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When Librarians Lawyer Up Catalogs Expand: The Tale of Cassidy, SkyRiver, and monopolist not-for-profit

Brooklyn Law School Library WorldCat collection is expanding.
WorldCat is an immense database of books, articles and other resources collectively created by library catalogers around the world for the past three decades via Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), a nonprofit agency. 

On March 17, 2011, Cassidy Cataloguing Services, Inc. announced that following collections will be included in Brooklyn Law School’s WorldCat Local subscription:

  • Westlaw: E-Treatises, Law Journals & Law Reviews
  • LexisNexis: E-Treatises, Primary Source Materials

Cassidy Cataloguing Services, headquartered in Rockaway, NJ, was founded in 1985 and provide cataloging solutions to law libraries. It primarily focuses on the cataloging of the digital collections of legal publishers like HeinOnline, Westlaw, LexisNexis, Wolters Kluwer CCH.

This catalog expansion involves a resolution of protracted dispute between Cassidy Cataloguing Services and OCLC. 

As Steve Essig of UCLA explains an interesting antitrust and intellectual property issue in his December 12, 2007 post to the Criminal Law Library Blog:

  • In late 2007, Cassidy Cataloguing Services announced a partnership with that would make cataloging records for Lexis and Westlaw e-treatises. But Cassidy Cataloguing contract and OCLC contract clashed.  OCLC contract made them owners of Cassidy’s records.
  • Essign stated that UCLA had contracted [with Cassidy Cataloguing Services] to receive Lexis and Westlaw [MARC record sets] but failed to take possession because [OCLC’s] new union catalog contract requires all records to become part of OCLC.  As a result, Cassidy [Cataloguing Services] has asked subscribers not to upload the Westlaw or Lexis MARC records to OCLC.”
Here is the controversial provision in the OCLC agreement:.
Delivery of Bibliographic Records, Section 2.3 

“Vendor hereby grants to OCLC, OCLC participants and non-participant users, and OCLC designees, a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable right to copy, display, publish, prepare derivative works from, distribute and use (including, without limitation, use in forming new compilations of information and loading into WorldCat) Total Records, and any other bibliographic records, holdings and other information supplied to OCLC, during the term of this Agreement with Vendor…”

Due to its actions in late 2007 and throughout 2008, OCLC unleashed ire of many law librarians and law libraries.  OCLC, over the last 18 years, with a series of strategic acquisitions had narrowed its competition.  Now, it had a new rival.
In 2009, Skyriver Technology Solutions, launched SkyRiver, a bibliographic utility, directly challenging long-dominant OCLC. With SkyRiver’s entry into the market, there was now an alternative bibliographic utility for cataloging that could save libraries lots of money, up to 40 percent off their expenditures for bibliographic services in come cases. 

So how did OCLC, a not-for-profit company react?

On March 15, 2010, Victoria Szymczak, Brooklyn Law School Library Director, wrote in the Law Librarian Blog,  “I have always been a fan of OCLC.  I think the organization has done wonderful work with libraries. And, I am very disappointed in their actions toward libraries that are trying to be better consumers and provide more innovative services to their institutions.”

On July 28, 2010, Skyriver Technology Solutions filed a complaint against OCLC alleging federal and state antitrust violations and unfair competition. More specifically the complaint states that OCLC “…is unlawfully monopolizing the bibliographic data, cataloging services, and interlibrary lending markets and is attempting to monopolize the market for integrated library systems by anticompetitive and exclusionary agreements, policies and practices.”  For more about the legal dispute, check out the Library Technologies Guide to the SkyRiver vs. OCLC lawsuit.

It looks as if OCLC and Cassidy Cataloguing Services may finally reach a compromise. OCLC grants permission to allow a WorldCat Local institution that has purchased Cassidy MARC record sets to view the records as part of its WorldCat Local subscription.  This means that the records will only display to users of that institution’s WorldCat Local and will not be available to other libraries, or other commercial members, for copy cataloguing or to attach holding codes.

The lawsuit between SkyRiver and OCLC is still pending.

Having Problems with LexisNexis Web Courses

Recently, users of LexisNexis Web Courses have experienced nativation problems with this platform. This problem is often experienced when LexisNexis Web Course platform is launched using either Mozilla Firefox browser.
To remedy this problem, Brooklyn Law School Library recommends that users upgrade their either Mozilla Firefox browser.

Manually check for Mozilla Firefox Updates On Windows XP

  1. At the top of the Firefox window, click on the Help menu and select About Firefox.
  2. The About Firefox window will open and Firefox will begin checking for updates.
    • If updates are available, they will begin downloading automatically.
    • If Firefox is already up to date, just close the About Firefox window.
  3. When the updates are downloaded and ready to be installed, click Apply Update.
  4. Firefox will be restarted and the updates will be installed.
  5. If major updates are available, the Software Update window will open. Click Get the New Version to begin the update process.

