102 law librarians from around the world are just finishing up their third week of the Web 2.0 Challenge, a five week online learning program designed to introduce law librarians to the professional side of Web 2.0 tools. This week, the students learned about professional uses for social networking and Twitter.  To date, they have produced 441 blog posts on the course website and 288 blog comments about their learning experiences. CS-SIS is proud to sponsor the Challenge for a second year in a row.

A month ago, the Canadian Privacy Commissioner issued a report that found some Facebook practices violate the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents  Act (PIPEDA).  Today is the deadline for Facebook to respond to the report.

The Facebook investigation was prompted by a complaint filed by the the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC)  at the University of Ottawa law school.  Several  main issues were raised in Privacy Commissioner’s report, the most glaring of which is the access to personal information on Facebook by some third-party applications. In order to download popular games and quizzes, Facebook users must consent to share all their personal information, except their contact details. These companies, totalling nearly one million, operate in 180 countries. Other serious problems include account deactivation and deletion, accounts of deceased users, and non-users’ personal information.

If Facebook’s final response is unsatisfactory, the Privacy Commissioner  has two weeks to take the California-based company to Federal Court in Ottawa to try and get a court order requiring it to change its business practices to comply with Canada’s  privacy law.

If the dispute goes to court it would be an international first for Facebook, which has grown to more than 200 million users since its launch in 2004.

There’s a very interesting article about social media on the (I am not making this up) Department of Defense website.  The article explains how Lt. Gen. William Caldwell IV discovered the power of social media when he was the the military’s top spokesman in Iraq. His experiences there made him recognize the military’s responsibility to keep the American public informed, and the importance of that understanding to ensure support for the mission. Now, as commander of the Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth,  he is working to impress those concepts on future military leaders. The Center now has a blogger page and Caldwell  requires his students to blog as part of their curriculum at the center. He also  encourages them  to contribute to the center’s YouTube, Twitter and Facebook pages.  His goal, he said, is to help create a new generation of leaders who recognize the power of social media and help the Army change its cultural mindset so it’s able to embrace it.

I want to thank the Computer Services Special Interest Section for awarding me the 2009 CS-SIS Grant for Students and New Librarians with less than Three Years of Service.   This grant enabled me to attend the most important conference in the law library field: The American Association of Law Libraries Annual Conference.  I found the wide variety of educational programs fantastic.  I connected with many new friends and colleagues.  Additionally, the extensive exhibits were great for learning about cutting-edge products and trends in the use of technology in law libraries.
The Computer Services Special Interest Section is so important to me because I am personally very interested in the use of technology to support all of the functions in the library.  I have started the second year of my first job as a law librarian as the Reference and Technology Librarian at Rutgers Law School in Newark, N.J.  I see my position as the link between technical services and public services within our library.
I found the many CS-SIS activities to be excellent.  My favorite program was “Making Your ILS Web 2.0 Happy”.   This was so helpful for me because I oversee and optimize the use of all modules of our integrated library system (Millennium) and provide training.  The program gave me so many ideas for ways to improve our integrated library system and our OPAC.   Hearing the experiences of others and knowing that I could follow-up with the speakers if I had more specific questions has motivated me to use additional technologies to improve our systems and make the OPAC more user friendly.  As a result, I think I will have a very productive second year at my job!
I also truly enjoyed the opportunity to be a guest at the CS Breakfast Business Meeting and Awards (despite the early hour!).  This gave me great insight into all of the individuals and all of the hard work that has been put into creating all of the activities, programs, and workshops that the CS-SIS implements.  I was really impressed!  I very much hope to have the opportunity to become more active with the CS-SIS in the future.  Thank you again for awarding me the 2009 CS-SIS Grant for Students and New Librarians with less than Three Years of Service.

See you in Denver!
Caroline Young, JD, MLIS
Reference and Technology Librarian
Rutgers Law Library – Newark

RECAP is a free extension for Firefox that improves the experience of using PACER, the electronic public access system for the U.S. Federal District and Bankruptcy Courts.

From the RECAP website (and do watch the little video called “Watch RECAP in Action):
“Since the 1980s, the cutting edge of judicial transparency has been PACER, an electronic system that allows attorneys and the general public to access millions of federal court records. PACER was a big step forward when it was originally created, but lately it has begun to show its age. At a time when the other two branches of government are becoming ever more subject to online scrutiny, the judicial branch still requires citizens to provide a credit card and pay eight cents a page for its documents…
Today we’re excited to release the public beta of RECAP. RECAP is an extension to the popular Firefox web browser that gives PACER users a hassle-free way to contribute to a free, open repository of federal court records. When a RECAP user purchases a document from PACER, the RECAP extension helps her automatically send a copy of that document to the RECAP archive. And RECAP saves its users money by notifying them when documents they’re searching for are already available for free from the public archive.
RECAP is a project of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. It was developed by Harlan Yu, Steve Schultze, and Timothy B. Lee, under the supervision of Prof. Ed Felten…
The RECAP repository is hosted by the Internet Archive, a world-renowned online library. With the help of RECAP users, we want to build the nation’s most comprehensive public archive of freely-available federal judicial records. And we’re looking for partners to help us build the archive more quickly and find new, innovative uses for the information. We are already working with Justia and public.resource.org to integrate the public records they already have into our archive.”

Below is a list of our new committees along with the chairs for the 2009-10 term.  Thanks to these individuals for volunteering their time and talent.

If you would be willing to volunteer for a committee and have not already let me know, please contact me at bjshucha@wisc.edu.  Let me know if you’re interested in working with a specific committee or if you’re just willing to help out where ever needed.  Thanks!

Sincerely,

Bonnie Shucha
CS-SIS Chair

Now that we’re back from AALL 2009, CS-SIS is off and running with this year’s Web 2.0 Challenge.

We’re very excited to have 104 law librarians from all over the world (including Belgium and Rwanda) and representing a good mix of types of law libraries as students this year. In addition, we have 15 small group facilitators and 8 instructors who have contributed to this year’s course. In the first 48 hours, this year’s group had already produced over 50 blog posts about their learning experiences so far!

Even if you aren’t a registered participant, you are welcome to follow along at the course website to learning about blogs, wikis, Flickr, social networking and bookmarking, Twitter, LibGuides, and how to bring Web 2.0 to YOUR library. All of the materials are publicly available without logging in, except for the small group chats.  Here’s the schedule–feel free to follow along for all or part of the course:

• Week of August 3: Blogs & RSS
• Week of August 10 Flickr & Social Bookmarking
• Week of August 17 Social Networking & Twitter
• Week of August 24 Wikis & LibGuides
• Week of August 31 Web 2.0 @ Your Library

In case you missed the presentation about the Web 2.0 Challenge at AALL, you can find the slides and handouts from D-1 I Want My Web 2.0: Lessons from the Web 2.0 Challenge Everyone Can Use right here.

Meg Kribble, Tom Boone, & Sally Irvin
W2C2009 Course Organizers