CRIV Blog

March is Women’s History Month and the CRIVblog would like to highlight some sources of information related to Women’s History and legal rights for women.  

First up is The National Women’s History Alliance. This group spearheaded the movement to have March declared Women’s History Month and their page has a summary of the process. In addition, the site contains a detailed timeline regarding the history of women gaining rights in the United States. The site provides links to many other useful resources related to women’s history.  

Next is the National Women’s Law Center, per their website they “fight for gender justice.” Their site contains information about the historical legal struggles of women in the United States. NWLC is often involved in litigation that affects the rights of women, so the site provides detailed information about current issues. 

The National Organization for Women is another organization that provides resources and useful information about the current issues related to women’s rights. NOW publishes advisories related to their core issues to help everyone understand those issues in more depth.  

HeinOnline has a specific collection known as Women and the Law. This collection provides resources related to Women’s History and their legal rights. This collection has many primary sources related to historical women’s movements as well as analytical sources on these movements.  The collection also covers information related to the struggle for women’s rights.   

Most of the resources above deal specifically with the history and rights of women in the United States. However, the issues covered in the resources above affect women all over the world. The International Resource Justice Center has a section that summarizes the various issues that affect women worldwide. This resource is found under the heading Women’s Human Rights. The page also connects some primary resources through its summation of the issues.  

By: Emilie Menzel, Jane Bahnson

The advent of ChatGPT has left many faculty members uneasy with allowing student access to the internet while taking law exams and many are considering switching back to in-person timed exams. Considering the in-person administration of state bar exams, a switch back to the traditional methods may be a pedagogically sound choice, regardless of the new text writing programs. But what does this mean for open-book exams, and for the many students who have switched, at the urging of publishers, to e-casebooks?

Publishers offer a varying menu of formatting options for purchasing textbooks. Some students will prefer e-books solely for the convenience of transporting them. This is not insignificant, considering the sheer weight of a typical constitutional law, torts, civil procedure, or contracts casebook. Publishers of 1L casebooks such as Aspen Publishing, Foundation Press, and West Academic actively promote e-book editions of their casebooks, although older editions are often not available electronically. Format options can include connected e-book or connected e-book plus print, often with an extra charge for including the print copy.

For those opting to purchase electronic access only, it is important to understand the type of access being purchased. The digital preservation is another question, as this may limit long-term access. For example, Aspen’s Learning Library offers a collection of digital study aids through an institutional subscription, which can be accessed by students through an application of the same name. However, these files will only stay on a device for 120 days.

There are often limitations when it comes to downloading electronic casebooks, due to restrictions imposed by publishers and by copyright laws. Aspen’s Casebook Connect does not allow downloading by students and only 30% of the book can be printed. However, those books published by Aspen that can be purchased through the VitalSource eReader can be downloaded and accessed offline. CasebookPlus, the West Academic and Foundation Press e-book platform, allows titles to be downloaded, and it also comes with a print copy. If you opt out of the print copy, you can print up to 10 pages at a time. However, a “learning library” accompanying a purchase includes study aids that cannot be downloaded, and access expires after 12 months.

So, what should faculty members consider when assigning casebooks? If an open book exam is contemplated, assigning a book available through a platform that allows downloading and use offline will avoid problems for students who purchase e-books. At a minimum, students should be aware of the issue upfront before they purchase their course textbook so they can choose a format that can be used in an open book exam. If assigning an older casebook with electronic versions that have limited downloading options, consider asking colleagues or former students to loan spare print copies for the open book exam. Alternatively, when selecting a textbook, consider some of the free and low-cost casebooks available on a variety of legal topics, and choose ones that can be used offline or printed out for exam use: https://law.duke.edu/lib/faculty/course-materials/.

In honor of Black History Month the CRIV blog is highlighting some of the collections related to the history of Civil Rights. These collections contain photos, documents and other resources that can help us understand the history of the movement for Civil and Political Rights in the United States.

The National Museum of African American History & Culture (NMAAHC) is part of the Smithsonian Institute and covers the history of African Americans in the United States. The digital collection has many digital objects that cover the Civil Rights Movement. Among these digital objects are photographs, buttons, magazines and a variety of documents related to the Civil Rights Movement. These digital objects are available to reuse and share as part of the Smithsonian Open Access initiative.

The Library of Congress, in association with NMAAHC, conducted a project to collect oral histories from individuals involved in the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights History Project is available through the Library of Congress website and contains the video interviews taken for the project. Transcripts of the interviews are also available.

