Hardcovers and Internet Archive Updates

So, Target has lowered it's price on hardcovers, following Wal-Mart and K-Mart's lead. The New York Times points out that this might be a bad thing for bookstores, which can't compete with large chains selling books at a loss. But the reaction of readers throughout the blogosphere? My general impression is "Does this mean they'll stop publishing hardcovers? I hope so!" Does anyone like hard-cover fiction? It doesn't fit in your purse, you can't read it in bed, I rarely buy the kind of book you'd want to have in hardcover on your shelf for years into the future. I read trash when I'm not reading for work. And I read series trash, but don't want to spend $20 for the new Harry Dresden novel, let alone the new Amanda Quick.

At any rate, this got me thinking about bindings on legal books, and the librarians who loathe them. I went to an event at CEB once (a California publisher) where a vendor employee mentioned that public librarians dislike looseleafs because their patrons come in and take out pages to photocopy and then don't replace them, leading to a rash of missing pages. I hate soft-covers because they fall over on the shelf more, and get that horrible page-cramp that makes me crazy. I'm not happy about having to pay a filer to deal with the loose-leaf book updates, either, but I'm reference so I don't have to worry about that too much (and I love our filer herself. She makes my library look beautiful). At any rate, if I were the god of legal publishing (aka Wexis) I'd issue everything possible as a hardcover. There doesn't seem to be a huge price difference between the different formats, possibly because they're price-gouging so badly already?
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In other news, I've started a column on the firm intranet for the library, and may repost my innocuous column that contains no firm news on this blog. That column's office title is "Fun News from the Library" but I think of it as my "Libraries are Awesome" column. Here's the latest:

Resources from the Internet Archive:
The Internet Archive has been in the news a lot lately. First, it's founder Brewster Kahle was named one of Utne Reader's 50 Visionaries who are Changing our World. The Internet Archive has launched Bookserver, a webserver whose goal is to make not only information on books available to the public, but to make the books themselves available in open-format, so you can read them on any device (unlike the Kindle or other proprietary devices, that only allow you to buy books from one vendor). This article will give you an idea of how impressive Bookserver will be once they shake the bugs out.
If you go to the Internet Archive's home page, you'll see that they're already making a wealth of information available to the public for free, including books, audio, live music recordings, and moving images.
For an example, click this link to the catalog record for "Alice's Adventures Underground: Being a Facsimile of the Original Ms. Book Afterwards Developed into 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'" Once on that page, you can clink on the http or pdf links on the left-hand side of the screen to access the full text of this manuscript from 1886. The Internet Archive has a variety of media available for free download, including many audio files. Check out this episode of Old Time Radio Program, The Danny Kaye Show. They also have a live music collection, including a large collection of live recordings of the Grateful Dead. Their moving image collection is not very extensive, due to very few being in the public domain. It includes mostly content submitted by users. The same is true of their Software collection.

I've added a feed from my google reader account to this blog, which I am super excited about because I love google reader.

I was thinking earlier today about how so many bookstores have gone out of business in the bay area, especially independants, and how I'd love to open a used book store specializing in used sci-fi, fantasy, romance, legal biographies, and books about war in the Embarcadero Malls. I'd have lunchtime buyers from everyone in the local office buildings who reads on BART.

Honestly, if you've had the (arguable) pleasure of talking to me in person lately, I've probably talked about how I think that the local independant bookstores are going out of business because they're ignoring popular fiction, especially romance (which, hello, is 50% of books sold in the USA! talk about shooting yourself in the foot). A store that sells books people actually want to read on the train would probably do great in this area. Sadly, the money and time to open this store? I do not have them. Ditto the business know-how. But if you're reading this, you should!

I should dust this blog off more often!

Just stopping in (after over a year) to say that LibraryThing's legal collection has expanded! Blog post on that: http://www.librarything.com/blog/2008/01/lawlibrarything.php

I love LibraryThing, it's addictive. It also makes me want to run out and buy scads more books. Which can't be good for my budget, but I can't bring myself to care.

