Building a Path to a Dream: Martinez

The California Supreme Court ruled unanimously yesterday in Martinez v. Regents of the University of California that California law could provide in-state tuition to any student who proved residency in the state by attending a California high school for three years, and graduating. The state statute did not violate federal immigration law. Martinez reverses a 2008 lower court decision finding the statute violated federal law which prohibits providing postsecondary benefits to aliens, based on state residency if the same benefits are not available to non-resident citizens.

Justice Ming W. Chin, writing for the Court, points out that the benefits are not, in fact, based on California residence. Instead, this statute bases the benefit on attendance at, and graduation from, a California high school. The decision cites statistics showing that the majority of those using the benefit are not illegal immigrants, but instead, are legal U.S. residents who graduated from a California high school and then moved elsewhere.

Next Veteran's Day may have a different celebration

I'm a little late reporting this. Next Veteran's Day may have a really interesting and very moving way of honoring our veterans. There is growing support for the idea of following the lead of Israel in their celebration of their Memorial Day or Yom HaZikaron. Boston.com and the Boston Globe reported that local doctor Peter Bendetson took his sons to Israel for a family vacation. There they witnessed how the Israelis took seriously the moment of silence, even to the point of stopping cars on the highway, and getting out. People on sidewalks, came to a halt.

Yom Hazikron is the day on which Israel honors its fallen servicemen and women. National memorial services are held in the presence of Israel's top leadership and military personnel. The day opens the preceding evening at 20:00 (8:00 pm), given that in the Hebrew calendar system days begin at sunset, with a siren. The siren is heard all over the country and lasts for one minute, during which Israelis stop everything (including driving, which stops highways) and stand in silence, commemorating the fallen and showing respect. Many national-religious Jews say prayers for the souls of the fallen soldiers at this time as well.

(from Wikipedia article, which includes a photo of people standing beside their cars) One thing the Wikipedia article points out is the universality of military service among the Israeli people, men as well as women. Unless a person is truly disabled (I assume this must be true in case of devastating disability), Israelis serve in either the military or a related service such as the Border Police Israel Police, Prison Service or Security Forces. Women may be exempted for religious or "nuptial" reasons -- the article says about one-third of women are exempted this way. The common experience and universality of the sacrifice, as well as the nearness of war in a very small nation may all contribute to the strong support for this major tribute.

By contrast, in our country, our last "universal" war was WWII, whose veterans are in their 80's or older. Since then, wars have been "police actions," that have been politically contested, protested, and bitterly resented by much of those portions of the populations conscripted to fight. At the end of the Viet Nam War period, President Nixon did away with the Selective Service conscription, and since then, the United States has had a "volunteer" military. That means a much smaller proportion of our population ever serves in the military. Those who were conscripted in more recent wars were often taken because they lacked social status, political juice, or money, interest or intellect to stay in college, or otherwise avoid active service. That is not to say that there have not been those who served from a sense of honor, pride or duty in this period, but the story has certainly been colored by the political whirlwinds of these times. Veterans have held very mixed meanings in America for a number of different people over the past few decades because of all the politics surrounding these struggles. Only since the last Gulf War and especially since 9/11, has patriotism seen a resurgence and veterans really found a wider sense of gratitude from more of the population of our country.

Even so, Veteran's Day often flows by with very little notice for many of us. There are Veteran's Day sales. Some of us have the day off, but we don't do much to mark it. Others do not have a holiday, and the work place does not do anything to mark it. Politicians, the active military and a few scout troops tend to be the only reliable groups marking the day from year to year. That's pretty sad if you think about it, especially in a time of war.

So, it's actually pretty cool that the sons of Dr. Bendetson said, why couldn't we do something like this in the U.S. for Veteran's Day? When they returned home, they started working on their idea. It helped that

1) Mark Bendetson got a summer internship in Republican Senator Scott Brown's office.

2) His friend got a similar internship in Democrat Senator Barney Frank's office.

Both politicians liked the idea very much.

The Bendetson brothers wrote to the White House and received an encouraging letter.

Bob Dole, the former senator from Kansas and a genuine war hero, sent encouragement from his hospital bed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Setti Warren, who besides being the mayor of Newton is a Navy reservist and Iraq war veteran, signed a proclamation saying his city would adopt the two-minute moment of silence.

Last week, after the balance of power shifted in the House of Representatives, the Bendetson brothers sent e-mails to the offices of the presumptive House speaker, John Boehner, and his chief whip, Eric Cantor. Their offices responded enthusiastically.