The Civil Rights Digital Library (CRDL) is a project of the University System of Georgia. This archive gathers links to individual items from Digital Collections all over the United States and provides easy access to those items. The CRDL aims to enhance the understanding of the Civil Rights Movement. The archive includes film of historical news broadcasts, photographs, interviews and other resources related to the Civil Rights Movement. Some of the links include material useful for teaching about the Civil Rights Movement.

The Civil Rights Movement Archive, formerly known as Civil Rights Movement Veterans, contains photos, documents and other materials from those who participated in the civil rights movement. There is a collection of materials straight from activists involved in all parts of the civil rights movement, which includes written documents, oral histories and videos. In addition, the site also hosts a collection of poetry from various well know African American poets and activists.

The author is CRIV member Carol Ottolenghi, Director of Research & Library Services, Ohio Attorney General’s Office

            Going “Off-Label” – using products in new or unexpected ways – can provide needed resources, save your organization money, and demonstrate your Library’s value. This post describes recent off-labeling at the Ohio Attorney General’s Office (OAGO). If your Library uses an information product in an innovative way, please share it in an email to the CRIV Blog Coordinator, Christy Smith  (christy.smith@shu.edu). Your responses may appear in future blog posts or CRIV Sheet articles.

            Legal organizations use scores of electronic products. Many of them have little direct Library application. However, our Library staff stays aware of 1) the tools the OAGO has, and; 2) the activities and needs of the various agency sections.

            This awareness is key to “off-label” success because the OAGO is so large that many sections do not know what the others are doing, except in a general sense. By making it a point to regularly query sections about their needs, Library staff can promote information-product sharing. We can help develop procedures that use existing tools in new ways. For example, in 2021, we tested and demonstrated how two of our litigation-support tools could also help our Law Enforcement agents organize cold case files. This:

• Increased OAGO efficiency
• Spread the product costs across additional sections
• Showed the OAGO as an effective steward of public money, which made Administration happy
• Demonstrated Library value to Administration, the new users, and Finance.

            I emphasize this last point because it is no longer enough for Libraries to do good work. If Libraries are to thrive within our organizations, we must be seen doing good work.

            Our most recent off-labeling adventure involves that quintessential Library product: the catalog. This project is currently underway and will be fully operational early in 2023. It began because the OAGO is moving to a new case management system. Unlike our previous system, the new system doesn’t play nicely with several existing programs. In addition, the new system “silos” information so that each section can see only its own documents.

            While this system may work beautifully for case management, it severely limited access to the Office’s section-based collections of institutional knowledge. It also prohibited the sections from searching our “PDF Library” – our 100,216 digital documents version of the old-school “vertical file.” It created, in short, a knowledge management (KM) problem.

            Great angst ensued when this was recognized.

            Necessity is the mother of innovation, as well as invention. After Librarian-worthy cursing and gnashing of teeth, we realized that a catalog upgrade might resolve some of the agency’s information-access problems. Obviously, catalogs are KM products. But they are not marketed as such. To convince our agency’s powers-that-be that this was a viable answer that deserved funding, we worked with our current catalog vendor to explore product aspects that fit specific OAGO KM needs. Vendors are (very) eager to help you develop new uses for their products, so it’s vital to keep them on task. The grid below is a simplified version of the one we used to keep our discussions focused on the OAGO’s needs, rather than vendor selling points.

            Our Library has two full-time, and one part-time, Librarians. That made vendor assistance in this project’s implementation the key to its success. We emphasized that from the beginning, and the company has proved a worthy partner. Library staff still has a lot of work ahead. But, it’s traditional Librarian work – collecting, organizing, disseminating – work that demonstrates the Library’s value to the OAGO.

This sort of Library-vendor collaboration isn’t unique, or even unusual. Please send your experiences to the CRIV Blog Coordinator, Christy Smith (christy.smith@shu.edu).

Carol Ottolenghi is Director of Research & Library Services at the OAGO, and the author of Intentional Marketing: A Practical Guide for Librarians, published by Rowman & Littlefield.

CRIV Vendor Liaison – Wolters Kluwer Semi-Annual Call

11/29/2022

Attending:       Jenna Ellis, Wolters Kluwer Liaison

                        Vani Ungapen, AALL Executive Director

                        Michelle Hook Dewey, AALL-CRIV Board Liaison

                        Jane Bahnson, AALL CRIV Wolters Kluwer Board Liaison

The meeting commenced at 3:00 pm. Jane has taken over as the new AALL CRIV Wolters Kluwer Board Liaison; all others are continuing on and we are looking forward to a productive year.

Updates from Wolters Kluwer

Jenna Ellis told us of new enhancements to VitalLaw.

