The US Patent and Trademark Office has announced that as of 1 October 2011, their nationwide network of Patent and Trademark Depository Libraries (PTDLs) will become known as Patent and Trademark Resource Centers (PTRCs). From the press release:

The name change signifies a major shift in focus from the “paper depository” concept to an expansion of access to electronic information and specialized training to meet the information needs of 21st Century patent and trademark customers. …

“PTRCs serve as the face of the USPTO in local communities and promote a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship that ensures that potential filers have the local resources necessary to draw on for support as they begin their quest for commercial success with their intellectual property,” said Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO David Kappos.

In addition to offering free electronic services and resources designed to support the intellectual property needs of local and state patrons, PTRC’s employ USPTO-trained librarians to provide customer assistance on the use of the agency’s patent and trademark databases and public seminars on intellectual property topics for novice and experienced users.

These 80+ resource centers can be found using the online PTRC Library List.

Bloomberg LP, parent company of Bloomberg News, announced today its intention to acquire Bureau of National Affairs Inc. (BNA).

From the Bloomberg press release:

Bloomberg LP, the closely held news and financial information provider, agreed to buy BNA for about $990 million to add legal, tax and regulatory research and analysis. … BNA shareholders, who are current and former employees, will get $39.50 a share in cash in a transaction that is expected to be completed this year, New York-based Bloomberg said in a statement today. … The tender offer will begin by Sept. 8 and is subject to regulatory approval, Bloomberg said.

From the BNA press release:

BNA, which is wholly owned by current and former employees, provides important legal, tax and regulatory research and analysis and would become a stand-alone subsidiary of Bloomberg. … Together, Bloomberg and BNA would form a unique combination of premium content, deep subject matter expertise, proprietary data and world class technological capabilities to provide distinctive products and solutions for professionals and decision makers in law, government, business and finance. … “For more than eight decades, we have provided our subscribers with quality products that allow them to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently,” said Paul N. Wojcik, Chairman and CEO of BNA. “We believe this is the start of a new day, where we will join forces with Bloomberg to extend our premium content to an expanded audience.”

Thanks for this report go to DGI member Amy Taylor, Washington College of Law, American University. For the DGI blog, Amy shares her notes from the session The Role of Law Libraries in Advancing Law.gov presented at the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) annual meeting in Philadelphia this July. Please note: “Law.gov” is not an actual website, but rather a concept that citizen access to U.S. law should be free of charge and free of license restrictions.

Take it away, Amy…

These are notes are from a panel discussion session with Carl Malamud, Public.Resource.Org; Keith Ann Stiverson, Chicago-Kent College of Law Library; Sarah Glassmeyer, Valparaiso University School of Law; and Ed Walters, Fastcase. Session was moderated by Greg Lambert, King & Spalding.

Carl Malamud spoke about projects that his Public.Resource.Org is currently involved with, including the 9th Circuit Briefs project in conjunction with UC Hastings.  The briefs from 1890-1970 have been scanned, broken into individual briefs, and enhanced with metadata and an external catalog.  After a spot-check, the briefs will be sent to the U.S. Archives, and after they are checked, will be certified as electronic federal copies and may be used as if they are the print version.

Keith Ann Stiverson encouraged law librarians to reflect on our successes and move forward with optimism — out of the 2007 50 State Survey on Authentication came the summit which led to the Uniform Act on Electronic Legal Materials (UELMA), and the Government Relations Policy has recently been revised.

Sarah Glassmeyer reminded us that Law.gov is not trying to be a complete substitute for commercial publishers, but open law is coming and there are thousands of ways to get involved. There are lots of smaller digitization projects, and we can’t wait for the overarching plan.

Ed Walters talked about Fastcase’s attempt to license the Georgia State Code from Lexis.  But since Lexis owns the Georgia code, it can set the licensing fee.  However, when Fastcase inquired, Lexis declined to license the code at all, for any price.  Ed acknowledged that West and Lexis have in many ways been careful stewards of the law, but problems arise when private corporations are owners of the law.

Ideally, the public corpus would be unbundled, free or inexpensive, and with access for everyone.  There are business models that make sense, and can make the raw materials available so the legal industry can have its internet revolution.

[Amy reported on two AALL sessions for DGI; the other is Authentication & Digital Law: Report from AALL.]

If you have not seen it yet, check out Amy Taylor’s DGI blog post Authentication & Digital Law: Report from AALL. She reports on a conference session about the new draft Uniform Electronic Legal Materials Act (UELMA).