The Bendetsons are hoping a bill can be introduced with the next Congress.

(from the Boston Globe/Boston.com article by Kevin Cullen) I also thought that the media savvy with which this has been launched was pretty high. When I was searching for the (aging) story online, I stumbled on the fact that one of the two sons of Dr. Bendetson, Michael, is a blogger with Huffington Post. I might worry that I had the wrong Michael Bendetson, except that it includes a photo and the information that the young man has interned at the U.S. Senate and attends Tufts University. All of that together sews it up pretty tight. He just hasn't written up his idea for memorializing Veteran's Day, ... yet. It really is a very good idea. I hope the bill is introduced and sails through the Congress. I look forward to traffic stopping dead for five or ten minutes next Veteran's Day. I think our veterans deserve a bit more attention than we are giving them now.

Libraries' using readers' choices in acquistion models

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice report at page A11 in print of Nov. 12 issue, "Reader Choice, Not Vendor Influence, Reshapes Library Collections," by Jennifer Howard. The article discusses two models being explored by libraries, one old and one new. In the older model, libraries simply set up a system of purchasing items requested one or more times on inter-library loan. They may set up parameters, such as no more than X dollars, non-fiction, and include a live person to monitor the types of titles being purchased this way, so that they remain firmly within the mission of the school and library. This is a wide-spread practice and springs from the well-known fact that the inter-library loan process costs money. This article quotes the average sum of $27.83 per book borrowed. That very quickly begins to save money if the same university press title is requested more than once on inter-library loan. It would be cheaper to buy the book, rather than borrow it.

The more innovative model makes use of the newer availability of e-books in library catalogs. Whenever a patron accesses, uses, or prints pages from an e-book in the catalog, it counts as a "trigger event." X number of "trigger events" result in a purchase of the title from the vendor. The article reports a growing number of research libraries are using this model to stretch their budgets, and be certain they are purchasing monographs of interest to their user populations.

There is also a mention of the use of the Expresso print on demand system. This also allows the library to use patron demand to build the collection. There was not, however, any discussion of the quality of the book produced with the instant printing system. I wonder about the binding, quality of paper and ink, and types of font, and layout. What would be the life expectancy of such a book? Granted, many of the books we are buying from professional publishers these days are not very high quality, but ... still, one wonders about the long term benefit to the collection.

These models present interesting alternatives to the sometimes disheartening traditional collection development methods librarians have always used. We work very hard to gauge patron needs and interests, and build collections that will serve our users both now and in the future. It is, in fact, disappointing to have books unused on shelves.

And yet, if we rely entirely on users' selections to build collections, that will result in some rather disappointing collections, I think. I would not like to rely on my patron's selections for most areas of use (a few faculty members exempted!). If we allow libraries to fall into relying entirely on patron selections for their monographic collection development, it will become a very poor collection, indeed! We need a combination of push and pull for collection development. (push being where the library pushes the information or titles out toward the patron, pull being where the library pulls the information in from the patron's use)

Existing Push: We try to market our own selections with New Books shelves, and New Books Lists, and New Books Bulletin Boards, and New Books Columns in newsletters. And even if they get a spurt of interest, it only lasts while the titles remain in the new books category. Better online catalog interfaces that work more like Google, cloud tag clusters, federated search engines, and on and on, we try to make all our titles more easy to find. Clearly we need some more ideas of push!

Law Librarians: Double Degrees Again!

Law librarians are debating that eternal, painful issue again: do we need to require double degrees? The issue has come up, not in the more usual venue of hiring reference librarians, but in the Director's suite. The ABA is undertaking a Comprehensive Review of its Accreditation Standards. ABA law school accreditation Standard 603(c) used to require the director of a law school library to hold both a law school and library degree.

In fact, there have always been law school library directors who lacked one or the other degree. These things happen, and some of them have worked out well. Sometimes, a school is in a difficult geographic area, or sometimes there has been a well-qualified person already in the library with experience. Occasionally, as with the current director of the Harvard Law School Library, there is a remarkable person in a related field with one degree, who is greatly desired for the position because of research background or other qualities he or she brings. In the best situations, the individual works closely with the librarians in place and gets in touch with the librarian community, becomes networked and at least to some extent, picks up some of the linkages that are important to staying current and cooperative in the librarian world.

But there are other situations where a substantive faculty member holds the title "Director of the Law Library" without ever truly becoming part of the either the library at the school or the library community. This damages the school and it seems to me to be criminally unfair to the individual who is left to run the library in every real sense. This individual seems to inevitably be a woman. And is always underpaid, as well as being untitled, and non-faculty, and un-tenured. One would have thought this sort of employment parasitism would have disappeared after the 1950's. But it is alive and well in law schools in the 21st century.

