Forward: Part 3

Montrese Hamilton discusses tools and techniques available via the Internet that provide value, variety and substance in the areas of free professional development opportunities.

Subjects: Features

The Way Forward: Part 2

While many of her colleagues packed their bags for the SLA 2010 Annual Conference in New Orleans last June, Montrese Hamilton traded her spot in the Big Easy for login credentials to the virtual conference offerings. Here she discusses the presentation, Negotiating Up.

Subjects: Communication Skills, Features

The Way Forward

Economic conditions are still in flux and the employment outlook defies easy forecasting. Consequently, moving up Maslow’s hierarchy toward greater job satisfaction may not include changing employers. To learn more about how information professionals can deepen contentment in-place, Montrese Hamilton contacted well-known career coach Marshall Brown for insight. See also The Way Forward: Part 2 and The Way Forward: Part 3.

Subjects: Communication Skills, Job Hunting

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