For Future Reference:

If I ever decide to do an article or paper on diversity in law firms, I'll be glad I saved these citations. If any of you have diversity committees, you might be interested in pulling these. Also, the ABA report "Visible Invisibility: Women of Color in Law Firms" is very revealing - not only about the (depressingly bad) support and training minorities get in law firms, but also because it lays out a very clear picture of where the power lies in law firms, and why.

The citation information is courtesy of LexisNexis.

Copyright 2006 Gale Group, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
ASAP
Copyright 2006 Cox, Matthews & Associates
Diverse Issues in Higher Education
November 30, 2006
SECTION: Pg. 24(5) Vol. 23 No. 21
ACC-NO: 155870612
LENGTH: 2444 words
HEADLINE: Getting to the truth: legal scholars struggle to understand the impediments to minority success in large law firms;
Cover story
BYLINE: Roach, Ronald

Copyright 2007 Law Bulletin Publishing Company
All Rights Reserved
Chicago Lawyer
January 2007
SECTION: Pg. 20008
LENGTH: 3504 words
HEADLINE: Generation Y: Group holds different goals for law career
BYLINE: OLIVIA CLARKE

Copyright 2007 LRP Publications
All Rights Reserved
Disability Compliance Bulletin
January 18, 2007
SECTION: Vol. 33 No. 9
LENGTH: 661 words
HEADLINE: ABA pushes hiring of lawyers with disabilities

Copyright 2007 Law Bulletin Publishing Company
All Rights Reserved
Chicago Lawyer
February 2007
SECTION: Pg. 10008
LENGTH: 4516 words
HEADLINE: Women and Minorities: The Retention Challenge for Law Firms
BYLINE: BOB YATES

Search Engines!

I just learned about some interesting new search engines, and I'm listing them here, so I don't forget about them:

By Prof. Judy Weedman, a site that does have sound. A talking librarian!
www.missdewey.com

This is a neat combination of search engine and directory search:
http://www.kartoo.com/

Where do you file those things in Canada, anyway?

This morning I spend a good long time trying to find a corporate record for a company in Quebec. I had no idea where the equivilant of a US Secretary of State's Corporate Records online search would be. I wasn't even sure what level of government filed those things. I finally found this: https://ssl.req.gouv.qc.ca/slc0130_eng.html which I think gave me what I needed, but I came awfully close to emailing Connie with questions.

Also, I never though my highschool French would come in so handy- it seems all Quebec's official docucuments are in French, and I could actually read them. Shocking!

Sometimes I'm not sure if I'm very dense or very clever...

I just looked up the definition of a term in the IRS regulations of a word used in the IRS statutes, and it seems that the decemal numbering of section 1 of title 26 of the CFR tracks the numbering of title 26 of the US Code. Do other regulations do that, or is it just the IRS? I've only noticed the corrolation between 26 CFR and 26 USC. Am I just not noticing this in other sections?

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

The best interlibrary loan request I've ever gotten:

Good morning,

I have been asked to find and borrow the following title, and surprise surprise I can't find it in any of the biblio databases:

The Online Adult Entertainment Webmaster Legal Resource: The Laws that Every Webmaster Should Know, by Frederick S. Lane III, Gregory A. Piccionelli, Version 2.0, 2004.
I know it's a long shot, but does anyone have a copy of this that we can borrow? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Steve at HR

I looked for it on Amazon (thinking it would hilarious to get my boss to get us a copy) and couldn't find it. How could such an obviously useful book go out of print?

A pet peeve of mine:

When a new publisher takes over a title, and makes you buy the whole thing again, instead of just updating what's already there. This just happened with the San Francisco Municipal Code, now published by Municode. They're making the library pay $401 for a new edition of the code, and then another $280 at the same time for update service. But our firm can't not have access to the Municipal Code, so we'll pay and watch our library budget hemmorage money. There has been much complaining about this on the local law library boards, but aside from starting a POD print operation and taking over publication ourselves, there's not much we can do.