Alert SALT! Just in case they might care about librarians.

I am sorry but that sort of injustice makes me so angry it is very difficult to be politic.

But this sort of injustice is exactly why it is important for AALL and individuals not to shrink from comments to the ABA about Standard 603(c). We might want to suggest that they consider a flexible Standard that would allow:

"Directors of law libraries should have both a law and a library or information science degree except in unusual circumstances, but in all circumstances, should have a sound knowledge of and experience in library administration."

I certainly do not want to attack individuals. Over the years, I have had friends who have had one of the two degrees. I have often found that these were people who, when they had experience in law libraries, were the people who I turned to for advice. I hope the discussion does not turn into personal attacks regarding degrees. I would prefer that we look, instead, at what would be the long-term good of our profession and our schools. We are called Law Librarians. We are called that for a reason. There are two parts to the title.

Law schools need and deserve directors who are truly integrated into the library community, who are keeping current with changes in this fast-moving field. They require directors who are connected into the collaborative network of library leaders, and participate in the ongoing discussion of issues. And they require directors who are really and truly the leader of the library, not a Potemkin head.

Update on Cushing Academy - The private school library that "dumped its books"

The Boston Globe ran another story updating its readers on Cushing Academy. In September, 2009, the Globe reported (and we blogged) about this story (here is a follow-up story from that time, when a big part of the story seemed to focus on the expensive coffee machine that was going into the library space). The headmaster (or principal), James Tracy, decided to get rid of nearly all of the books, and spend more money on databases. The space that had been taken up with shelving became more open space, for group seating, for computer use and for a coffee bar. The databases are linked with a federated search engine. E-books are included. The students are instructed in searches and introduced to the databases they will need for a class, but then left to explore on their own.

The library is now more heavily used than ever. The school has hired another librarian since the re-organization. I like this, and think most librarians will not be surprised. The focus we have is increasingly on service, and less on the materials. People need more help sorting and choosing from the huge amounts of information that is too easily found now. Before, it was the other extreme, where gathering the data was the difficulty, and the skill and value of the library and librarians was in sorting, choosing and housing the best information for the patrons.

And yet, if you follow the link to the newer Globe article, you will find that the Cushing Academy has not quite abandoned books, and even the students still like books, and speak a bit wistfully about them. You also will read that none of the other private prep schools in the area have followed Cushing's lead in re-furbishing their libraries. Phillips Academy and Phillips Exeter are keeping their library books, thank you. Headmaster Tracy has had interested inquiries from Harvard Law School, University of Virginia libraries, Syracuse, a rural public school in West Virginia, and UNESCO. There is not much explanation about what those inquiries are leading to. It is interesting that the furor has died down, and the students are very happy with the library. But it is also interesting that the model is not really catching fire at this point and spreading much, either. As the article quotes Harvard's librarian Robert Darnton, “Libraries must advance on two fronts — digital and analogue. To concentrate on one at the expense of the other would be a mistake. The idea that printed books are in decline and will go away is just plain wrong.’’ We are still at that hybrid point, if we will ever reach a point where reading will become completely digital, we have not gotten there yet. The print format still has many points to recommend it, and many situations in which it is still superior, or perhaps the only way to proceed. I was recently at a dinner where a different Harvard librarian was invited to speak and she did a wonderful job of articulately, yet succinctly, explaining to a non-librarian crowd why libraries (at least non-science and non-medical) libraries will continue to need large buildings for at least the next 20 years or more. That is to say, why we will still be dealing with books for that long. There are just so many things that have not yet been digitized yet, and will cost so much to get digitized, that it will take a long time to get them all into the computers, and do it well. In some fields, there are things that may never be digitized -- maybe nobody will ever fund it, or get around to doing it, or find it.

But there is also the dimension of the users' space in libraries. The students' space (or patrons' space). Libraries have a very important role as social hubs and as leverages for people. Many children of immigrants, many autodidacts have written movingly about the role of school and public libraries in their lives. The libraries leverage the information, the literacy in the books multiple times for the readers. They leverage literacy and culture, and civilization throughout the community. In the same way, libraries leverage the space and facilities they offer: photocopiers, scanners, computers, databases, information, multiple times throughout the community to build the economy and allow people to build their careers and start businesses. In a tough economy, libraries are essential boosters to their communities. I think this is true for school libraries, where students and recent grads (or even older alumni) come in to work on their resumes, and job searches. I know my law school has set aside two alumni meeting rooms for offices and our library consciously collects for alumni use. Many state law schools have that as part of their mission as well, and often also collect to support public use in addition. Libraries should maybe try to figure how much they contribute to the economy or at least manage in cost savings for different patron bases or community groups.

