April 24, 2013, marked the 150^th anniversary of the publication of the Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field, a U.S. government document also known as the “Lieber Code”. Francis Lieber of the War Department, Adjutant General’s Office, prepared the Code at the request of President Abraham Lincoln. The President issued the Code on April 24, 1863, as General Orders, No. 100. Even after a century and a half, this document continues to be relevant today. Justice O’Connor cited it in the plurality opinion in Hamdi et al. v. Rumsfeld, 542 . . . [more]

There are a number of articles about how libraries can be part of law firm-wide Knowledge Management projects and initiatives. Ted Tjaden has written a particularly good article on the subject: “The Evolution of Law-Related Knowledge Management in North America – Opportunities for Law Librarians”. However there is very little literature out there on how law libraries can use knowledge management processes within the library.

Private law libraries tend to be small, so they may not feel the need to have a formal KM program. That said, most law libraries are already practicing some sort of informal KM, . . . [more]

The lack of uptake for citation management software programs, such as Zotero, EndNote, and RefWorks, by even tech savvy legal practitioners and scholars has puzzled me for some time. The absence of these programs or similar solutions is particularly surprising when one considers the large number of vendor supplied and internally customized labour saving solutions law firms implement in the interest of repeatedly saving small amounts of time and the institution wide licences many universities have implemented to encourage their use. As I started exploring the reasons for this absence, I found that there are many issues . . . [more]

In my previous article I discussed the different ways in which Change can affect us – and whether it is welcomed or it is being endured has a great deal to do with that. We know Change is inevitable and constant, so our best strategy is to prepare ourselves, in body and mind, to run the marathon that it presents.

Whether you’re running with Change or away from it, it’s going to be a long haul. An SLA article from 2002, “Coping with Change in the Workplace,”[1] sets out a few basic strategies to make the constant transitioning a little . . . [more]

I started off this column planning to write about free resources available from OUP. But then I started to think about the other on-line publishers, who also provide some limited content to non subscribers, and thought that this is something to be identified and shared in more detail. In a world where there is a rush to the monetization of knowledge, where we have a divide between the digital haves and have-nots , it is good to see that some of this knowledge is freely shared. For those with access to subscription resources, in law firms and universities, it’s sometimes . . . [more]

On May 1^st, a Texas law student uploaded the specs for 3D printing of a single-shot pistol to the web – specs that were downloaded over 100,000 times before the U.S. State Department asked that he remove them from his site. That same day, May 9^th, U.S. President Barack Obama issued an executive order “Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information.”

The juxtaposition highlights how open data efforts are generally considered contributions to freedom of information and the advance of human liberty, but occasionally thought of as dangerous incursions into . . . [more]

One of the conferences I go to for a quick and painless technology update is Computers in Libraries (CIL) held in Washington, DC in the spring. I first came to it in 2000 when a friend of mine loaned me her press pass for the last day of the conference. At one of those sessions I was pleasantly surprised to learn about virtual reference service at Northwestern University Library, only a few miles from where I was working at the time in Chicago. I was hooked and have been to almost every CIL since then. 

After I retired, however, I . . . [more]

Though my column focuses on legal information, in the United States legal education is intimately bound up with the trends in legal information. LEXIS and WESTLAW maintain a stranglehold on the marketplace by heavy investment in law school training. By putting boots on the ground in the form of dedicated training representatives, student advisors and, of course, free access 24/7 to the relevant systems, the big commercial data bases win hearts and minds. New law students are highly energized and very impressionable. What they find upon arrival in law school is, as far as they see it, the way things . . . [more]

A computer trainer I know well tells me that there was much discussion in his company as to whether they should charge for searches that returned no results. After great debate it was concluded that zero hits was a legitimate search result, and, as such, the company should charge for it. I think anyone who carries out research would agree with this: knowing that something has not been considered or talked about is important. The difficulty with this is knowing if zero genuinely is the answer, rather than the result of not using a relevant resource or search term. It’s . . . [more]

This month marks the 42nd anniversary of the publication of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book. For Slaw readers younger than I, Abbie Hoffman was a political and social activist, a leader of the 1960s counterculture and youth revolution movements. With Jerry Rubin and others, he was a founding member of the Yippies (Youth International Party) and one of the defendants in the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial for incitement to riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. (Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie were the Democratic nominees for that year’s presidential race; Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew won the election.) 

Steal . . . [more]

“People like progress, but they hate change.” There are a couple of misconceptions in that statement: Progress is the tangible result of change, you never find one without the other. But more importantly, people regularly confuse dislike with fear. While both are instinctive reflex reactions, overcoming each involves very different strategies. As managers of change, we have to understand that what on the surface appears as “hate” is in reality a fear of the unknown; fear of the future and uncertainty about our ability to secure a place in it.

Those who know me well know I thrive on change. . . . [more]

“Would you pick up a half bottle of beer left on the pavement and drink it?”

This question was put by Rob Cotton, CEO of NCC Group , to a BBC Radio4 presenter when he was discussing the risks of using free wifi hotspots in cafes, etc. Perhaps the image was a bit extreme, but it caught my attention, as intended. He was drawing a picture of the not so pristine world of unsecured free wifi hotspots, and the lure of joining the Cloud wherever you find yourself. The premise is that you should think about what you search, or . . . [more]