 

Main Collection Area Temporarily Closed

The main collection area of the library, located in the cellar, is temporarily closed due to work on the plaza.  We do not know when it will re-open, but in the interim, for computer access, please use the cellar Mac lab, which is open or the second mezzanine Lexis and Westlaw labs or the third floor computer lab.

If you need a book located in the main collection, please let the circulation desk staff know the book’s call number and title, as well as your email address and we will pull the book and notify you as soon as we can retrieve books from the stacks.

Thanks for your patience and cooperation!

Library Amnesty During National Library Week, April 11-15, 2011

  In 1958 the American Library Association began a salute to libraries nationwide with its annual celebration of “National Library Week.”  It has been observed every April since and this year it will be April 10-16, 2011. 

In observance of National Library Week, the BLS Library will have a library books amnesty during that week.  Beginning Monday, April 11th through Friday, April 16th, students may return any overdue books they have outstanding with no fees charged and no questions asked.  Just bring all overdue books to the circulation desk and your library record will be cleared of overdues and fines.

Please be aware, however, that amnesty does not include overdue fines still on record from previously returned materials.

Let’s share the knowledge with other library users and return all overdue books!

Drug Sentencing and Race

US District Judge Jack B. Weinstein’s well-researched 126 page Statement of Reasons for Sentencing Pursuant to 18 USC § 3553(c)(2) in US v. Bannister, 2000 WL 1113591 (E.D.N.Y. March 24, 2011) is worth reading for its in-depth historical, cultural, economic, and social analysis of the law’s treatment of the inner city drug trade. Discussing the mandatory minimum sentence guidelines in the case of 8 of 11 black and Hispanic young men charged in street-level dealing of heroin and crack near the Louis Armstrong Houses in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, Judge Weinstein makes no excuses for the choices that the defendants made that led them to his courtroom. He spends the first 40 pages tracing “fixed artifacts of history” including hundreds of years of enslavement of African Americans, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, northward migration, de jure and de facto segregation, decades of neglect, and intermittent improvement efforts by government.

He then goes on to address the effectiveness of long-term sentences for drug offences in reducing crime as well as the disparity in sentencing for offences involving cocaine in powder versus crack form. In the end, he follows the precedent of US v. Moore 54 F.3d 92 (2d Cir. 1995) that mandatory minimum sentences do not violate equal protection as well as precedent that Congress did not enact the sentencing disparity in the treatment of crack cocaine versus powder cocaine with a discriminatory intent (a ratio of 100 to 1 ratio under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 later reduced to a ratio of 17.8 to 1 by The Fairness in Sentencing Act of 2010). But his statements that mandatory minimum sentencing provisions prevent the exercise of a fundamental judicial duty, that lengthy incarcertion fails to serve the purposes of sentencing, and his strong suggesion to revisit precedent is a likely basis for future challenges to lengthy drug sentences for failure to comply with 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a).

The recent entry at Sentencing Law and Policy by Prof. Doug Berman contains excerpts from the opinion including these stirring words:

Pragmatism and a sense of fairness suggest reconsideration of our overreliance on incarceration. Though defendants are hemmed in by circumstances, the law must believe that free will offers an escape. Otherwise, its vaunted belief in redemption and deterrence—both specific and general—is a euphemism for cruelty. These defendants are not merely criminals, but human beings and fellow American citizens, deserving of an opportunity for rehabilitation. Even now, they are capable of useful lives, lived lawfully.

For further reading, see Crack Pipes and Policing: A Case Study of Institutional Racism and Remedial Action in Cleveland at 33 Law & Policy 179 (April 2011) availalble at the Brooklyn Law Library circulation desk.

Episode 064 – Conversation with Professor Elizabeth Schneider

Episode 064 – Conversation with Professor Elizabeth Schneider.mp3

In this podcast, Brooklyn Law School Professor Elizabeth M. Schneider talks about her recently published book Women and the Law Stories (Call #KF478..A5. W642 2011) which she co-edited with Prof. Stephanie M. Wildman and for which they wrote the Introduction. The book looks at landmark cases establishing women’s legal rights, and tells the stories of the litigants, history, parties, strategies, and theoretical implications. Prof. Schneider uses the book in her Women and the Law course to give students the human stories behind the cases. The subject areas of the book include history, constitutional law, reproductive freedom, the workplace, the family, and women in the legal profession as well as domestic violence and rape. Prof. Schneider teaches Civil Procedure, Domestic Violence and the Law, Women and the Law and a Federal Civil Litigation, Public Law and Justice Seminar. Her extensive list of publications is available here.