The decoration for this blog post is a photo of the library at the Cushing Academy, from the Boston Globe article. I can't help but notice that there are 2 people with laptops and 1 person with a book.

Brief & Exasperated: Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Even Thnk About it!

This OOTJ blogger keeps thinking it might be safe to start posting things about the litigation about Don't Ask Don't Tell. And then, more unravels. Or it doesn't. It just keeps getting more and more exasperating. So I keep putting off blogging about it. And I keep getting more annoyed. I am sorry that I haven't put anything at all up. I have been so quick to put things up about the same sex marriage issue and so it may seem odd that nothing at all has appeared here about the Don't Ask Don't Tell issue. Every time I get ready to put things up, it blows up again. I apologize. By now, I have gotten a bit gun shy (sorry). The Log Cabin Republicans'Website has many news updates and a few full text links about the case. More links on Justia, at the style Log Cabin Republicans v. Rumsfeld. Also at Scribd, with the style Log Cabin Republicans v. Gates, or Log Cabin Republicans v. U.S.. You can also find good coverage at LawMemo blog about Employment Law by Ross Runkel.

While I am disappointed in the Obama administration, I suppose I understand their arguments. It would be nice to believe that the pols would do the right thing and pass a political solution to the problem. I have a bad feeling this isn't going to happen. I suppose we'll see. In the meantime, we have excellent people who are willing to fight for the U.S., whose skills and talents we need, who are being dismissed if their sexual orientation becomes public. This is just sad and needless.

Link Rot: DOIs, EZIDs, PURLs, and ARKs

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a Hot Type article on page A14, "Publishers Find Ways to Fight 'Link Rot' in Electronic Texts," by Jennifer Howard. In a previous article, the same author introduced her readers to the problem of link rot, with which librarians are all-too familiar. Then, in this article, she spends time discussing several interesting organizations set up to combat the problem.

The first is CrossRef.org, which is a non-profit membership organization set up by scholarly publishers. On its website, CrossRef describes its mandate as publisher collaboration,

...to make reference linking throughout online scholarly literature efficient and reliable. As such, it is an infrastructure for linking citations across publishers, and the only full-scale implementation of the Digital Object Identifier (or DOI) System to date.

What a DOI is:
A unique alphanumeric string assigned to a digital object – in this case, an electronic journal article or a book chapter. In the CrossRef system, each DOI is associated with a set of basic metadata and a URL pointer to the full text, so that it uniquely identifies the content item and provides a persistent link to its location on the internet.

For more information on the DOI itself, which is a NISO standard syntax, please visit the International DOI Foundation website at doi.org.

Back to the Chronicle article, where author Howard cautions her readers with a blog post from Ars Technica, DOIs and their Discontents where John Timmer blogged that Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) could be put out before the object linked was actually published, for instance, if an article were reviewed or written about and the DOI attached were included in the review, all before the item was actually released to the public.

Author Howard also notes that speaking with the people at CrossRef helped her understand how making citations permanently available is a collective problem that must be solved collectively. The networking nature of all the citations linking to each other means that you depend on everybody's links remaining in good conditions, not just your own.

CrossRef began with the hard sciences, and expanded into social sciences and the humanities. There are about 3,215 publisher members of the organization, and some libraries as well, who publish materials, policing one another to encourage good citizenship, to ensure nothing is lost. At the beginning, it was mostly large scholarly publishers, but now more smaller publishers seem to be joining, and more monographs are being added as well. But the smaller publishers have a harder time affording the costs of the DOIs. CrossRef offers tiered pricing for members.

But there are other options to avoid link rot. DataCite.org is another non-profit organization, more international in scope that produces DOIs for libraries and data centers. It seems very focused on the hard sciences, though the website emphasizes that DOIs manage any sort of data. One U.S. member of DataCite, the California Digital Library, has also developed its own in-house version, called EZID. EZIDs can be used to track things like datasets that have not usually been tracked before, as well as scholarly articles. PURLs, Persistent Uniform Resource Locators were the first solution I heard of to Link Rot. We are introduced to ARKs, Archival Resource Keys. Finally, she introduces Zotero, an extension of the popular Firefox web browser that allows users to gather, organize and store information and citations, formatting them and sharing them easily. But it also allows users to create an archival copy of the web page from which they did their research. This is an innovative way in which to combat link rot. The author does not actually report on Zotero, but merely mentions it.

