The Mendik Library wishes the very best of luck to all New York Law School graduates who will be sitting for a bar exam next week. It has been a long haul – but, you really are almost there. To better accommodate your study needs during the home stretch, the Mendik Library will stay open until midnight starting Wednesday, July 18th through Sunday, July 22nd .
We wish you every success and look forward to seeing you on the other side!
Congratulations Class of 2012! We are very happy to report that this year’s “Food for Fines” was a smashing success! We collected more than 780 food items for the Salvation Army’s Chinatown Corps. In addition to serving underprivileged families, the Chinatown Corps helps more than 700 senior citizens in the nearby neighborhood. When the Corps staff came by recently to pick up the cans, Dean Crowell presided over the donation event.
Thank you all for helping us help our neighbors. You have set a very high bar for 2013!
Just a reminder that the Mendik Library will be closed tomorrow, Wednesday July 4, 2012, in celebration of Independence Day. The Library will be open on Thursday and Friday, July 5 and 6, from 10:00 a.m.—9:00 p.m. We will be open for regular summer weekend hours on Saturday and Sunday, July 7 and 8, 10:00 a.m.—9:00 p.m.
Enjoy the fireworks!
Student access to LexisNexis and Westlaw is governed by our academic subscription contracts, which prohibit research use of these systems in conjunction with paid employment. As a result, students’ use of LexisNexis and Westlaw passwords will automatically become limited on June 1st.
Each year LexisNexis and Westlaw face greater competition from other electronic research vendors. This year, Bloomberg Law and Fastcase offer students unrestricted summer access to legal research databases that are comparable to LexisNexis’s and Westlaw’s. As a result, this summer’s LexisNexis and Westlaw student access policies are more liberal than they were in previous years.
If you want to use LexisNexis or Westlaw for research this summer, for qualified academic uses, you must register on their Websites to extend your passwords. It would be a good idea for you to register now, to ensure that these services are there when you need them.
We have compiled the details of all the vendors’ policies, registration procedures, and research options into one handy page. Please visit: http://www.nyls.edu/library/for_students/extend_passwords.
Effective Monday April 23, all study areas and computer labs in the Mendik Library will remain open late night and early morning hours. The late hours extend to 2 a.m. every day, and the Library space reopens at 7 a.m. every morning. This Study Hall schedule will remain in effect through the end of the exams period.
During the Study Hall period all areas behind the Circulation Desk, including the Reserve Collection and the Reserve Reading Room, will close at 11 p.m. on Monday through Thursday, and 10 p.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The Library opens for business at 8 a.m. on weekdays, and 9 a.m. on weekends.
During late night and early morning Study Hall hours there are no librarians on duty; security guards patrol Library rooms and study areas. All Circulation transactions, including borrowing and return of books, as well as charge-out and charge-in of Reserve materials, must be completed by regular closing time. Policies regarding food, drink and quiet study remain in effect.
Late and early Study Hall is for NYLS students only; you’ll need your NYLS OneCard ID to stay at closing time, and to enter the Library after closing. Please have your ID ready to show the guard.
Students will be required to leave the Mendik Library when the facility closes at 2 a.m. Study areas elsewhere on campus remain open 24 hours.
Sunday April 22, 2012 is Earth Day.
Repeating last year’s theme of A Billion Acts of Green®, a “people-powered campaign to generate a billion acts of environmental service and advocacy . . .” the folks at the Earth Day Network have almost reached their goal: the total Acts of Green reported as of the morning of April 18, 2012 was 977,876,186 (and counting).
One easy Act of Green you could pledge, helping send that number over the one billion mark, would be to turn off the library study table lamps and carrel lights whenever you leave. Or, you could use the stairs instead of the elevators between floors. We will thank you and so will the Earth.
Another suggestion: By drinking your coffee, tea, or other beverage from a spill-proof, reusable mug, you can transform a single Act of Green into an ongoing one, helping continually to reduce the volume of plastic, Styrofoam, and paper cups piling up in landfills or requiring energy for recycling. At the same time, you’ll be complying with the Library’s food and drink policy and earning our thanks!
If you don’t have a spill-proof mug, pick one up at the Circulation Desk for $3.00. Although we already sell these mugs at a loss, for every one purchased through the end of this semester’s exam period librarians will contribute $.50 to Earth Day Network (www.earthday.org/), which works with over 22,000 partners in 192 countries to broaden, diversify and mobilize the environmental movement.
For complete information about Earth Day, visit Earth Day Network.
REMINDER: The April Fool’s Day Info Hunt drawing is almost here! Submit your completed entries by Tuesday, April 3rd at 5:00 pm for a chance to WIN one of many prizes, including study aids and texts, and OneCard Guest Cards (these can be used for food purchases as well as printing and copying). The drawing will take place outside the library entrance at 5:30 pm on Tuesday, April 3rd.
For more information, click here.
The Mendik Library is pleased to announce new enhancements to its Encore catalog interface – a state-of-the-art “discovery engine.”
Encore has a trimmer and cleaner look with tags listed on the left instead of displaying in a cloud. In the facets column on the left you can now access course reserves and other drill-downs to move you from broad search results to a more specific and focused list of resources. Links to relevant full text articles from our HeinOnline subscription are now displayed at the bottom of the results screen.
This enhancement of Encore helps place New York Law School among the leaders in law school library technology. We hope you will enjoy using Encore to help navigate all of our resources. So give it a try and let us know what you think! We look forward to your comments and suggestions.
