LISNews: Librarian News

Are There Drawbacks to Law Libraries Going Digital?

It's good that people can get access to materials much more easily. But our concern is that the government or a court agency, publishing online, might run out of space on its hard drive, and decide on its own what to delete. Then, all of a sudden you don't have it online and you don't have it in print, either.

LAW-LIB is a listserv where law librarians ask and answer legal questions and help each other find legal resources and trouble shoot unique legal reference questions. Currently the list administrator has raised the issue of whether a specific person should be banned from the list and great debate has ensued. What is problematic is that when a debate on a listserv happens it happens in your inbox. A typically amount of emails from LAW-LIB might be 6-12 in a day. The current debate has thrown this number into the range of 50-75 emails.

I wanted to raise a listserv idea that could be debated on a forum that is more conducive to discussion. The power of listservs is that they have a very strong connection with people because the email goes directly to them. The listserv participants are dealing with a "push" information system. My idea is to have a listserv that operates something like the game show Jeopardy in that things would have to be in the form of a question. The listserv would only be for questions. All answers to questions and discussion would be on a corresponding website. Each question sent to the mailing list would automatically be posted to the website. If you wanted to see the answer to a question or provide an answer you would go to the the website. -- Read More

Richard Stallman Says: Something strange and dangerous is happening in copyright law. Under the U.S. Constitution, copyright exists to benefit users — those who read books, listen to music, watch movies, or run software — not for the sake of publishers or authors. Yet even as people tend increasingly to reject and disobey the copyright restrictions imposed on them “for their own benefit,” the U.S. government is adding more restrictions, and trying to frighten the public into obedience with harsh new penalties.

How did copyright policies come to be diametrically opposed to their stated purpose? And how can we bring them back into alignment with that purpose? To understand, we should start by looking at the root of United States copyright law: the U.S. Constitution.

State Supreme Court to close 3 libraries: Some high-level belt-tightening will result in the Tennessee Supreme Court’s shuttering of its three state law libraries, including its Middle Division library in Nashville, effective Dec. 21.

The high court’s ruling is effective Dec. 31. and is part of the judicial system’s budget-cutting process. Besides the Nashville library location closure, the court is also closing its libraries in Knoxville and Jackson.

The three law libraries combined house about 125,000 volumes and material on CD ROM. The Nashville location also has a computer lab.