explodedlibrary.info

reminiscing about competitive intelligence

This morning I had a reference question about finding financial and other information about a small privately held company. This brought back memories because I did a lot of this sort of research in my previous job, which was primarily doing competitive intelligence for a medium-sized privately held company.

I'm a little rusty at this, and I don't have access to all the tools that I used to have. I did find some information on Westlaw in Dun's Market Identifiers database (the more powerful & expensive databases aren't included in my law school subscription).

Then I wondered, how accurate was the information in this database? ...

Matrixy

Salon blogger Martin Marprelate has written an insightful fan's commentary about the Matrix Revolutions. ...

Legal Reference Services Quarterly article on information overload

Information overload has been long been an issue that I'm interested in. For me, it's the true occupational hazard of being a librarian - especially being a reference and electronic services librarian. I get a paper cut once in a while, I pick up my share of colds from the reference desk and I've received minor cuts and burns from troubleshooting printers and photocopiers, but none of these things compare with the persistence of information overload. This brief article - Kathryn Hensiak, Too much of a good thing: Information overload and law librarians, 22 Legal Reference Services Quarterly 85 (2003) - was a helpful contribution to the subject. You can view an abstract of it here - otherwise you could ask your academic or public library for an interlibrary loan. Some articles on information overload seem to be saying, "gee-whiz, ain't it cool that this is a problem!" This article spends some time showing why it's a real problem ...

finding information about the Moussaoui case

A student doing cite-checking for a law review needed to find some materials about the Moussaoui case. I found that there's a wealth of material at FindLaw. Note that it's in reverse chronological order - and that some of the documents have very unusual names (e.g. "Motion by Defendant to Force [illegible] Liar Aschroft to Disclose and Unredact his Delerious New 5th Plane Pilot ").

Jessamyn West's presentation on the USAPATRIOT Act and CIPA

This is a very helpful summary about the various issues associated with these two oppressive laws - and a guide to how librarians might respond to them.

randomly found blawg: What Blogs can do for Solo and Small Firm Lawyers

TypePad has an interesting feature which allows me to shows links to 5 or so recently updated TypePad blogs on my blog. It's the "Recently Updated Weblogs" section and it's totally random - I have no control over what appears there. For all I know, I could have links to the most hateful right-wing blogs imaginable, but only for a short time, because these links change all the time. Because sometimes randomness is my answer to information overload, I glance at it from time to time and look at one of the blogs whose name catches my attention. Just now I saw this one. I don't know how long this blog will exist for, as it was made for a presentation, but it makes some very salient points and is well worth a look.

so, what does "CCG" mean?

[13 July 2007 update: Replaced broken link to OCLC glossary with a working link, changed the definition so that it's the same as OCLC's updated definition]

There are so many acronyms around - and the same combination of words can mean so many different things, depending on who uses it. So when the new ILL person at my library didn't know what "CCG" meant when it appeared on one of her ILL requests, I assumed that this acronym was born of libraryspeak. Unfortunately, I know of no Biebers (a fine publication which decodes the acronyms for legal publications) for the library world. Instead I turned to the web, and after one false start, I found a very helpful resource done by you know who - Google. I don't know for how long the Google Glossary has been around, but this was the first time that I used it. I entered CCG into its search box and saw my answer in the sixth hit:

A code provided by the Borrower that indicates a request conforms to the Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyright Works (CONTU) guidelines.
http://www.oclc.org/support/documentation/glossary/resourcesharing/glossary.htm#C

This made sense because the request was for a number of chapters from a book, and somebody might wonder if this was going beyond "fair use." Even more obvious was that this came from OCLC - and even a reference librarian knows that OCLC speaks ex cathedra in this area.

trying out domain mapping

Seeing that both TypePad and BuyDomains.com support domain mapping, I would that I'd try this out. The idea is that everything in this blog will have an URL that starts with "www.explodedlibrary.info/" rather than "explodedlibrary.typepad.com/salonblog/". This sounds like a good idea. The downside is that if you've linked to any particular entries in this blog, your links may become out of date - or maybe that's the RSS feed.

New York Times on Diebold

It was interesting to read this article from today's New York Times. Here are a couple of thoughts about it:
- Had Diebold not cracked down in such an unethical way on their legitimate critics, this controversy would not have grown in the way that it has - and the New York Times certainly would not have printed today's story. In the same way that Fox's laughable lawsuit only served to boost the sales of Al Franken's book, Diebold's copyright cudgel has been a PR nightmare for them. When will people and companies learn not to make this mistake again and again?
- This ultimately comes down to constitutional law. Both copyright and freedom of speech are grounded in the US constitution. If I were a hard core DMCA supporter, I'd also be very mad at Diebold. Their actions are hastening a collision between the DMCA and the First Amendment. If the DMCA is going to be used in this manner to stifle legitimate debate about the heart of the political process (voting), there is a chance that it will be held unconstitutional. Maybe this is a slim chance, maybe not, but if I were one of the DMCA's beneficiaries, I'd be worried about this gamble. So long as the debate about the DMCA was framed as whether people should be able to download music for free - it was never really going to get anywhere. But this Diebold case is different - in the post Florida 2000 world, it's really struck a nerve.

Diebold's not the first to invoke copyright to censor important free speech

I get more angry, every time I hear more about the way Diebold is attempting to stifle debate about the insecurity of its touch-screen voting machines. Even if I put aside the red flags about the idea of a company with very partisan leadership getting involved in the voting equipment business, and the fact that Diebold's software has a serious security flaw and does not allow for a paper trail of votes, I am amazed at their response to this criticism - rather than try to improve their software, they try to silence their critics with copyright law! Here's a copy of one Diebold's cease & desist notices, which I found at Chilling Effects. I am glad to see that at least one ISP is standing up to Diebold. I decided to do some research about the intersection between copyright law and freedom of speech - to see if Diebold is the right, and the law is a total ass. ...