Librarian and Digital-Scholarship founder Charles W. Bailey Jr. has compiled a Google Book Search bibliography , with selected  articles and other works  useful in understanding Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues associated with it.  Where possible, links are provided to works that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories.

The National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind have announced that they’ve filed a discrimination lawsuit against Arizona State University, claiming that the University’s Amazon Kindle DX Pilot Program discriminates against the blind. The NFB and ACB have also filed complaints with the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education and the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, asking for investigations of the five other institutions of higher education that are part of the Kindle pilot project, which is intended to assess the role of electronic textbooks and reading devices in the classroom.  The other institutions in the pilot program are Case Western Reserve University, the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, Pace University, Princeton University, and Reed College.

Although the Kindle  features text-to-speech technology that can read textbooks aloud to blind students, the NFB and ACB say that  its menus are not accessible to the blind, making it impossible for a blind user to purchase books from Amazon’s Kindle store, select a book to read, activate the text-to-speech feature, or  use the advanced reading functions available on the Kindle DX.

This Wednesday, Richard Leiter will talk with guest Tracy Thompson-Przylucki, Executive Director of NELLCO, on Blog Talk Radio. NELLCO is a consortia of ABA approved law libraries with the motto “the whole is greater…”. NELLCO’s goal is to negotiate the best possible prices and access terms on electronic resources for the membership. NELLCO is a non-profit, member-driven organization. Members pay annual dues to participate in the consortium. NELLCO is not a reseller and does not add any administrative or other fees to the prices negotiated for the membership. All discounts are passed directly on to the members. The show will air live at 3:00 PM Eastern time on Wednesday, July 1 and will take call-in or chat-in questions.

A list of program ideas for the 2010 AALL Annual Meeting is now available on the CS wiki.

Please take a look at the existing ideas and add in any of your own. If you would like to add a program idea and don’t yet have access to the CS wiki, please contact Bonnie Shucha, CS-SIS Vice Chair and 2010 Program Committee Chair.

Ryan Overdorf, Chair of the CS-SIS Adaptive Technologies Committee, has recently added some useful new content to the wiki. The Adaptive Technology / Assistive Technology section offers an introduction to this technology which removes barriers and increases accessibility to desired resources.

According to the wiki, “These pages currently focus on two areas likely to be of interest to our core readership of law librarians: popular assistive technology products and Web accessibility. More content on the current areas and other areas may be added as time permits and reader interest indicates a need.”

Here’s something that might be of interest to CSSISies CSSISizens (thanks, Ken): the first ever “Handheld Librarian Online Conference: An online conference about Mobile Library Services” will be held on Thursday, July 30 from 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Eastern time.  Discussion will center around how libraries can provide services on  mobile devices that are increasingly used for a wide variety of purposes including communication, internet access, text messaging, and entertainment.  The program, sponsored by Alliance Library System, LearningTimes and Infoquest, will include a variety of ways to collaborate, network and learn from a  group of experts in the field. The schedule is here and includes a panel session called Everything We Know About Implementing a Kindle Loan Program, moderated by Rene Erlandson, Director of Virtual Services @ the University of Nebraska Omaha.  The cost is $49 for one person, $89 for a group of 2 or more people logged in from one computer.

Just in time for the AALL Annual Meeting next month, CS-SIS has a shiny new, printer-friendly PDF brochure.

Big thanks are due to Melissa Serfass of the Communications Committee for her work with AALL in designing the brochure.  Thanks also to Deborah Schander for adding it to the CS website and for her work on spiffing up the site navigation.

As we announced earlier this month, CS-SIS is sponsoring the Web 2.0 Challenge again this summer.  The Challenge is a five-week online course that will introduce law librarians to social software and how to use it in their libraries. It will begin in early August just after the AALL annual meeting and run through early September.

The five-week course will cover these areas:

• Blogs & RSS
• Flickr & Social Bookmarking
• Social Networking and Twitter
• Wikis and LibGuides
• Web 2.0 @ Your Library

The course is intended for law librarians who have little experience with these technologies but are interested in learning more. We estimate each week’s materials will take 1-3 hours to complete. You need not be a member of AALL or CS-SIS to participate.

Registration is now open! If you are interested in participating, please fill out this form.  Because there are a limited number of spaces available, course participants may be selected on a first-come, first-served basis.  The registration form will be available through June 29, and we will assign accepted participants to their small groups by July 10. However, course content will be freely viewable to anyone who wishes to follow along.

Questions? Contact Meg Kribble (mkribble AT law.harvard.edu) or Sally Irvin (irvinsa AT wfu.edu).  Those of you who attended his session at CALI last week got a preview of the great work being done by our third organizer, Tom Boone, on this year’s course website.

There were lots of CS-SISsies at the CALI conference in Boulder last week both as attendees and presenters. CS-SIS held a preliminary meeting at the conference to talk about potential CSSIS programs  for the 2010 AALL meeting in Denver. If you weren’t able to attend, there will be another CS-SIS Program Planning Meeting at AALL on Monday, July 27, 2009 from 12:00 PM – 1:15 PM in WCC-Room 158 A.

If you weren’t able to be at CALI’s closing plenary on Saturday, John Mayer announced that next year’s CALI conference will be held at Rutgers School of Law – Camden in Camden, NJ, which is just across the Schuylkill Delaware River from Philadelphia, PA (thanks for the correction!).   Here’s an article about their new building, which opened last fall, and here’s a map showing the location.

LibGuides is a “web 2.0 library knowledge sharing system” offered by the company Springshare.  LibGuides is growing in popularity among all kinds of libraries, including law libraries as a platform for creating web-based research guides.

Elizabeth Farrell of Florida State University College of Law has recently added a list of law libraries currently using LibGuides to the CS wiki.

Following the list is a selected list of resources that may be helpful for law libraries currently using LibGuides or considering its purchase.