Bridge the Gap Legal Research Program

The Law Library Association of Greater New York (LLAGNY) is sponsoring the Bridge the Gap Legal Research Program at New York Law School on April 8, 2011. The cost of the program is $40.00 and includes breakfast, lunch and course materials. Program description flyers and the registration form are now posted on the LLAGNY website.

There are separate program flyers for students and for attorneys. Here are the direct links to those materials in a PDF (fillable) format: for Law Students; for Attorneys; and for Library Students. There are also versions of the forms in Word at the website.

Having Fun with the OED

The Oxford English Dictionary is the granddaddy of dictionaries.  If you were a word, the OED lets you know when you have arrived and rolls out the carpet to welcome you to the English language.  For the English speaker, it is the place to go if you want to learn how a word got its meaning and how the meaning may have changed over the years, along with the spelling of the word.  Since putting the OED online, the publishers have added many enhancements that can bring out the word geek in all of us.

For example, the timeline feature tells us how many words entered the English language each year, beginning with the year 600.  One of the first words listed is the word town – which was spelt tuun way back in 601 and meant “an enclosed land surrounding a single dwelling.”  You can see how the word changed over time under the enty.

You can also filter the timeline by region, origin and subject.  For example, when looking at the time line, we learn that most of the words in our language were added to the English language between 1850 and 1899.  (In fact, 42,229 words were added during those years).  However, if we sort by subject – for example – law – we learn that most legal terms were recognized as English words in the years 1600-1649 (the number of new words was 1,595.

The OED adds new entries on a daily basis.  For example, today’s new words included:

♥ to heart

The new sense added to heart v. in this update may be the first English usage to develop via the medium of T-shirts and bumper-stickers. It originated as a humorous reference to logos featuring a picture of a heart as a symbol for the verb love, like that of the famous ‘I ♥ NY’ tourism campaign. Our earliest quote for this use, from 1984, uses the verb in ‘I heart my dog’s head’, a jokey play on bumper stickers featuring a heart and a picture of the face of a particular breed of dog (expressing a person’s enthusiasm for, say, shih-tzus) which itself became a popular bumper sticker.  From these beginnings, heart v. has gone on to live an existence in more traditional genres of literature as a colloquial synonym for ‘to love’.

It also included muffin top, initialisms like LOL, and lumpenintelligentsia.  What?  You don’t know what lumpenintelligentsia means?  Look it up here (remember to use the proxy server if not on campus):   http://www.oed.com

March Madness and Sports Law

As March Madness sweeps across college basketball, the Brooklyn Law School Library has added to its collection Legal Issues in American Basketball edited by Lewis Kurlantzick (Call #KF3989.A75 L445 2011), a set of essays on a variety of legal issues facing professional basketball. The book is the second in a series dealing with the legal regulation of athletics. The BLS Library also has the first in the series, Legal Issues in Professional Baseball (Call #KF3989.A75 L44 2005). The new book has five chapters including an introduction by the editor, a law professor at the University of Connecticut School of law, and these chapters: Technology and Legal Issues in Professional Basketball; Labor Relations in the NBA: Beyond the Words and into the Practice; Thunder on the Road from Seattle to Oklahoma City: Moving from NOPA to ZOPA in the NBA; “We Got Next”: the Once and Future WNBA; An International Dimension: Player Movement, the NBA-FIBA Agreement, and Foreign League lLmitations on American Payers. The contributors are Robert C. Berry, Pofessor at Boston College Law School; Russ VerSteeg, a graduate of the University of Connecticut School of Law and Pofessor at New England Law School; Jacquelyn Bridgeman, a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School and Pofessor at the University of Wyoming’s College of Law; and James R. McCurdy, a graduate of the University of Texas School of Law and Pofessor of Sports Law at Gonzaga University School of Law.

BLS students looking for a study aid on sports law can review Sports Law in a Nutshell by Walter T. Champion (Call #KF3989.Z9 C48 2009) on reserve at the circulation desk. The nutshell simplifies the complex world of sports law and provides a road map to issues such as contracts, torts, antitrust, liabilities, constitutional implications, labor law, and taxes. Sports Law Practice, a two-volume looseleaf set by Martin J. Greenberg (Call #KF3989 .G74 2009),is a more useful resource for the attorney or agent in the arena of sports law with sample forms, checklists, and examples that provide invaluable assistance in drafting contracts. Contractual analysis assists in understanding contract provisions and how to structure contracts and addendums.