UELMA is also the topic of today’s Library of Congress digital preservation blog post, Meet My Trustworthy Friend, UELMA. The post explains the potential impact of UELMA:

This is huge! While not proscribing any particular preservation or authentication method or technology, the law establishes a digital preservation framework for official electronic legal materials moving forward.

If legal material defined by the act is published only electronically it must be designated “official” and meet the requirements of the act. If there is a print version of the legal material, an official publisher may designate the online version “official,” but the requirements of the act to authenticate, preserve, and provide access must be met.

Of course, as Amy explains, each state must enact the language of UELMA in its legislature for it to have real impact.

Thanks for this report go to DGI member Amy Taylor, Washington College of Law, American University. For the DGI blog, Amy shares her notes from the session Authentication: the Evolution Continues presented at the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) annual meeting in Philadelphia this month. Take it away, Amy…

These are notes are from a session with Barbara Bintliff, University of Texas, Jamail Center for Legal Research, and Michele Timmons, Office of the Revisor of Statutes.

This session focused on the recently enacted Uniform Electronic Legal Materials Act (UELMA) passed by the Uniform Law Commission.  Barbara Bintliff, Reporter for the UELMA spoke about the drafting process.  Michelle Timmons, Chair of the UELMA of the drafting committee spoke about the law’s specific provisions.

The Uniform Law Commission is a non-profit, unincorporated association of about 350 members.  By drafting uniform law acts in statutory areas that lend themselves to uniformity, they ULC is able to promote enactment of uniform laws by the states and thus bring uniformity to the law.  Ms. Bintliff stressed that before the ULC will undertake the draft of a uniform act, there must be a substantial reason to anticipate enactment and that uniformity is a principal objective.  Additionally, a uniform law, in and of itself, is not the law — it becomes the law in each state that enacts it. Enactment is everything.

Because technical standards and formats are evolving, and costs are an issue, the Act is outcomes-based and tech-neutral.  The goal of the Act is to make possible the provision of online legal material with the same level of trustworthiness traditionally provided by publication in print.  The Act requires 3 things from publishers: 1) authentication — the method of authentication is not prescribed, but the user should be able to determine that the work is unaltered; 2) preservation in either print or electronic format;  and 3) that the material be accessible for use by the public on a permanent basis. (Text of UELMA)

The Act mandates that the following materials be covered, whether currently in effect or not: State Constitutions, Session Laws, State Codes and State Agency Rules.  The Act permits the inclusion of the following materials: State Agency Decisions, State Court Rules, Reported Decisions of Specific State Courts, and Other Materials, which was added to include City, County, and Municipal Ordinances.

The state names a state agency or official as the official publisher with the authority to implement the Act.  The Act applies prospectively, and provides that if material is published in electronic format only, then it must be designated as official.  If published in print and electronic, then the electronic format may be designed as official.  The official publishers are required to consider the most recent technical standards in an effort to keep the Act from being obsolete before it is even enacted.  The Act does not address copyright issues, rules of evidence, and the relationship between the official state publisher and commercial publishers.

–Submitted by Amy Taylor

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has just made a collection of 28 federal legislative histories available online at USDOJ: Legislative Histories. The histories were researched and compiled by DOJ librarians and have previously been available only in the department’s main library.

In their guide to the topic, the Law Librarians’ Society of Washington, DC (LLSDC) describes federal legislative histories as “compilations of documents related to a specific U.S. public law that precede the law’s enactment.” LLSDC also has a guide to finding legislative histories online from both government and commercial sources: Legislative Histories of Selected U.S. Laws on the Internet.

Law Librarian of Congress Roberta Shaffer issued a news-packed letter today. Greetings from the Law Librarian of Congress, an open “holiday letter,” is available as a guest post on the Law Library’s blog, In Custodia Legis. In the letter, Roberta summarizes the Library’s service to Congress and government, staff accomplishments, digital initiatives, new publications, international cooperation, and future directions.

Some quotes of note:

…The Congressional Joint Committee on Printing recently authorized the Government Printing Office to work with the Library of Congress in creating enhanced access online to three sets of important documents, the “Constitution of the United States: Analysis and Interpretation” (CONAN); historical volumes of the Congressional Record; and the United States Statutes at Large. We will play a substantial role in this collaboration.

…the Law Library’s future plans include developing and maintaining a “One World Law Library,” or “OWLL,” using the latest digital technologies to make the world’s laws and law-related materials accessible and usable over the Internet.

