LISNews: Librarian News

George Mason law prof and editor of Green Bag, Ross Davies is going to lead a team of researchers who will exam the puffery published in law school websites. In what is proposed to be a regular, perhaps annual report, The Deadwood Report, this effort will attempt to reality check the claims and actual work performed by law school faculty members. Details at Law Librarian Blog

Mindy's latest book, Sorcery and the Single Girl, features Jane Madison, a special librarian who also is a witch. See Spotlight on Law Librarians: Mindy K. Maddrey.

Joe Hodnicki writes "Legalese is a massively structured dialect. Symbols appear in very distinct patterns that are more reminiscent of machine code than text. More at Law Library Blog"

From Tim O'Reilly: "Carl Malamud has this funny idea that public domain information ought to be... well, public. He has a history of creating public access databases on the net when the provider of the data has failed to do so or has licensed its data only to a private company that provides it only for pay. His technique is to build a high-profile demonstration project with the intent of getting the actual holder of the public domain information (usually a government agency) to take over the job." Read about Malamud's latest project, "creating unencumbered public repository of all federal and state case law and codes," in O'Reilly's blog entry, "Carl Malamud Takes on WestLaw," or John Markoff's New York Times article, "A Quest to Get More Court Rulings Online, and Free."