One enhancement is the addition of Abortion Restrictions Jurisdictional Compare Smart Chart to the “Smart Chart” tool, which is a multi-jurisdictional comparison survey that includes laws, regulations, executive orders, and seminal cases. This new topic compares abortion rights and restrictions by topic, such as time and  insurance coverage restrictions, and across multiple jurisdictions.  Links provide full access to the underlying documents  and the chart format can be customized. This new smart chart is available to most subscriptions that include the related underlying publications.  

Another enhancement involves the expansion of research features available to everyone for the statutes and regulations database, which includes primary statutory and regulatory law at both the state and federal level. The search template now offers search by “document type” in addition to the jurisdiction, citation, and keyword options. There is also a “curated topic” option that will retrieve cross-jurisdictional results on a specific topic through a pre-designed Boolean search. For example, for the curated topic “cannabis,” there are six pre-designed searches that retrieve relevant laws and regulations on discrete subtopics. One such subtopic, “Medical Marijuana Cultivator Requirements” runs the search “cannabis w/5 medical AND cultivat*” and retrieves 1,021 cross-jurisdictional results.

Another feature, Next Generation Laws and Regulations, alerts users to updates or pending updates in laws and regulations. Researchers can use pre-search filters, curated topics, “show all future versions,” and other functions.  An orange flag identifies those laws under revision, and a redlining toggle in the upper right of the screen allows the reader to see what the changes are. New language is indicated in green type, while deleted language is shown in red type. These changes will remain for a few weeks after the changes take effect. There is no retained archive of older versions of the laws after this period has run.

Wolters Kluwer representatives can also provide training on the use of its products, including training for law schools in conjunction with upper level courses on topics such as tax and arbitration. Contact links are available on the VitalLaw home page.

Requests for Assistance

No formal requests for assistance were submitted, but one issue of concern was raised to a CRIV member regarding the receipt by individuals of Wolters Kluwer communications they no longer wish to receive. Wolters Kluwer acknowledges some who have opted out of communications may be on different lists and is taking steps to make sure the lists are updated.

Updates from AALL

The 2023 AALL conference will take place from July 15-18 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. The topic for the vendor round table has not yet been determined, but all expressed a preference for an in-person meeting if possible. The format will be decided when the date gets closer and will be influenced by health and environmental concerns as they exist at the time of the conference.

The meeting adjourned at 3:30.

With more than 1000 library participants nationwide, the Federal Depository Library Program has long served both as a means for the public to access materials published or authored by the federal government and for ensuring the preservation of current and historical government information.  Libraries that participate in the Program include academic, judicial, and government law libraries, college and university libraries, public libraries, and historical societies; member libraries have historically received print and /or microform copies of selected government documents at no charge and, in more recent times, digital access to some government publications as well.  In late 2021, the FDLP notified libraries that, beginning in 2022, distribution of documents in microform formats would be phased out.

Since 2014, libraries new to the FDLP have had the option of selecting only those documents that are available in digital formats (so, they’re all-digital FDLP participants!).  Having seen how the pandemic affected access and use of government information, and recognizing the needs of more and more libraries to move to nearly all-digital collections, the FDLP formed a Task Force on a Digital Federal Depository Library Program in early 2022.  This past September, the Task Force released its draft report for public comment. 

The Task Force was charged with determining “whether an all-digital FDLP is possible, and if so, [defining] the scope of an all-digital depository program and [making] recommendations as to how to implement and operate such a program” (Draft Report for Public Comment).  Data that lend context to the Report included the facts that (i) 25% of current FDLP participants already select only digital or nearly only digital documents; (ii) an additional 17% of federal depository libraries intend to transition to a truly all-digital collection; and (iii) 97% of new federal government documents published since 2009 are in digital formats.

The work of the Task Force was apportioned among six working groups charged with considering, respectively, the impact of an all-digital FDLP on access; the impact on depository libraries; the impact on federal agencies; the impact GPO, library services, and content management; Title 44 and legislative and policy issues; and implementation and strategic framework necessary to support a transition.  The first thing to note is that the Task Force’s use of the term “all-digital” does not imply that the FDLP would be exclusively digital.  Rather, the Task Force acknowledged that “alternative formats of both current and historical information would continue to be available” – for how long and which documents are included are yet to be determined (Draft Report for Public Comment). 

After outlining both the benefits of an all-digital program (e.g., improved access and metadata; flexibility for participating libraries) and the risks of not going all-digital (e.g., lack of standardization among agencies and lack of a systematic approach to collection and curation, let alone missed opportunities), the Report noted some corresponding barriers to and disadvantages of the all-digital approach (e.g., digital disparity; accessibility issues; challenges associated with particular types of government publications; authentication and version control; user privacy).