Huh. Look at that. LLRX.com has an article on Law Library Blogging (here: http://www.llrx.com/columns/tao6.htm ) by another Blogger on this site - Ms Connie Crosby (her blog is here: http://conniecrosby.blogspot.com/ ). Her site is very interesting (as SLaw sites tend to be) with a useful list of links on the side, and it makes me wonder why so many of the great law librarian blogs I've seen since starting to poke around online are Canadian. I wonder if our neighbors to the north are adapting to technology faster, or if the law librarian democraphic is younger, because I sincerely doubt they just have more time on their hands.

Noelle, my best friend, posted this meme on her blog:

Closest Blue Book Meme
1. Grab the nearest book with a blue cover.
2. Open the book to page 86.
3. Find the first full paragraph.
4. Post the text in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around and look for the coolest book you can find, just the closest blue book.

I'm at work, and the closest book that is blue is "The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation." I suspect I'm the only one who finds this hilarious. Anyway, here's my quote.

"For cases with multiple dispositions, however, the parenthetical identifier is given only when a case is cited as the primary citation. Once given, the parenthetical identifier may be used when the case is cited again. Thus, the following examples are correct:"

I keep on working on this pile of cataloging, but it doesn't seem to get smaller.

And the printer doesn't want to print labels for the books from LA (and who can blame it, really).

And I'm very, very sleepy today.

Tomorrow I am bringing my earphones and my MP3 player. There has to be a better way.

"Be a little careful of your Library. Do you foresee what you will do with it? Very little to be sure. But the real question is, What it will do with you? You will come here & get books that will open your eyes, & your ears, & your curiosity, & turn you inside out or outside in." —Ralph Waldo Emerson

The 5 Ws and an H

Who: Me
What: Didn't have to shelve a huge pile of books
When: Last night
Where: At my little law library
Why: Because the guy who files our legal pocket parts and looseleaf updates did it for me!
How: With great skill and finesse

Bonus W: Who Cares? I do! I hate leaving a messy library overnight, and I was going to have to, because I'd been working on a giant project all day and had hit my cap on my hours.

The 5 Ws and an H

Who: Me
What: Didn't have to shelve a huge pile of books
When: Last night
Where: At my little law library
Why: Because the guy who files our legal pocket parts and looseleaf updates did it for me!
How: With great skill and finesse

Bonus W: Who Cares? I do! I hate leaving a messy library overnight, and I was going to have to, because I'd been working on a giant project all day and had hit my cap on my hours.

One of the great things about this job is that occasionally, I get paid to spend hours surfing the web. Today was one of those days.

I tried out ask.com today - I didn't like it much. I'm not sure if it's because I'm used to searching using Google, or if it's because the groups search was thrown off by the last name of the person I was searching for information on (the last name was Gates, and ask.com tried to sell me gates, even though I had the first and last name in quotes, so it shouldn't have isolated that term). I'll give it another shot, but I think my default search engine will still be Google or Yahoo.

I just tried to edit my links on the sidebar...

I just tried to edit my links on the sidebar, and the changes are showing on my Template page, but not on my blog. That's annoying.

I'll poke at it more later.

*edit in* - it's because my computer was pulling up the cached version. I hit refresh, and now everything displays fine. *Facepalm*

My first post!

I'm not planning to use this as a regular blog (I keep that elsewhere, sorry people), but I do plan to post links and useful law library tips. Mostly so that I remember where all the links are. Think of this as a poor man's (or poor law librarian's) version of J's Scratchpad, but not nearly as cool.

Links to start out with? For library job hunters in the bay area:

http://www.sla.org/chapter/csfo/jobline/jobline.html

http://www.nocall.org/

www.craigslist.com (do a search for "Librarian" in the "jobs" section, and you'll find a bunch of stuff)