…we will be focusing efforts on the structure and content for our domain, LAW.GOV. This will involve collaboration with internal LC stakeholders, as well as myriad external ones, including state and local libraries, federal agencies, and foreign and international law collections held globally.

For the first time in a very long time, the Unites States Code will be adding a title. Naturally overlooked in the early years of our nation, space law will get dedicated coverage in a new Title 51, “National and Commercial Space Programs”.

The current 50-title scheme was established in 1926. Much of the code regarding NASA has been in Title 42 (Public Health and Welfare), chapter 155 (via Cornell LII).

The 111th Congress bill establishing Title 51, H.R. 3237, has been passed by the House and Senate and will be sent to the White House for the President’s signature. The congressional Office of the Law Revision Counsel, which has the responsibility to prepare such legislation, includes a brief summary of the bill’s purpose on its website.

The outline of Title 51 is included in the bill. Subtitles are:

• Subtitle I – General
• Subtitle II – General Program and Policy Provisions
• Subtitle III – Administrative Provisions
• Subtitle IV – Aeronautics and Space Research and Education
• Subtitle V – Programs Targeting Commercial Opportunities
• Subtitle VI – Earth Observations
• Subtitle VII – Access to Space

The committee report for H.R. 3237 (House Report 111-325, via FDsys.gov) includes a disposition table for the current U.S. Code sections that will be moving to Title 51.

Title 51 is being enacted as positive law. For an explanation of positive law, see Positive Law Codification in the United States Code (from the Legislative Counsel via LLSDC Legislative Sourcebook).

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” is an old management adage. Sarah Rhodes of Georgetown University helps us with the measurement part in her recent journal article Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive’s Examination of URL Stability (Law Library Journal vol. 102 no. 4). Sarah reports her analysis of link rot data based on a sample from the archive of the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group, a “collaborative digital preservation program established to preserve and ensure permanent access to vital legal information currently available in digital formats on the World Wide Web.”

Due to the nature of the archive, “more than 90% of the top-level domains in the sample were state government (state.[state code].us), organization (.org), or government (.gov) URLs, representing approximately 41%, 32%, and 17% of the sample, respectively.” The archived materials are predominantly PDFs. Among her findings: The state government, .org, and .gov domains were the leaders in link rot, with state government outpacing them all.

As Sarah explains, the Chesapeake Group’s archive is highly selective and not representative of Web archives in general. For details on the definitions and methodology used for this study, see the full article.

[h/t @richards1000]

David Selden, Director of the
National Indian Law Library in Boulder, Colorado (http://www.narf.org/nill/), has been honored as one of Law Week Colorado‘s Outstanding Legal Professionals of 2010.

The National Indian Law Library is a public law library devoted to federal Indian and tribal law. Its collection consists of Native American legal materials ranging from books and journal articles to tribal self-governance documents, such as tribal codes and constitutions.

Selden was featured in the August 23 print issue of Law Week Colorado. In the article, Jamie Cotten writes:

Next door to the Native American Rights Fund in Boulder
is the National Indian Law Library – a small building filled with Native
American law books and codes.

The former fraternity house is now a nationally
recognized Native American law library, run for the past 12 years by law
librarian David Selden, one of Law Week Colorado’s picks for our 2010
Outstanding Legal Professionals issue.

Earlier this year, Selden received the Roy M. Merskey Spirit of Law Librarianship Award, given to nationally recognized people in librarianship.

It’s
an award for [someone] who’s done a lot for community service outside
of their profession, so it related to my environmental work that I’ve
been doing and volunteerism for the Colorado Indian Bar,” Selden said.

“The award generally goes to the big names in the field,
so for him to receive that is quite an honor,” said Robert Linz,
associate director and head of public service for the Colorado Association of Law Libraries.

“He’s
really passionate about his work with the tribes, and in making that
material available. He’s also known as the expert researcher in that
area.”

Selden, who spent five years in Uganda as a child with his
family, was exposed to cultures and tribes not many 7-year-olds, or
adults for that matter, will see. Selden’s father is an anthropologist.

“I gained a respect and interest in other people’s
values, and even though in many ways we’re so different, we have a lot
in common,” he said.

David’s work to promote sustainability in libraries and communities was highlighted in the announcement of the Merskey award, given by the University of Texas School of Law. The Special Libraries Association
named him a Knowledge to Go Green Champion in 2009.