The Goodson Blogson

During the Goodson Law Library’s Dedication Week in November 2008, a meeting of prominent law library directors resulted in the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship , which urges law schools to cease print publication of law reviews in favor of free, permanent, online publication archives. On Friday, October 22, an all-day event at the Law School will discuss best practices for implementing this policy. The workshop is co-sponsored by the Goodson Law Library , Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain , and the Harvard Law School Library . Panels will address the traditional versus open access business model for law journals, how a move to open access affects copyright and author agreements, and technological concerns such as publishing platforms and archiving processes. The agenda, registration form, and housing information can be found at http://bit.ly/durhamOA . Duke Law and our co-sponsors at Harvard Law have long been leaders in the Open Access movement fo...

Tired of checking the study room clipboard at the library service desk, only to find every room booked solid for the rest of the night? Well, now you can stake a claim to one of our eight private study rooms up to 72 hours ahead of time from your own computer. From Monday, September 27 until Friday, October 8 , the Goodson Law Library will pilot-test an online reservation system. To reserve a study room, visit the reservation link and log in with your NetID and password ( note: study rooms are available only to Duke Law students). The reservation page displays the current availability of our eight room keys, and links to the calendar where rooms can be reserved (in four hour time blocks) up to three days in advance. Be sure to claim your room key promptly; your reservation may be forfeited if the key is not picked up within 15 minutes of the reservation start time. Because this is a pilot program, please be sure to let us know what you think of the online sign-up experience. The res...

After years of maintaining nearly 400 different Tax Management Portfolio titles in print , the Goodson Law Library now has electronic access to the full text of the Tax Management Portfolios through BNA’s Tax and Accounting Libraries . These slim spiral-bound Portfolios are heavily used by tax professionals, who rely on the news, commentary and analysis within to keep current with changes in tax law. A list on BNA’s site describes the various titles available in the five portfolio series (Accounting; U.S. income tax; Estates, Gifts, and Trusts, Foreign Income and State tax). To browse or search the portfolios online, visit the BNA Publications database , which is available on the library’s Legal Databases & Links page . Our research guide to Federal Tax has been updated to add the new database, and the remainder of the guide will be updated in the weeks to come. The print portfolios, currently housed in the library’s Gann Tax Alcove, will shortly be moved to reflect the fact that...

As 1Ls make progress on their open memo assignment and 2Ls/3Ls slog through cite-checking journal assignments, it seems like everyone could use a helping hand with The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation these days. The Goodson Law Library has some spare copies on Reserve for when you just need to confirm an abbreviation or a rule, and there is also an online version (paid subscription required) which offers full-text searching of the new 19th edition and the ability to save personal annotations for future tricky cites. But what people really seem to want is a tool to convert citations automatically into proper Bluebook format. We’re often asked for advice on shortcuts to perfect legal citation: everything from “Can’t I just copy what it says on Lexis and Westlaw?” to “Is there a citation management software that will put footnotes together for me?” We’ve previously written about citation management tools such as EndNote and Zotero , which offer some support for Bluebook styl...

They’re a little too early for International Talk Like a Pirate Day (Sunday, September 19), but last week the Library of Congress announced its new digitized collection of pre-1923 piracy trials . Spanning two centuries, this collection provides transcripts of historical pirate trials from around the world, from Captain Kidd to lesser-known buccaneers. This site joins HeinOnline’s Legal Classics Library and The Making of Modern Law: Trials on the list of good sources for historic trial transcripts (see library research guide to Court Records and Briefs for more info). While it’s usually 18th-century pirates who capture our pop culture imagination in books like Treasure Island and films like the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, piracy remains a very real threat on today’s seas, especially in international waters off the Horn of Africa. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s Maritime Administration (MARAD) reported on August 2 that 18 vessels are currently being held by Somal...