Library Information

Celebrate Earth Day!

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.

Don’t be an April Fool!

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.

Our Online Catalog Has a New Look

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.

Mendik Library In The News


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:

  • Assisting Congressional tax-writing committees and Members of Congress with development and analysis of legislative proposals;
  • Preparing official revenue estimates of all tax legislation considered by the Congress;
  • Drafting legislative analyses for tax-related bills; and
  • Investigating various aspects of the Federal tax system.


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 .

 

2011 First Week Pizza Survey Results

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.

 

Happy 2012

Welcome back!

Hope you all had a relaxing and rejuvenating winter break.  Alas, all good things must come to an end.

All of us at the Mendik Library wish for you a rewarding and fulfilling semester. We’d love to be a part of your success and hope you will let us help you with all your research projects and information needs.

Good luck and best wishes for a great semester! We’re looking forward to strengthening our partnership.

The Mendik Library Staff

 

ABA Journal’s Top 100 Law Blogs

The ABA Journal has just released its fifth annual list of the top 100 law blogs (or blawgs).  The alphabetical list is annotated, with short descriptions of each blog.

Included this year is NYLS’s own Legal As She Is Spoke (LASIS) blog, a product of the Program in Law and Journalism under the direction of Michelle Zierler.  The staff and writers for the blog are all students in Professor Zierler’s Legal Reporting classes.  Congratulations LASIS!  The ABA’s description of LASIS is below.

 

lasisblog.com

New York Law School students from the Program in Law and Journalism rip cases from the headlines, break them down and assess their merits (and the media’s accuracy in reporting the case).  Though its name pays homage to English As She Is Spoke, a laughable, incoherent 19th century Portuguese guide to the English language, these bloggers have shown they know of what they write.

 

Haunted Halloween Hunt

Happy Halloween from the Mendik Library! As a Halloween treat, here’s your opportunity to be entered into a drawing to WIN one of more than a dozen valuable study aids and texts we will be giving away (see a sampling of titles below).

Click here to access the Haunted Halloween Hunt.  Each slide includes one question (there are only 5) plus helpful guidance on sources and steps to get you to the answer.  Press Enter to reveal each step in the research process and to move on to the next question.  Click here to access a PDF answer sheet (or pick up a copy at the Reference Desk) and submit your completed copy at the Reference Desk by 5 PM on Monday, October 31st to enter the drawing.

 

Among the titles winners will choose from are:

Reading like a Lawyer – Time-Saving Strategies for Reading Law like an Expert
Persuasive Written and Oral Advocacy
Guide to Legal Writing Style
Legal Writing and other Lawyering Skills
New York Practice Hornbook (Siegel)
The Question Presented:  Model Appellate Briefs
Winning an Appeal
Questions & Answers:  Evidence
Legal Interviewing and Counseling Nutshell

Mendik Mobile: See the App in action!

What’s Mendik Mobile?  It’s an App that will let you access some of the Mendik Library’s key services on your smartphone. It’s a free download and is now available for Apple, Android, Blackberry and a wide variety of other smartphone platforms.

Want to see the App in action?  Visit the Library Reference Desk on Tuesday, October 18, at 12:45 pm and/or 5:45 pm.  As an added bonus, you can have your photo taken with your favorite librarian while enjoying some sweet pre-Halloween treats.

 

Discover a New World with the Mendik Mobile App

 

We’re pleased to introduce an exciting new development, Mendik Mobile, an app that will let you access some of the Mendik Library’s key services on your smartphone. It’s a free download at all of the major smartphone app stores.

Using Mendik Mobile, you’ll be able to:

• Search our catalog for books and other library resources.
• Find the books your professors have placed on course reserve, and check on their availability.
• Login to your account to renew books you’ve borrowed, or to check on fines.
• Contact us by phone, text or email.
• Follow our blogs to learn about new books we’ve acquired and new services we’re offering.
• Search our DRAGNET search engines for free and reliable research sources.

Mendik Mobile is now available for Apple, Android, Blackberry and a wide variety of other smartphone platforms. Discover this new world, just in time for Columbus Day, by visiting: http://bit.ly/mendikmobile.