Library Updates

Lewis & Clark College Health Services Swine Flu Information

L&C College Student Health Services has posted a Swine Flu Information page complete with the latest campus updates along with links to CDC, HHS, Oregon, Multnomah County and other other flu resources.

Also available through the site is the College’s Swine Flu Response Plan (pdf).

OregonLaws.org

We’ve been remiss in not posting about the great work done by one of our own. Robb Shecter, a second year law student here at Lewis & Clark Law School and also Communications Officer for the school’s New Media department, has crafted a new, very-much improved Oregon Revised Statutes

OregonLaws.org takes the text of the Oregon Revised Statutes (ORS) straight from the source (thanks public.resource.org and Justia!), upon which Robb performs some imaginative coding and design magic.

The final result (so far – the site continues to evolve at a quick pace) is an online version of the Oregon Revised Statutes that is easier to read, search, link to and reuse. A genuine service – and free.

Just a few of the innovative reasons Robb’s OregonLaws.org has become the go-to free source for the ORS:

• Design: ORS provided in true outline form with hanging indents and better text layout
• Readability: Great care given to fonts and text size
• Navigation: Every section provides ORS context via breadcrumb trail at top, great list of surrounding sections on left column, links to annotations on right, links to cited ORS sections within text, and links to same section (well, chapter) in footer/section footnote
• Search: Section-level searching (a big improvement right there), with intelligent relevancy ranking, highlighted keywords, and search visualization/filtering by title
• Browse: Just click on the 2007 Oregon Revised Statutes link to dig down the ORS table of contents to the title of your choice
• Annotations: All of the Notes of Decisions contained in volume 21 of the ORS are fully incorporated into the results. See, for example ORS 164.225, where all the cases citing this section are listed in the right column
• Permanent URLs: Easy-to-decipher urls for each section. You too can break the code. Go ahead, guess the section number of this link before clicking, http://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/496.996.html
• Jureeka: OregonLaws.org is now being used by Jureeka (a very handy Firefox plugin) to automatically turn web references to ORS sections into links. The chapter-only linking on the State’s site doesn’t allow for such pinpoint citing.
• Readability: When an ‘And’ or ‘Or‘ shows up in a list of elements or as alternatives, they will be emphasized (bolded) in Oregon Laws. For example see the bolded ‘and’ in ORS 164.278
• Oregon Legal Glossary: An OregonLaws.org sub-project, the Oregon Legal Glossary does a great job of pulling definitions from within the various ORS sections and providing easy access to them. Shows the power of organizing and opening up government data such as, say, the ORS. Care to find all of the various definitions for a single term in the ORS? Now for the Robbs among us it is no problem.
• Updates and Discussion: One of the great parts of OregonLaws.org is how Robb is providing updates and explanations on what he’s doing with the site. Be sure to follow the OregonLaws.org blog and twitter feed for the latest updates and to provide your comments on his good works.

There are other good reasons to use OregonLaws.org, but perhaps the best reasons are the basic ones: Better, easier and quicker access to the very same ORS as provided on the state’s site.

Add in the fact that it is continually being improved (many options on the wish list: Index; Links to new/proposed laws affecting sections; Expanded glossary…) and you too will start using OregonLaws.org as your default site for the Oregon Revised Statutes.

With finals approaching, don’t forget that CALI lessons provide a free way to help you prepare for exams!

If you’re unfamiliar, CALI lessons are interactive, computer-based tutorials distributed by the non-profit Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI, www.cali.org).

CALI publishes over 700 CALI lessons in 33 different legal subject areas, listed at http://www.cali.org/lessons. All law students at CALI member schools, including ours, have free, unlimited access to CALI lessons. Law students around the country ran CALI lessons over 900,000 times last school year.

If you are registering a free account at cali.org for the first time, note that you must use our school’s authorization code to create a new account.

Our school’s authorization code is available via our L&C Law Student CALI Lessons page. Just click the ‘Get the Authorization Code’ link (then enter your L&C email username and password), or stop by the Boley Reference Desk and ask for the code there.

We also have the CALI DVDs for those preferring to work offline. There is a stack of them at the reference desk. Just stop by and grab one. Remember, however, that lessons added or updated since the beginning of the school year are only available at cali.org.

Good luck with finals!

Time again to clear out your record and your conscience with our annual Food for Fines program.

Between April 13 and May 15 we will waive your fines if you bring in an equivalent amount of non-perishable nutritious food. If your fine is $50.00 or more, you can purchase a gift card from Fred Meyer for the same amount of your fines.

All food and gift cards go to the Raphael House, a shelter for at-risk children and women in Portland.

Please bring food, gift cards or money to the circulation desk of the law library. Not sure of the need? You can check your library record online for a complete record of your fines.

The Campus Safety office has posted this notice about a sexual predator known to visit college campuses and pose as a professor.

He may be in Oregon, but Campus Safety has no reason to believe that he has ever been on the Lewis & Clark campus. Read the bulletin for more information, picture and physical description.

The Lewis & Clark Law School community now has access to HeinOnline’s latest digital library, the United Nations Law Collection.

The United Nations Law Collection presents searchable, exact reproductions of major United Nations legal publications, including:

• United Nations Treaty Series (UNTS)
  All texts of treaties and international agreements registered with the Secretariat of the United Nations and published by it since 1946. Searchable by citation, name, popular name, registration number, keyword and more.
• United Nations Treaty Series Index
• Multilateral Treaties Deposited with the Secretary-General
• The U.N. Treaty Handbook
• Reports of International Arbitral Awards
• International Court of Justice Reports
• United Nations War Crimes Commission Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals
• U.N. Conference Proceedings
• UN Yearbooks
• Monthly Statement of Treaties and International Agreements
  For each treaty or agreement since 1983, information on the registration number, title, date of conclusion, date of entry into force and authentic text(s)
• United Nations Legislative Series
  21 books from 1951-2005 and covers such topics as the law of the sea, treaties, nationality, privileges and immunities
• Much more, with additional content to be added in future releases

For help with using the Collection see this Quick Reference Guide (pdf).

Find links to the Collection on our Databases page as well as within the Lewis & Clark Catalog. As with most of our subscription databases, access to the United Nations Law Collection from on- or off-campus. On-campus users will go directly to the digital library. Off-campus users will need to first enter their Lewis & Clark Law School username and password.

As always, for help with this and our other online and print resources be sure to stop by, call (503-768-6780) or email (lawlib@lclark.edu) the Boley Law Library Reference Desk.

Lawlib Twitter, our new online update service, now has over 100 followers. We feel pretty good about that, especially as Lawlib Twitter is not yet one month old.

In the few weeks that Boley has been in the Twitter business we have posted over 240 ‘tweets,’ providing links to the full gamut of legal research tips, blogs, academic articles, news and other resources.

Followers include a number of our students, faculty, staff, and alumni, along with lawyers, legal organizations such as the ABA, other libraries, and of course folks who choose to be anonymous – one of the benefits of Twitter.

There’s still time and room for you to add us to your Twitter feed. Just login to your Twitter account or start a new one at twitter.com, then go to twitter.com/lawlib, click follow, and voila – you’ll have our every post in your very own Twitter feed.

[Of course, you can continue to enjoy Lawlib Twitter via our library homepage. Every link we send to Twitter gets posted to our News and Updates section within minutes.]

Find out more at Introducing Lawlib Twitter.

A drill to simulate a campus lock down scenario will take place on Wednesday, April 15 at 2:15 p.m.

This post from The Source briefly describes how the drill will work and the reasons behind it. It also includes a link for registering for emergency notification text and/or voice messages, a video on using our door locks, and details on what to do during a lock down.