Victoria Sukhol, Assistant Director for Cataloging at NYLS, was recognized recently by the American Association of Law Libraries for her work cataloging the website of the Joint Committee on Taxation. The AALL selected the Joint Committee’s website as its website of the month in December, and thanked Ms. Sukhol for her work cataloging this rich source of tax legislative information for the past century. The Committee recently posted to its website all of its publications back to the 1920s.
The Joint Committee on Taxation is a nonpartisan committee of the U.S. Congress, originally established by the Revenue Act of 1926. The committee operates with a professional staff of economists, attorneys, and accountants, who assist members of Congress of both parties with tax issues. The committee staff is involved with every aspect of the tax legislative process, including:
Perhaps best known of the Committee’s publications are their “Bluebooks,” which provide explanations of tax legislation enacted in each congress. The explanation follows the chronological order of the tax legislation as signed into law. For each provision, the document includes a description of present law, explanation of the provision, and effective date. The analysis provided in the Bluebooks is often cited in tax cases. For more information please see the committee’s website at http://www.jct.gov/. You may review Victoria’s catalog record at http://lawlib.nyls.edu/record=b1676785~S0 .
For the fifth consecutive year we surveyed 1Ls during First Week library tours about their use of digital communication tools. Our apologies for this late delivery — though the pizza may be cold it’s still worth having.
In addition to telling us their favorite pizza topping (answer below), more than 470 members of the class of 2014/15 responded to questions about:
• their preferences in electronic communication;
• their social networking activity;
• their usage of blogs, RSS feeds, podcasts, e-books, and Twitter; and
• the types of electronic devices (smart phones, e-book readers, etc.) they owned.
You can see all the survey questions (and the responses) here. Below are some highlights, revealing a continuation of some trends we have been watching develop.
• E-mail use continues to plummet vis-à-vis text messaging as the preferred means of written electronic communication. The percentage of those favoring e-mail fell this year to 37%, down from 45% in 2010, 55% in 2009, 62% in 2008, and 67% in 2007. At the same time, entering students’ preference for text messaging rose to its highest level yet, 46%, overtaking e-mail as the most popular form of written electronic communication. This result is consistent with the findings of a Pew Internet & American Life Project 2011 study detailing that 73% of American adults who own cell phones (83% of Americans) send and receive text messages. The study further found that young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 averaged nearly 110 texts per day, translating to more than 3,200 per month.
• Facebook remains the dominant social networking site for these students, favored by nearly 86%. Significantly, this group is also using Facebook more often than predecessor classes; frequency of use increased for the fourth straight year, with 49% reporting logging on to the site more than once per day, compared to 2010 (46%), 2009 (39%), and 2008 (28%).
• For the first time, our survey included questions about Twitter. We’ve learned that nearly 38% of the entering class have a Twitter account, although only 5% tweet more than once per day. Another 5% tweet a few times per week and 14% tweet occasionally. But, that tells only half the Twitter story: 26% of the class are regularly following more than five Twitter feeds with another 5% following between one and five feeds. We would expect both types of Twitter usage to increase over time.
• Blogs and RSS feeds are still not an important part of most students’ lives. Just over a third of the 1L class arrived at NYLS as subscribers to or readers of blogs (a slight decrease from last year) and only a very small number (8%) take advantage of RSS or e-mail subscriptions that push the information directly to them.
• Similarly, podcasts have still not gained much traction – usage has more or less stagnated for the past three years with 49% of the class not having downloaded or listened to a podcast and another 7% not even knowing what a podcast is. Last year’s numbers were 47% and 10%, respectively.
• The popularity of Macs compared to PCs continued to increase, albeit at a slower rate, rising to 51% from 50% in 2010, 39% in 2009, and 31% in 2008.
• Internet Explorer continued to lose popularity while Google Chrome made big gains as the browser of choice. Some of Chrome’s gains came at the expense of both Firefox and Safari. While Chrome usage surged from 12% to 22%, Firefox dropped from 36% to 24% and Safari from 30% to 28%.
• When asked which search engine they use most often, respondents again identifiedGoogle by a wide margin (94%), with Yahoo a mere 2% and Bing barely 1%. Interestingly, 44% of those surveyed “sometimes” use a different search engine to perform an identical search after receiving results from an initial search, perhaps recognizing that individual search engines can have limitations and failings. That number is nearly identical to the results of 2010’s survey. An additional 5% “usually” use another search engine to supplement their results (compared to 8% for 2010) and nearly 7% “always” do so (compared to 5% in 2010).
• For just the second time, the survey asked students which among certain specified electronic devices they owned. Among “smart phones,” Blackberry lost ground this year (from 40% to 32%) to the iPhone (up to 37% from 22%) and the Android (at 21%). Ownership of an iPad or other tablet device increased from 5% to 16% and ownership of an e-book reader increased from 4% to 14%.
• Of great interest is that despite a large increase in the number of students owning e-book readers and tablet devices, the actual use of e-books showed an unexpected drop-off – 50% compared to last year’s 56%. A reluctance to move away from traditional books seems to linger.
• Finally, after last year’s brief upset, Pepperoni regained its crown as students’ favorite pizza topping, pulling in 26% of the vote compared to Extra Cheese the nearest contender with 15%. Mushrooms, at 13%, continued to repeat as a third place finisher.