The Goodson Blogson

If you are researching the laws of more than one jurisdiction, you can often save time with a fifty-state survey. These publications compile citations to the laws or regulations for each state on a particular subject, eliminating the need to search each state’s laws individually. Fifty-state surveys can be found in various formats. The Law Library has long subscribed to the Subject Compilation of State Laws (Reference KF1 .F67; 1960-present), a print series which offers citations to books and articles that compare state laws on a particular topic. However, because new volumes do not cumulate, the Subject Compilation usually requires researchers to consult several volumes in order to find all of the relevant listings for a single topic. Fortunately, the Subject Compilation of State Laws is now available through HeinOnline ( http://library.duke.edu/metasearch/db/id/DUK00693 ). The online version may be searched or browsed by topic, greatly streamlining the process of locating all rel...

Law students are natural multitaskers, but even the most dedicated 1L wouldn't risk the embarrassment of reading a casebook on the treadmill. Enter AudioCaseFiles , a relatively new web site which offers MP3 downloads of more than 1,000 cases from the most popular law school casebooks. It's an ideal service for auditory learners, those with long commutes, and perhaps even insomniacs. AudioCaseFiles offers the option to browse cases by topic or by casebook, and includes several from the Duke Law booklist (such as Kadish's Criminal Law and Its Processes: Cases and Materials and Friedenthal's Civil Procedure: Cases and Materials , among others). If listening to court opinions isn't your idea of a good time, AudioCaseFiles has also expanded into video, with more than 4,000 hours of footage from actual trials in a variety of practice areas. ( View the list by case names ; you can also sort video offerings by practice area.) Trial practice students, in particular, may be...

Eight private study rooms are now available on Level 2 of the Law Library. These rooms are available for the use of individual law students or groups of students, and can be “checked out” for four hours at a time from the Circulation/Reserve desk on Level 3 by presenting a Law School ID. Students may also reserve a room up to 24 hours in advance. Each study room is currently equipped with a 32-inch LCD screen, which allows up to three students to plug in a laptop for visual presentations. In the coming weeks, all of the study rooms will also contain a built-in computer with DVD playback and a webcam with videoconferencing and recording software.

Due to the sheer volume of daily publication, most newspapers do not provide their contents online in PDF or other page-image formats. Historically, newspapers have made their contents available in microform, but this means that frequently, the only libraries which own a microform version of a local newspaper are limited to the geographical region where the newspaper is published. This makes interlibrary loan requests difficult and time-consuming for owning libraries to fill, particularly when most newspaper articles are available in HTML through databases like America's Newspapers and InfoTrac Custom Newspapers . For these reasons, it is the policy of the Duke Law Library not to submit interlibrary loan requests for newspaper articles which are available in HTML format. However, some researchers prefer to view original (PDF) images of newspaper articles, and an increasing number of free and subscription sites are filling that need. Various major U.S. newspapers are available in P...

Earlier this week, the HeinOnline database announced the completion of its Congressional Record scanning project , which spans 1873-2003 (a scan of the "daily" edition for more current volumes is also available). Hein had already digitized the predecessors to the Congressional Record (the Congressional Globe , the Register of Debates and the Annals of Debates in Congress ), meaning that Duke users now have access to a complete, searchable PDF set of the debates in Congress dating back to 1789. Legislative history researchers at Duke have additional online resources for congressional resources which are too old to be published on GPO Access . The U.S. Congressional Serial Set Digital Collection has been steadily scanning volumes of committee reports , currently dating from 1817-1952 (with an additional 2-3 years being added each month). With GPO Access providing committee reports back to 1994, and the CIS microfiche set in the library covering back to 1970, the digital ...