Below please find the text of an email that was sent to YLS students regarding current awareness tools.

Today, I thought that I would let you know about a few tools that can help you keep current.  These tools can help you keep current with the law in particular fields or scholarship in particular fields, by particular authors, or that appear in particular journals.

There are several methods that you can use to stay current with new events in particular areas of law.  I expect that you are already familiar with Lexis' and Westlaw's saved searches (if not, contact a reference librarian or the Lexis or Westlaw representative for instruction).  Those tools allow you to receive new results from searches that you have constructed.  There are, however, better tools.

Two publishers have specialized in a form of legal publishing called "looseleafs".  Looseleafs pull together all primary source material on a legal topic as well as analysis and current awareness information (the name hearkens back to their print past).  Today, these publishes still produce these research tools and they are still very useful and they produce excellent current awareness tools.

Commerce Clearinghouse is one of these publishers.  CCH has pulled many of their looseleafs together into one online platform that you can access from the Law Library Databases page (under the name CCH Online Networks).  After a short registration process you will have access to information on a wide variety of legal topics.  You can also sign up to receive "tracker" newsletters from CCH (either in your email of via your rss reader) on over 70 legal topics.  Just click on the "tracker News" link in the upper left.

Another looseleaf publisher, the Bureau of National Affairs also produces material on a large number of legal topics and produces newsletters on over 100 legal topics.  You can see a list of the newsletters here: http://www.law.yale.edu/library/research/bna-email.asp.  These newsletters will come to you by email.  If you are interested in receiving any BNA newsletters, please send an email with your name, your Yale email address, and the name(s) of the newsletters that you would like to receive to john dot nann at yale dot edu.  Please note that it will take several days for your BNA subscription to become active.

There are several tools that you can use to track legal scholarship.  I expect that you know about the "New Acquisition" lists that the law library publishes, http://www.law.yale.edu/library/acquisitions.asp, but did you know that you can find out, on a weekly basis, what new books we've recieved on any topic that  you choose?  To do that, set up a preferred search and have new results sent to you.  To set up a preferred search, conduct a search in MORRIS (a subject search is a good one) and, on the results screen, click on the "Save as preferred search" button.  Log in and follow the prompts and from then on, you'll receive notice of any new books that we receive that match your search.  By the way, for broader coverage, you can also do the same at worldcat.org.

There are a couple of good tools for keeping up with legal periodical articles.  Washington and Lee Law Library's Law Journal Content tool allows you to set up an rss feed for new journal tables of contents (http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC/index.aspx) (there is actually a lot more that you can do with the content, you can see their information page for more: http://lawlib.wlu.edu/CLJC/explanation.aspx).

The Current Index to Legal Periodicals is another contents tool.  CILP is available to you by a variety of means.  First, it exists as a database on Westlaw (database identifier is CILP) and the usual Westlaw saved searches work on it.  Second, you can sign up to get the tables of contents of selected journals and/or information about articles classified under selected subjects.  To set up a CILP search, go to http://lib.law.washington.edu/cilp/scilp.html and set up a profile.  First, however, you will need YLS's code.  You can get that in the Library databases link on the Inside site (https://inside.law.yale.edu/Research/305/default.aspx - this should work if you sign in).  And third, you can go to CILP and read it in html, Word or PDF at: http://cilp.nellco.org/cilp/index.cfm.

Also, some journal publishers provide table of content or other current awareness tools for their stable of titles (see Sage Journals Online for example) and other, non-law, indexes allow you to save searches.  If you are interested in any of these, stop by and see a reference librarian or contact one of us and set up a meeting (http://www.law.yale.edu/library/reference.asp).

Also, don't forget that we can help with your other research issues.  You can stop by or, for more complex probnlems, contact us and set up a meeting.

Thank you!

