Articles Posted in Libraries
Learn Basic Website Design Skills at your Public Library
Free Law Books Online: Findlaw and Nolo
Washington County Law LIbrary Website: New Links, Old LInks, Dead Links
If you run into broken links from this blog to documents on our website, the Washington County (Oregon) Law Library, we apologize.
When websites are upgraded, when webpages are moved, when links rot, we all know what happens. Sigh.
We all try our best to clean up links, but sometimes we just need to move on, move forward. (Maybe that was what James Joyce and Shakespeare decided too, when they looked at their published manuscripts and noticed typos or, heaven forbid, awkward sentences. I bet they both said, “let it go, let’s just move on. What’s past is prologue.” Well, it could have happened!)
Oregon Continuing Legal Education (CLE) Course Materials in Law Libraries
The following Oregon law libraries have a selection of credit-worthy Continuing Legal Education (CLE) course materials available for members of the Oregon State Bar (OSB) and others who can use the CLE course materials to fulfill their own profession’s CE requirements.
Some of the County Law Libraries have very short (3 to 5-day) attorney CLE check-out periods in November and December and each has law library has its own circulation (book check-out) policy.
Please call ahead (or check websites) to confirm title availability, checkout rules, and law library hours.
U.S. Supreme Court Library a Thriving Entity
Whenever someone tells you that they “don’t need no stinkin’ law library,” beware – why doesn’t that person want you to have access to the nation’s laws and to the collected wisdom of legal scholars through the centuries?
U.S. Supreme Court Justices are some of the smartest legal scholars in the country and not only do they have the smartest law clerks from the best law schools, but they have a stellar law library. You don’t hear any of them saying, “why don’t we save some taxpayer money by closing the law library” – do you?
I saw this quote in a recent article about the retirement of the current U.S. Supreme Court Law Librarian – they have a staff of 28!
New Law Library Website
We at the Washington County Law Library are pleased to announce the premiere of our newly redesigned website. We’ve reorganized our content and added some new navigation menus. A new navigation tab has been added for CLE information, and we organized our legal research resources into subject-area subsites (general resources, Oregon resources, subject guides, etc.). We’ve also added direct links from our home page to the library catalog and the subject guides page. One of the most exciting additions to the website (at least to us) is the document index, where we have compiled all of the documents available on the website. Another exciting new subsite is the Divorce/Family Law page, accessible through both our website and the county’s homepage (from the Key Services & Information menu). We invite you to explore the redesigned site and discover all our library has to offer.
New Legal Research Guide – Collecting Judgments
Back in March, OregonLive.com ran a David vs. Goliath story on a man from Philadelphia who “foreclosed” on a Wells Fargo Home Mortgage branch. The man didn’t actually foreclose on the branch; he won a judgment against Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, resulting in a lien that would have led to a Sheriff’s sale of the branch’s contents. Judgment collection situations aren’t always that interesting, but we do get quite a few questions about judgments and how to actually collect on them. So, we recently added a new legal research guide on collecting judgments to the law library’s website.
For information on setting up a debt-collection business in Oregon, see Laura’s post from January 4, 2009.
Meeting of the Law Librarian Bloggers, AALL 2011, Philadelphia
Sites to see from the 2011 Virtual Reference Summit
Some of us here at the Oregon Legal Research blog are recently returned from the 2011 Virtual Reference Summit, where many Oregon library staff go to share an interest in the triad of reference, service, and technology issues and ideas we regularly encounter in the field. Some fun and potentially useful sites were presented that our readers might enjoy:
EasyBib: Free automatic bibliography and citation maker for books, websites, newspapers, and so on. The usual style suspects are included: MLA, Chicago, APA.
OttoBib: Same thing, for books only; but creates the citation/bibliography immediately using just the ISBN and also can provide a permanent URL for the bibliography.
Oregon Legal Research Blog