In Celebration of Election Day

One of my colleagues mentioned to me last week that a former staff member was known for the "Election Cake" that she made for election day every year. The recipe was said to come from Hartford, Connecticut, and was very old. My curiosity piqued, I Googled Election Cake and found an entertaining article in The Washington Post. In addition to some historical information, the article includes a recipe for the cake. I haven't tried the recipe because we are trying to cut down on sweets, but it sounds good--a yeast-based coffee cake full of raisins and spices but not a lot of sugar--a perfect accompaniment to morning coffee or tea. The recipe goes back to at least 1796, when a recipe for an Election Cake appeared in Amelia Simmons's American Cookery. I also checked my great-grandmother's 1881 edition of Practical Housekeeping. A Careful Compilation of Tried and Approved Recipes , which has a recipe for Old Hartford Election Cake which it says is over one hundred years old. Here is the recipe:

OLD HARTFORD ELECTION CAKE
Five pounds sifted flour, two of butter, two of sugar, three gills distillery yeast or twice the quantity of home brewed, four eggs, gill of wine, gill of brandy, one quart sweet milk, half an ounce of nutmeg, two pounds raisins, one of citron; rub the butter and flour together very fine, add half the sugar, then the yeast and half the milk (hot in winter, blood-warm in summer), then add the eggs, then remainder of the milk, and the wine; beat well and let rise in a warm place all night; in the morning beat a long time, adding brandy, sugar, spice, and fruit well floured, and allow to rise again very light, after which put in cake-pans and let rise ten or fifteen minutes; have the oven about as hot as for bread. This cake will keep any length of time.
For raised cakes use the yeast made from Mrs. Buxton's recipe; if fresh-made, it is always a perfect success for cakes. This recipe is over one hundred years old.--Mrs. Eliza Burnham, Milford Center.

I don't remember anyone in my family ever making Election Cake, although my mother was famous for her stollen, a German yeast bread made for Christmas. Growing up, Election Day meant Sour Cream Coffee Cake, aka Brackett School Cake. My mother was president of the Parent Teacher Organization for several years, and she made many of these cakes every year to sell at the Election Day Bazaar at my elementary school. It is a very simple but rich cake that everyone likes. Here is the recipe:

Sour Cream Coffee Cake
Mix and beat well:

1 cup sour cream
2 unbeaten eggs
1/2 tsp. soda

Measure 1 1/2 cups of sifted flour and sift again with 1 cup sugar, 2 tsp. baking powder, and 1/4 tsp. salt. Combine the two mixtures and beat well. Turn into a well-buttered coffee-cake pan (I use a round pan) and bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Remove from the oven and while hot spread with butter and a mixture of sugar and cinnamon. Cool and enjoy!

Follow-up on Newspaper Paywalls

I have blogged several times about the erection of newspaper paywalls, especially the decision of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation to charge for The Times and The Sunday Times. Frankly, I was skeptical that enough people would be willing to subscribe to general news publications, even those of high quality, when there is so much free content available on the Internet. An article in today's New York Times, however, reports that 105,000 customers are now paying for the online versions of The Times and The Sunday Times. News Corporation said that about half were regular subscribers to the digital editions, while the rest are "occasional purchasers. Another 100,000 readers have activated free digital accounts that are included in print subscriptions to the papers." While News Corporation did not release any information about revenue, the number of paying customers should be encouraging to other newspapers looking to "introduce paid services as online advertising falls short of publishers' hopes that it might someday replace dwindling print ad revenue."

Law Student Turns Book Thief

The Columbus Dispatch is reporting that a second-year law student at Ohio State University is believed to have stolen "more than 200 [books], one at a time, from the university law library and sold them online for more than $10,000." It is interesting to note that the books that were stolen were not rare law books; rather, they were "common titles" that most academic law libraries probably have in their libraries. The suspect had over 1,350 books listed for sale at the Orion Bookstore site on Amazon.com. The police had been tracking the "thefts since the beginning of August, when the university got an e-mail from a Brazilian lawyer ... who had bought a volume online ... and found a crossed-out OSU ink stamp on its inside front cover." This lead led to "a sting operation, marked merchandise and a hidden camera." Rare books are much easier to identify than more commonplace titles, and the Ohio State investigation is still in process. This is a good reminder of the monetary value of the physical collections that librarians have built up over many years.