The Goodson Blogson

By all accounts, Ohio native Lillian Mountweazel (1942-1973) lived an interesting life. The former fountain designer turned to photography at the tender age of 21, exhibiting and publishing her critically-acclaimed photographs of such far-ranging subjects as Parisian cemeteries and American mailboxes. Mountweazel died at just 31 years old in an explosion, while on an assignment for Combustibles magazine. Had she lived a bit longer, she might have eventually settled down in Agloe, New York or Argleton, England -- places which, like Lillian Mountweazel, never really existed. Those are just a few examples of copyright traps : fabrications deliberately tucked into otherwise factual publications in order to detect third-party copying. Copyright traps can be found in a variety of sources like: Encyclopedias : Lillian Mountweazel was an invention of The New Columbia Encyclopedia (1975). "If someone copied Lillian," editor Richard Steins told The New Yorker in 2005 , "the...

The Goodson Law Library's research guide to North Carolina Practice has just been updated. This guide outlines primary and secondary legal research resources for the state of North Carolina, in both print and electronic formats. So what's changed in the latest version of this guide, besides updates to links and book editions? A new section with guidance on researching North Carolina legislative history , including links to General Assembly study reports and digitized versions of House and Senate journals. Updates to the list of A-Z Subject Treatises to include North Carolina Continuing Legal Education (CLE) publications, which are now available to the Duke Law School community via Bloomberg Law 's secondary sources menu. Improved instructions for accessing online versions of other treatises on LexisNexis and WestlawNext , as well as N.C. pattern jury instructions through Fastcase (which is provided free to members of the N.C. Bar Association, and is the only elect...

It's no secret that web links can be unreliable. The Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group , which has been reporting on website "link rot" since 2008, said in its 2013 annual report that nearly half of the links from its original website sample list no longer work; this includes a number of government and educational websites. A similar study of websites cited by the U.S. Supreme Court from 1996-2010 showed that nearly one-third of the cited links were no longer functional. As the A.B.A. Journal reported in December , groups including Chesapeake as well as Perma.cc (of which Duke Law is a member) are working to combat the problem going forward, but in many cases the damage has already been done. So what can researchers do when they encounter a dead website URL? A blueprint can be found in chapter 6 of the latest edition of Levitt & Rosch's new reference work The Cybersleuth's Guide to the Internet: Conducting Effective Free Investigative & Legal Re...