In celebration of 125 years, the Georgetown Law Library looks to the future with a symposium of the academic, advocacy, government, and library communities on Wednesday, January 30 at Georgetown Law.

“Big data” is a term perhaps too narrow for the topic: The size of data sets is not the key to big data issues. Rather, it’s the changes in society that are growing along with our ability to discover meaning by connecting points of information electronically, across numerous, vast, and often unrelated stores of data.

This conference will examine the public good and collective harms associated with the large-scale aggregation of information from public and private sources. During the course of the day, panelists will also discuss how scholars, researchers, and information professionals use very large or complex data sets to distill meaning and develop public policy.

Registration is free and open to all. A complimentary lunch will be provided for registered attendees, however space is limited. Register now to reserve your place and view additional information at www.law.georgetown.edu/library/about/125/symposium.

A new "Big Data" resource of tax material has recently been made available. On October 30, Public.Resource.Org made available 10 years' worth -- nearly 6.5 million -- Exempt Organization Form 990 returns filed by exempt organizations and private foundations as well as unrelated business income (UBIT) returns filed by these organizations. The data set contains returns from January 2002 through September 2012, and will be updated monthly.

 

At this time, these returns are only available in pdf format, but Public.Resource.Org plan to extract the underlying data from these returns to make them more amenable for data analysis.

 

These records and more information about the data set are available at https://bulk.resource.org/irs.gov/eo/readme.html.

 

 

 

 

The Georgetown Law Library has launched a new data archiving service, the Georgetown Law Dataverse, to support the empirical research of Law Center faculty members, academic centers and institutes, and legal journals.

"Georgetown Law faculty are increasingly publishing scholarship with empirical data components," said Law Library Director and Professor of Law Michelle Wu. "This trend is reflected in the broader legal academy as well. As a result, free, open and reliable access to source data has become critical to the development of legal scholarship. With an eye towards facilitating such scholarship, the Georgetown Law Library is offering this innovative service to support the preservation and sharing of digital datasets."

The Georgetown Law Dataverse is a repository of digital datasets, collections of statistical information or other related data used in empirical scholarship. This service will allow authors to permanently preserve and publically release data that they have collected. Authors who continue to update their work after publication can upload revised data as it becomes available.

More information about the Dataverse is available here: http://www.ll.georgetown.edu/collections/dataverse.cfm.

This Veterans Day, we might reflect upon the progress made possible through the sacrifice of military servicemembers, and the tragedy, triumph, and trials of war. In legal history, the tribunals for war crimes following World War II have had a profound impact on our domestic and international jurisprudence and scholarship, and there are a growing number of online resources to help us research these important materials.

Transcripts and associated documents of the Nuremberg Trials (officially the International Military Tribunal for Germany) have been digitized, organized, and made available for free on the Web through several ongoing initiatives, including Yale’s Avalon Project, the Nuremberg Trials Project at Harvard Law, and the Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection at the Cornell Law Library. The National Archives has also converted many of their microform documents on WWII crimes and trials to PDF.

Although no comparably extensive online compilation yet exists for the Tokyo Trials (International Military Tribunal for The Far East), some of the most important and interesting documents are available on iBiblio.org through the HyperWar Foundation (the Tribunal’s judgment) and the Harry S. Truman Library website (official correspondence and photos). For now, full transcripts of the Tokyo Trials are only available in print, here at Georgetown in the Wolff Library.

The Law Library also offers a good selection of relevant print and electronic resources; try an Encore keyword search to see our cataloged holdings on the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials.

The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive has released the results of its third annual analysis of “link rot” among the original URLs for law- and policy-related materials published to the Web and archived though the Chesapeake Project.

The 2010 analysis reveals that nearly 28 percent of the online publications archived between March 2007 and March 2008 have now disappeared from their original locations on the Web but, due to the project’s preservation efforts, remain accessible via permanent archive URLs. This sample of online publications was first analyzed in 2008 and showed link rot to be present in 8.3 percent of the publications’ original URLs. One year later, in 2009, the same sample showed an increase in link rot to 14.3 percent.

During the three years that the URLs were studied, link rot increased from about one in every 12 archived titles in 2008, to one in every seven titles in 2009, and finally to about one in every 3.5 titles in 2010. These findings demonstrate a dramatic increase in link rot among archived Web content over time.

The analysis also explores the prevalence of link rot among top-level domains, showing content at state-government URLs (.state.__.us) to be at a significant risk for link rot, compared to resources posted to government (.gov) and organization (.org) Web sites.

A detailed summary of the study is available at http://legalinfoarchive.org/.

The Chesapeake Project was launched in 2007 by the Georgetown University Law Library and the State Law Libraries of Maryland and Virginia as a collaborative digital archive for the preservation of important Web-published legal materials, which often disappear as online content is reorganized or deleted over time.

Having successfully completed its two-year pilot phase in 2009, the Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive is expanding. A new law library has recently joined the Chesapeake Project, and the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) in March 2010 announced the formation of its Legal Information Archive, a collaborative digital preservation program for the law library community modeled after the Chesapeake Project. All LIPA-member libraries are invited to participate in the Legal Information Archive. 

For more information, visit the LIPA Web site at www.aallnet.org/committee/lipa or the Chesapeake Project at www.legalinfoarchive.org.

Fans of the legislative process have a new favorite Web site to frequent. C-SPAN has made digital copies of every program it has broadcast since 1987 available online. This video collection, totaling more than 160,000 hours, is searchable and is indexed by subject, person name, congressional committee, and several other fields. In addition to its coverage of Congressional activity, C-SPAN also broadcasts original programs, such as Booknotes, and America and the Courts. These programs are included as well, and the entire collection is available at no cost for education, research, review or home viewing purposes.

Amazon just announced a large-format version of their electronic book reader, called the Kindle DX, which you can see in action at engadget. The product doesn't launch until this summer, but it could be in the hands of many university students for a pilot coming to five schools this fall. Library Journal reports that these schools are: Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Princeton, Reed College and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.  As of yet, there are no law schools who will try this out.  Because Kindle books are typically locked into a single device, this could mean the disappearance of a used book market.  That said, it means fewer dead trees and possibly more publishing options for content producers.  In law schools, where much of the raw source material is in the public domain, casebooks and case compilations could be done very economically, if not for free.

An interesting feature of the new device is that it supports native PDF documents, instead of forcing people to pay to convert them to a proprietary Kindle format. This means you could get class notes or reading materials in PDF format and read them directly.  It's not clear if this would support image-based formats like scanned law reviews from Hein Online or published reporter cases from Westlaw.  If so, this could be a boon for students willing to pay almost $500 for the device.

In the past, there has been some debate over whether libraries can lend Kindle readers to their users. One problem with having a Kindle in a library is that book purchasing is tied directly to the account on the device.  A library owning one to lend would have to disable purchasing options. Books purchased for the Kindle cannot be transferred to another device.

In advance of the latest Kindle announcement, the New York Times ran a story about large format e-book readers, exploring questions of whether these could save daily newspapers.  Media conglomerate Hearst Corporation is rumored to be launching a wireless e-book reader. They publish everything from Harper's Bazaar to Good Housekeeping to Popular Mechanics.  It will be exciting to see how electronic books develop over time.  They look like a possible life preserver for print media. Perhaps this Fall we'll see how they fare in the education sector.

Update: Additional coverage, including law school topics, is found here:

• Who will get the first e-book into the law school classroom?
• Case Western Reserve University students will use textbooks on Kindle electronic reader