In the end, the consensus of the six working groups was that FDLP members would benefit from an all-digital approach and that the FDLP should indeed go all-digital.  Some working groups commented on the underlying laws and regulations that would affect or in fact inhibit the transition to an all-digital program and others described the infrastructure that would be necessary to develop and maintain an all-digital approach.  The recommendations in the Report focus on (i) ensuring cost-free access to government information; (ii) protecting the privacy of users of an all-digital depository library system; (iii) determining which documents should continue to be distributed in print and for how long; (iv) developing both standards to ensure authenticity and version control and best practices for digital preservation; (v) allowing different levels of participation among libraries; (vi) creating training to enable participating libraries to locate digital materials and curate digital collections; (vii)  collaborating with agencies, libraries, and others to ensure access to technologies that support the use of an all-digital FDLP; and (viii) considering new bibliographic resources and support for FDLP libraries. 

As the Report states, “[t]he move to an all-digital FDLP is not revolutionary, but rather in many ways, evolutionary and would result in the formalization of a process long-underway as increasing amounts of U.S. Government information are born digital.”  That said, there is much work to be done in reliably standardizing the creation and collection of authoritative government information.  But the fact that the FDLP is moving in the right direction – with thoughtfulness and a pretty comprehensive approach – is nothing but good news both for libraries that participate in the program and those who might want to do so in the future (and, really, for all of our patrons as well!).

Sources:

Draft Report for Public Comment, Task Force on a Digital Federal Depository Library Program, September 14, 2022.

Association of Research Libraries Statement on Digital FDLP Task Force Draft Report, October 31, 2022

Last week, Westlaw invited us to test drive Westlaw Precision a few months before the scheduled January general rollout. We are grateful for the head’s up. No instructor wants to be simultaneously learning how to use a research platform while teaching students how to use it. But it does once again present the problem of how to keep our students abreast of new technology while making sure they understand the role these products play in legal research, and this can be particularly tricky for students struggling with the nuances of jurisdiction and precedent and trying to remember what “F. Supp.” means. Do we take time out of our already material-dense classes to introduce these products to brand new researchers? If so, what materials do we omit?

In the March/April 2021 issue of AALL Spectrum, Mary Ann Neary and Sherry Xin Chen published a terrific article on introducing brief analysis tools to students, offering suggestions for how they might be introduced using exercises that illustrate the limitations inherent in the technology and their potential usefulness. Since that article was published, at least one of these products has disappeared (EVA, an ambitious open access product by now defunct Ross Intelligence), and others we don’t hear about much. By most accounts, these analyzers are most useful as a “self check” after the underlying research has been done and the work product is finished. They do not replace fundamental research tasks, but add a layer of review. This seems right, and if time and money permit, probably helpful. But do these belong in the 1L curriculum, and if so, how much time do we give?

With Westlaw Precision, we have yet another tool, and all signs indicate that when it is rolled out, it will be given center stage. We understand some law firms already have it. Although the topics covered so far don’t include the standard 1L curriculum, they do cover potential 1L appellate brief topics. I took it for a spin using an old topic, and while I have so far been unable to produce helpful search results, it was . . . fun. And now, there is yet another analytical product being rolled out, a Wolters Kluwer Securities Enforcement Analyzer. Many of our students are interested in working in the financial sector. Should this also be part of our instructional menu of analyzers?

As Neary and Chen correctly point out, our students will be subject to the duty of technology competence, and as research instructors we are on the front lines in helping students understand and use these tools. When and how to introduce which tools remain open questions. As research platforms become increasingly complex, we need to be nimble with our curriculum, but doing this without overwhelming our students is an ongoing challenge.

Litigation that began back in 2016 focusing on the amount and use of PACER fees collected by the federal judiciary settled last week (the settlement still needs to be approved by a federal judge).  The class action, filed in the federal district court for the District of Columbia, claimed that PACER fees were excessive and were used, in part, for unauthorized purposes (e.g., technology improvements for the federal courts).  Thanks to the settlement, PACER users will receive a refund of up to $350 of PACER fees paid from April 2010 to May 2018.  For those who incurred more than $350 in fees during that time, additional funds may be distributed after the initial refunds (of up to $350) have been made.  The settlement applies only to payments made in the past and does not affect current or future PACER fees. 

That said, apart from the litigation (but likely encouraged by it), the judiciary has eliminated some PACER fees since the lawsuit was filed and proposed legislation winding its way through Congress would make PACER cost-free.  That would mean that the judiciary would lose about $150 million in annual fees; reports have suggested that it costs around $64 million to update and maintain PACER annually. 

The following sources provide more information on the litigation and the settlement . . . and I am sure that the court filings are all available . . . . on PACER . . . .

Bloomberg

Law.com

Politico

Reuters

Washington Post