Making Lemons into Lemonade: Libraries and the Challenge of the Website Transition

At the beginning of the spring semester, Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law school transitioned to a new website with a more modern look but a much more rigid architecture. As often happens with new website launches, there were obstacles to overcome – 404 errors to fix, a new navigation to learn, resources to update – as well as old website simply not transferring to the new site. In this article Ashley Ahlbrand describes some key issues her team faced and how they were addressed as a Lessons Learned for other groups pursuing the same transition.

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Subjects: Information Management, Internet Resources, Law Library Management, Libraries & Librarians, Library Marketing, Program Planning

Should Colorado court documents be free on public library computers?

Jeff Roberts of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition raises the question of expanding free public access to court documents in Colorado. Specifically, he identifies the only location where a non-lawyer can view and request copies of all civil court documents from ICCES, the Integrated Colorado Courts E-Filing System. This location is the Colorado Supreme Court’s law library in the Ralph L. Carr Judicial Center in downtown Denver. Fees and access to PACER have been the topic of discussion in the legal community for many years. The urgency of this discussion and a resolution that ensures free public access to court filings is critically dependent upon the future of court law libraries.

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Subjects: Court Resources, Courts & Technology, E-Government, Electronic Court Filing, Government Resources, Legal Technology, Online Legal Research Services

Journalism Resources on the Internet 2016

Marcus Zillman’s new comprehensive guide is focused on journalism resources and sites of ongoing value in your process to refine topical and subject matter research and deliver actionable work product. This guide is a value added discovery tool that includes a wide range of reliable, comprehensive and actionable government, academic, corporate, news, training and business resources.

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Subjects: Business Research, Competitive Intelligence, Internet Resources

New Economy Resources 2016

This guide by Marcus Zillman aggregates significant actionable sources for researchers focused on the “new economy,” including current and historical government data, analytics and alerts from Open Source providers, the private sector, and the legislative and regulatory sectors.

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Subjects: Economy, Financial System

IBMs Watson is Now Data Mining TED Talks to Extract New Forms of Knowledge

Alan Rothman’s commentary offers actionable information about a new technology from IBM called Watson that is a powerful tool for researchers whose work engages data mining, knowledge management and competitive intelligence. Rothman attended a recent presentation that demonstrated how Watson is deployed as a search and discovery tool whose object is the huge video archive of TED Talks content.

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Subjects: Business Research, Competitive Intelligence, KM

Evolutions in DNA Forensics

Criminal law expert Ken Strutin’s new article is yet another research tour de force – a collection of recent and notable developments concerning DNA as forensic science, metric of guilt, herald of innocence, and its emerging place in the debate over privacy and surveillance. The increasing use of DNA evidence to support assumptions of an individual’s guilt and less frequently as a tool to prove the innocence of prisoners wrongly convicted, reflects many facets of the changing fabric of the American criminal justice, the role of the Fourth Amendment and the increasing collection of a wide range of biological evidence from crime scenes whose metadata then is searchable within the national DNA database.

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Subjects: Criminal Law, Discovery, Legal Research

Book Review of Inventology: How We Dream Up Things That Change the World

Alan Rothman’s article presents an engaging and enlightening perspective on the elements of serendipity and prodigious talent engaged in the world of inventors and their inventions, as well providing readers with an excellent book review. This new book about inventology spans many decades and is interwoven with historical events that provided impetus to some of the inventors.

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Subjects: Book Reviews
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