Legal Research

E-Book Lending Program from Internet Archive & Partner Libraries

Posted on February 23, 2011
ReadWriteWeb is reporting that “Internet Archive Partners With 150 Libraries to Launch an E-Book Lending Program.” This new digital lending system will allow library patrons to borrow up to 5 e-books at a time for up to 2 weeks. People can choose to borrow either an in-browser version (that can be read via the Internet [...

Video: Watson and Law Librarians

Posted on February 17, 2011
Following up on my post yesterday, I have been thinking for awhile about adding more video to this blog. The problem is getting the motivation during busy work times to create the content can be difficult. However, I think I’ve come up with a good system for using videos to comment on the hot technology [...

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords

Posted on February 16, 2011
Everyone is busy imagining why the IBM computer Watson is so important to their own industry. Robert C. Weber writes in the National Law Journal about how great it will be when computers like Watson can perform legal research on their own. Imagine a new kind of legal research system that can gather much of [...

A defense of AALL (sort of)

Posted on June 28, 2010
Here you’ve put me in an awkward position. See, now I have to defend AALL’s annual meeting program, and that really isn’t something I wanted to do. If you haven’t been paying attention to the criticism of AALL’s programming you need to catch up...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

Review of Wolters Kluwer Intelliconnect

Posted on May 19, 2010
“Innovation isn’t a goal, useful is a goal. If you can be useful and innovative, even better. But useful first.” – Jason Fried, 37 Signals It might seem like a cop out, or a bad review, or even patronizing. But when I say Wolters Kluwer’s Intelliconnect product is useful I mean that as a high compliment...

Book report: What Would Google Do?

Posted on March 27, 2010
Back in November I had the opportunity to meet and interview Jeff Jarvis at a conference here at Yale. His talk was fascinating and the interview (embedded below) was interesting as well. I promptly had our library order What Would Google Do and was not disappointed...

Vendor v. Librarian ? mega slam: Part 2

Posted on February 10, 2010
I wanted to wait a few days for part 2 of my post to think about my position and what had been written and said. Since then a few more posts have shown up, most notably from Tom Boone, and at the Law Librarian blog. And, as is always the danger when waiting to post [...

Vendor v. Librarian ? mega slam: Part 1

Posted on February 04, 2010
Sitting at dinner with executives from Thomson Retures Legal (TRL) in St. Paul, MN, one of my colleagues asked, ?what do you expect from us?? The answer was that they simply wanted to tell their story. At the time I wondered if this was a direct hint toward a recent blog post I wrote, encouraging [...

Yale Teaching with Technology: Google Wave

Posted on January 31, 2010
On Tuesday, 2/2/10 I’ll be co-presenting about how to use Google Wave. We have created several waves for this presentation. This post is an will be an example of embedding a wave on a website or blog.

5 random thoughts about WestlawNext

Posted on January 29, 2010
So lots has been written about WestlawNext. Much more detailed analysis has been floating around. So rather than rehash what’s already been said all over the web, I’m going to provide some random thoughts I had about the project as I was sitting in the meeting at Eagan, MN...

Video: discussion of WestlawNext

Posted on January 27, 2010
ABA Journal and New York Times have already written about it. Lisa Solomon and Robert Ambrogi have seen it also. On Feb. 1st Westlaw unveils it?s new product WestlawNext to the world at LegalTech. Yesterday they met with a group of legal information professionals to talk about the product and it?s creation...

Please Tell Me a Story

Posted on December 19, 2009
When I received a phone call from Yale asking me to come out for an interview for my current job the person on the other end of the conversation informed me I would have to give a 20-minute presentation about the future of emerging technologies in law libraries...

Why I voted Yes on the SLA name change

Posted on November 19, 2009
A few years ago I was asked to speak at an Enterprise Information Management conference in San Francisco. It was very exciting, the first time I had been asked to speak somewhere. I was slated to speak on the second day, but after attending the first day of sessions I was very nervous...

Interview with Jim Milles, Professor of law and former law librarian

Posted on November 13, 2009
Jim Milles is in town for the Journalism and New Media Ecology conference and I managed to score an interview. We discussed news and journalism, his new position, and the future of libraries. Enjoy.

