ZiefBrief

HeinOnline Search Tips and Tricks

Current USF Law students, faculty, and staff have remote digital access to HeinOnline.  To access Zief digital resources remotely, follow these instructions.

1) To access our databases remotely, you must use the specially-formatted links on the Zief Law Library A to Z database page.

2) After clicking a database link on this page, enter your myUSF username and password when you are prompted to do so.

To get the most out of your HeinOnline searching, review this very thorough and helpful guide from the HeinOnline Blog.

Getting the Most Out of HeinOnline

You may have used HeinOnline to download law review article PDFs. But HeinOnline has so many other fabulous search features, and this post does a great job of explaining how to use them!

 

Here are some highlights from the post:

• Found the perfect article? Use HeinOnline's "More Like This" tool to find similar works. The feature uses an algorithm to locate “interesting words” within an article and generates a list of related articles based on those words.

• Try HeinOnline's Keyword Search Builder, found within the Advanced Search option of various databases. Enter keywords into one or more of the boxes provided, then adjust the weight of each word using the boost factors.

• ScholarCheck analyzes every article’s citations to determine the most-cited journals, articles, and authors. View and access articles and cases cited by other articles and cases, and see how many times an article has been accessed in the past 12 months. 

• Constructed the perfect search? Preserve valuable research time and effort by saving that query for later. Keep your list of saved queries organized with topic tags, and receive an email alert whenever new material is added to the results.

The librarians are available virtually to assist USF students, faculty, and staff with HeinOnline and our dozens of other digital resources. Connect with a research librarian via live chat Monday through Friday, 9 am to 5 pm. You can also email the entire team at: [email protected]

Using PowerNotes to Keep Research Organized

Organizing legal research can be challenging, particularly when you're gathering sources from web pages, Lexis, Westlaw, HeinOnline, and a host of other legal research sources. PowerNotes is a new online research tool designed to make legal research and document drafting more efficient for legal writers. PowerNotes allows you to gather excerpts from any online resource, including Lexis and Westlaw, and save, highlight, or annotate this content within your own customized research subjects with a single click.

Students can build and edit a brief or memo outline as they research -- if you want to change your outline's organization, you can drag and drop your research subjects to restructure your outline.

PowerNotes also saves links to all of your sources to help ensure that you cite to sources accurately. This PowerNotes video tutorial has more information about how this tool works. You can use your law school email to create your own PowerNotes account.  A student's first project on PowerNotes is free, and if you choose to add subsequent projects, students pay $4.99 per month. USF Law does not have an institutional subscription to PowerNotes at this time.

HeinOnline's YouTube Tutorials

HeinOnline announced that it has placed its "how to" tutorials on YouTube. The videos cover the basics of searching and navigating HeinOnline, as well as how to get the most out of HeinOnline's U.S. Congressional Documents library. 

CourtListener — The Newest Free Legal Research Platform

CourtListener, the latest free-legal-research platform, has launched with an impressive line-up of features.

In addition to a searchable database of millions of state and federal opinions with a powerful search engine, CourtListener also boasts an archive of PACER federal court filings (via RECAP), judicial profiles, oral argument audio from state and federal courts, and a gallery of intriguing U.S. Supreme Court visualizations.

(Hat tip to Cheryl Niemeier for her Bose Law & Tech blog post highlighting CourtListener!)

Law Library Interlibrary Loan Services

From time to time, we like to remind USF law students, faculty, and staff about our interlibrary loan services. If you are a current student or current member of our law faculty and staff and you locate a book or article that you need for research that isn't available at USF, law library staff can request copies of these materials for you from other libraries across the country.  While loan periods for interlibrary loan (ILL) books are more restrictive (typically, a 3-week loan period is authorized by the lending library), this service allows you to obtain materials from academic libraries in other areas of the nation.  Just remember that each USF library processes ILL requests separately. Law students, faculty, and staff must file ILL requests with the law library, and non-law USF library patrons must file ILL requests with Gleeson Library.

USF Students May Make Research Appointments Online

USF law, graduate, and undergraduate students may now make individual research appointments with a Zief Law Library research librarian. (Appointments with Zief Law Library research librarians are only available to current USF students. Other authorized Zief Library users with research questions may visit the research desk in person, or call 415-422-6773.)

The major advantage to making a research appointment is that you will have the librarians un-divided attention and it is far less likely that you will be interrupted during your consultation.

Please use the link next to the names of the librarians - note that the URLs are case sensitive:

     Suzanne Mawhinney: www.goo.gl/wF0v5

     Lee Ryan: www.goo.gl/lZyCV

 

     John Shafer: www.goo.gl/KEu3k

     Amy Wright: www.goo.gl/Ms4v1

The Paperless Law Review? An Experiment at USF

One of ZiefBrief's favorite parts of the job is working with USF four excellent student-edited journals.

This year we're excited to watch the University of San Francisco Law Review move toward an entirely paperless editing cycle. Led by Editor-in-Chief Robin Bennett, the USF Law Review Board is pursuing this goal by aggregating digital article drafts, sources cited, and other information on a SharePoint site accessible to all editors and staff.

As part of this initiative, the Zief Library is advising the Law Review on finding the most stable, reliable digital documents for source collection. This has meant wrestling with the Bluebook and its insistence on official sources and its bias in favor of print.

Our approach includes creating a Google Notebook on Law Review Source Collection with links to the most authoritative and most stable PDF sources for the sorts of documents (law review articles, cases, statutes, regulations, Congressional documents) commonly cited in law review articles — and then training all Law Review staff in tips and techniques for using the top sites, like HeinOnline and GPO Access. There are still times when the Law Review has to pull and scan paper sources, but they're well on the way toward paperless production of their journal.

One in 100 Americans Behind Bars -- Pew Report Released

The Chronicle of Higher Education points out in this article that a new report on the US prison population and spending has just been released. The report is the work of the Pew Center of the States and is titled One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008 (click here to link directly to a 37 page .pdf file.)  Why the interest by the Chronicle of Higher Education, you may ask? Well, it turns out that there are now 5 states (Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut, and Delaware) that spend more on corrections than they do on higher education. California, with an $8.8 Billion budget for corrections is very close to this mark spending 83 cents on correction for every dollar spent on higher education. This report is a treasure trove of statistics and bibliographical information for anyone interested in prisons, policy, or the general population.  

A Flood of Free Federal Appellate Case Law

Suddenly, after years of doing without any decent free source of federal appellate decisions, legal researchers now have least two excellent options:

• The Public Library of Law (from Fastcase)
• US Court of Appeals Cases and Opinions (from Justia)

Both the Public Library of Law and Justia have federal circuit court cases going back to 1950. Their search engines are user-friendly, and each allows you to limit your search to a particular circuit.

(The Public Library of Law and Justia (via its Supreme Court Center) also have all Supreme Court decisions. In addition, Justia has federal district court opinions from 2004 to the present, and the Public Library of Law has state appellate and high court cases from 1997 to the present.)

Why so much new federal case law all of a sudden? As Robert Ambrogi explains it, in mid-February public.resource.org and the Creative Commons jointly released 18 million pages of public domain federal case law. After that, it was just a matter of days before Justia and the Public Library of Law took this raw data and rolled out search engines for the decisions.

[Thanks to Robert Ambrogi's Lawsites  for the tip about the Public Library of Law, and thanks to Bonnie Shucha of WisBlawg for the tip about Justia!]