John

--
John B. Nann
Associate Librarian for Reference and Instructional Services,
Bibliographer for EU and UK Law, and Lecturer in Legal Research
Yale Law School
127 Wall Street
P.O. Box 208215
New Haven, CT 06520-8215
203.432.1259
john dot nann at yale dot edu

Tough question to answer, but Reed-Elsivier took a crack at it.  They looked closely at the carbon costs related to one journal (the aptly enetitled Fuel) 

There are two sides to the cost: production and end use.  The biggest carbon impact in journal production was employee commuting and business travel.    Production of the journal used about 40 tons of CO2.  Delivery of the print journal has about twice the carbon impact when compared to online delivery.  But, and it's a big but, the largest variable is end user behavior.  Online delivery starts out with a 2 to 1 advantage over print (say 10 tons of CO2 versus 5 tons).  However, if users print out the articles, the online benefit quicky disappears.  The estimate of the carbon impact of "high end use" of the online version using the numbers above raises the 5 tons to 80 tons!  Although, the study seems not to include any corresponding increase related to photocopying articles from print journals.

So, production 40 tons, printing and distribution 10 tons, online delivery 5 tons.  Printing out the online journal up to 75 tons!

In any event, what seems clear is that the biggest variable is end user behavior and that a marked benefit for online delivery can quickly disappear.  Another reason for better e-readers!

Hmm, the Chief Justice isn't so enamored with the Internet on online research.  The Des Moines Register quotes Chief Justice Roberts as saying that "[t]he Internet is a powerful tool that nonetheless threatens to undermine the critical thinking and research skills lawyers need to effectively argue a case".  What do you think?  Are you able to research online, does the lack of a structure that the print imposes a help or a hinderance?

This fall, the Law Library will be hosting a series of fall research seminars focused on helping law students prepare for their supervised analytical writing (SAW) assignment by demonstrating the emerging technologies in the field of legal research.  Students will learn about helpful (and not so helpful) legal databases, how to search for information and how maintain legal research records.  Lecturers will showcase subscription based as well as open source tools for legal research.  These seminars are open to the whole law school community.  The first event is:

Emerging Technologies in Documenting and Tracking Your Research
Wednesday, September 17, 2008; 3:00 - 4:00 p.m. - Room 112

Participants will learn how to manage their electronic research using tools such as RSS feeds, Zotero, Google, etc.  Cookies and light refreshments will be served.

If you were unable to attend this event, please contact Reference Librarian Camilla Tubbs for information on these important research tools.

 A new report from the Law Library of Congress has been posted.  The report covers and references both international treaty obligations and domestic legislation.

It has always seemed that history is the area of research best suited for the heavy use of technology.  A new wiki on English medieval legal documents confirms this again!

The notice of the wiki, published on the listserv of the American Association of Law Libraries Special Interest Section for Foreign, Comparative and International Law says, "Hazel Lord, Senior Law Librarian at the University of Southern California School of Law has been tirelessly working on a bibliography of published sources of English medieval legal documents (covering the years 600-1532).  What she had thought originally would only be a few hundred sources, has blossomed into a list of close to 1,000 sources!"

She has created a wiki for this project.  The wiki can be found here:  http://emld.usc.edu/tiki-index.php.

She hopes that you will take a look and participate.

The Library of Congress has a number of RSS feeds.  Many are primarily of interest to those headed to DC, but there are also some excellent copyright feeds, law feeds, and other interesting feeds.  A list of the feeds with descriptions is available here: http://www.loc.gov/rss/.

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) is joining the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and Federal Depository Libraries around the country to provide an online reference service to the American public.  UIC will manage and maintain this unique free web based service called  "Government Information Online: Ask a Librarian."   It will be supported by nearly 20 public, academic and state libraries throughout the country.  This service will give the public an opportunity to ask questions about government resources to librarians who specialize in finding government information on every topic.

An example of how this service works: with the current process in the Presidential elections, the public may have questions about the primaries, caucuses and Electoral College process. A librarian is available at http://govtinfo.org/ to answer those or any other questions about the government. 

Yale University currently offers "Ask a Librarian" services to its library patrons, at http://www.library.yale.edu/reference/asklive/index.html