On imitation and stealing in library innovation

Posted on October 13, 2009
Recently there has been some heated debate, and even a backlash against the use of certain technologies in libraries.Aaron Schmidt at Walking Paper is planning presentations questioning innovation in libraries. A colleague here at Yale, started a debate by suggesting it was “reprehensible” for information professionals not to be on twitter...

Video: Interview with Stephen Schultze, co-creator of Recap

Posted on October 07, 2009
Today, Stephen Schultze and Harlan Yu from the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton, and two of the creators of the Recap project, presented Recap at Yale Law School. Afterwards I had a chance to record a short video interview with Stephen Schultze about issues related to Recap and online access to government records...

Team Digital Preservation and the Aeroplane Disaster

Posted on September 18, 2009
via youtube.com Cool videos about Digital Preservation. Posted via web from jeiseman’s posterous

AALL 2009 Wrap Up Awards: The Wolf pack award

Posted on August 01, 2009
OK. So I am going to do this again because people seemed to like it and asked for it again, and it’s a good way for me to organize my thoughts about the conference. Let’s call it my annual AALL wrap up awards. This award is based on a quote from the comedy movie The [...

AALL2009 Word Cloud

Posted on July 31, 2009
I created a word cloud from the tweets marked with the #aall2009 hashtag. There were over 1250 so some editing was in order. The word cloud appears below, click on the image to see the full size at http://wordle.net where it was created. So I did this by using the Twitter API to download all 1250+ [...

Essential reading for emerging technology librarians

Posted on July 19, 2009
If you’re like me and responsible for using new technologies to connect with patrons or if this is just a topic you’re interested in then I have a book recommendation for you: Groundswell : winning in a world transformed by social technologies...

Calicon09 Word Cloud

Posted on July 01, 2009
I created a word cloud for the #calicon09 tweets with Wordle. Thanks to Yankee in Canada for the idea. Here’s how I did it: 1. Used the twitter API to access the tweets with the #calicon09 hash tag in a json format. 2. Based on some code found around the interwebs, I put together some php for processing the json [...

5 takeaways from CALIcon09 conference

Posted on June 24, 2009
I’m back from CALI and even now, a few days later I still have trouble wrapping my head around what I’ve learned. Sarah and Meg enjoyed the conference. A lot of the other cool kids were there also. If I didn’t link to you it doesn’t mean I don’t care though...

10 tips for networking at CALI, AALL and beyond

Posted on June 11, 2009
I think I’m a pretty good networker, and after recently meeting some bad ones I’ve been thinking about networking a lot. It’s such an important skill, and with CALI coming up and AALL after that I thought it might be a good idea to offer up some networking tips...

Interview with Aaron Swartz

Posted on March 25, 2009
Today, I attended a presentation at the Sterling Memorial Library by Aaron Swartz. He came to talk about his project, The Open Library. If you haven’t heard of this project it’s definitely worth checking out. It was a great talk and he had a very interesting perspective on things...

OCLS Mobile for iPhone and iPod Touch

Posted on March 25, 2009
via youtube.com I don’t even live in the OC, but I want this app. This is great. And the video advertising it is great also. Posted via web from jeiseman’s posterous

YouTube - Librarians? Parade

Posted on March 16, 2009
via youtube.com Facinating video from the 1930’s showing Yale librarians ceremoniously moving the collection from the old library to the Sterling Memorial Library. Great use of YouTube for historical footage. Posted via web from jeiseman’s posterous

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky

Posted on March 15, 2009
With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves ? the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public ? has [...

Online Social Networking: Is It a Productivity Bust or Boon?

Posted on March 11, 2009
There is a fair amount of research, the most prominent of which are

Using Data: Web Tech Guy and Angry Staff Person

Posted on March 06, 2009
via usingdata.typepad.com This animation is from Michael Edson of the Smithsonian, from an IMLS conference. He is a keynote speaker at Computers in Libraries this year. Hope someone live blogs that, and he posts his slides. Thanks to the Infotoday Blog...

John Conyers and Open Access (Lessig Blog)

Posted on March 05, 2009

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.