Professor Roy M. Mersky died yesterday from complications of a recent fall. A member of the University of Texas-Austin School of Law faculty and the director of its law library since 1965, Mersky held the Harry M. Reasoner Regents Chair in Law. He was also a professor in the University's graduate School of Information.

Professor Mersky received his B.S. in 1948, J.D. in 1952, and Master's degree in Library Science in 1953 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was a member of the Bars of New York, Texas and Wisconsin. He served in the US Army during World War II and was awarded a Bronze Star.

Mersky's first law library position was at the University of Wisconsin Law Library, working as U.S. Government Documents Cataloger from May 1951 to June 1952. He served as Director of the Washington State Law Library, 1959-1963, and Professor of Law and Law Librarian at University of Colorado, 1963-1965, before his Texas appointment....

2008 marks the 50th anniversary of his first professional publication: Bibliographic Organization in Law Libraries: A Panel, 51 Law Library Journal 338 (1958). Of course, everyone knows his Fundamentals of Legal Research, first published in 1975 (with J. Myron Jacobstein), Spirit of Librarianship (with Richard Leiter), and his many works on Supreme Court history. He was working on Unknown Justices with William Bader at the time of his death.

For more on Professor Mersky's many accomplishments, along with his Wisconsin connections, see his 40+ page CV.

Starting sometime in April, library books will be available at Contra Costa County BART stations via "ATM style lending machines." A new program called Library-a-Go-Go, along with the Contra Costa County Library, will allow BART riders to simply swipe a card, select a book, wait for said book choice to drop, and then return the book after the rider is finished reading their literary gem. The machines will "hold around 400 popular and best-selling titles, both fiction and nonfiction, and will be accessible during Bart hours."

Sweden, Norway, and Finland already use these nifty little gadgets. The Pittsburg/Bay Point station is first up to receive the literary lenders, which "cost a little under $100,000 each."

It would seem that book vending machines aren't new overseas. A company called Novel Idea has created a Mini-Bookshop vending machine which vends 20-24 new and bestselling titles and can hold up to 290 books. The machine has an LCD screen on the front which enables any customer to read a synopsis of any of the books available in the machine. All books are pre-packed in a gift box specifically designed to protect both the machine and book from being damaged during the vending process. The box comes with a pull-out carry handle and currently includes a press out bookmark.

Source: WSLL @ Your Service

From the attorney representing Justia and Public.Resource.Org:

My clients respectfully cannot agree to the Public License. First, and most fundamentally, it would require them to acknowledge that portions of the Oregon Revised Statutes (ORS) are protected by copyright, and they respectfully but vigorously disagree that portions of the ORS are protected by copyright.

Both organizations plan to go ahead with the release of the full text of the 2005 and 2007 statutes as of June 2nd.

The new service will be used to send critical safety information from UW-Madison Police. It will be reserved for the highest level of emergency.

From Richard Leiter:

We hope to discuss pricing practices of legal publishers and their effects on law libraries and legal researchers. Ken will also discuss the new edition of the Buyer's Guide and we'll speculate on implications of the Thomson-Reuters merger. We hope to hear from private, public and academic libraries - and publishers. We also expect to have time to take calls and comments on any topics of interest to listeners.

Listeners can call-in at 347-945-7183 or use the chat feature to ask questions.

Leiter reports that this is the first attempt at such a program. "At this point, we have no plans to carry it on beyond tomorrow, but, if it is a success, we may offer the show once a month, on the first Friday." Find out if there is more to come by subscribing to the RSS feed for the Law Librarian program.

Source: Lawlibdir listserv

Her talk is available online through WisconsinEye.

Source: Libraries@UW-Madison

Michael Morgalla, our Faculty Liaison, received the award for classified staff. Mike works with our Law School faculty on current awareness, obtaining resources across the campus, verifying citations, charging out material from special collections, and addressing basic reference questions.

Steven Weber received a student award. Steve has worked in numerous departments including reference, collections, administrative office and circulation as lead desk worker. Steve is also currently attending library school here at UW Madison.

Both Mike and Steve are tremendous assets to the Law Library and we were so pleased to see them honored with these awards.

For more information about other Library Service Award winners, see Libraries@UW-Madison.

Read more from The Capital Times. The complete NorthStar report is available from the Campaign for Wisconsin Libraries.

Source: Nicole's Auxiliary Storage

But what do you do when the site doesn't offer a RSS feed or email alert? Build your own. I put together this short handout for a class I taught last week. In it, I describe two tools - PonyFish (RSS) & Watch That Page (email) - which allow to you create your own monitoring service.

It's for regional words/phrases/things/places, etc. that you think someone should know about a city. But it's more than just a city guide -- it's really a place to share insider information like nicknames for things, regional slang, etc. that you wouldn't know until someone explained it to you. You can also upload photos of things (whether or not you wrote a definition for it). Also, if you have a better definition for a word that already exists on there (or just think there is some key information missing), just add your own definition. You can vote on definitions, too, and the number of votes they have determines the order in which they appear under the word.

Although it's heavily Madison focused, CityDictionary is open to any city/town in the United States.

Thanks to my colleague, Vicky Coulter for the tip.

It's More Than You Thought
Many of us probably think of WisconsinEye as CSPAN for Wisconsin, and, yes, while it does serve that role, it also does much more. In addition to its coverage of state government, WisconsinEye captures other aspects of Wisconsin public life, "from the Capitol to Main Street and city halls, community centers and neighborhoods."

Availability
Christopher explained that WisconsinEye is available on the digital tiers of both Time Warner and Charter Cable. It is also available online. DVDs are also available for purchase from WisconsinEye for those wishing to have a permanent copy of a particular broadcast for their collection.

Coming Soon
Christopher gave us a sneak peek of some planned upgrades. A email alert service for upcoming programming and video archive search engine are currently in the works. An RSS feed for newly archived programming is also planned. There will also be new types of programming, such as expanded areas of coverage within the capital (committee rooms, rotunda, etc). Several new series are also planned, including a legal affairs series.

For Legislative History Research
There were several questions from the audience about using WisconsinEye coverage for legislative history research. Christopher indicated that this type of use was welcomed. Note that their user agreement indicates that:

Users who are schools, higher education institutions, State of Wisconsin agencies, libraries and municipalities are authorized to record, reproduce, internally transmit, publicly display and perform our Content to their respective students, employees, or patrons for educational, training, research and other non-commercial and non-political purposes.

Although thousands of hours are already available in WisconsinEye's archive, accessing them at this point is difficult since one would have to browse by date to view the content. I look forward to the addition of the video search engine. Presumably, this will make content much more accessible and, therefore, useful for conducting legislative history research.

Starting next month, Meebo will be rolling out ads in the IM service that invite users to access quizzes, polls, long-form video and other resources. Users will be able to opt-in to sponsored experiences that are targeted to them specifically, based on their demographics and behavior.

It's unclear if the ads will carry over to the MeeboMe widgets, which lots of libraries are using to place reference chat boxes on their web sites.

For more on Meebo and other reference IM services, see my article, IM a Librarian: Establishing a Virtual Reference Service with Little Cost or Technical Skill.

Source: LibrarianInBlack

The University of Wisconsin Law School's Institute for Legal Studies will host its fourth Midwest Law and Society Retreat on September 19 and 20, 2008, at the Pyle Center on the UW-Madison campus.

The interdisciplinary symposium draws faculty, independent scholars, and graduate students from diverse social science and law programs in the Midwest for a weekend of intellectual exchange and community building.

For more information about the retreat, see the Institute for Legal Studies web site. I'm scheduled to give a research methods presentation on Saturday.