Join us on Thursday, April 27, 12pm to 1pm for a Legal Tech Institute Vendor Visit from our Westlaw representative who will discuss Family Law resources available for free on the Law Library’s Westlaw computers. Texas attorneys can earn 1.0 hour CLE credit. Visit the Legal Tech Institute Course Catalog to register.
Latest & Greatest - Continuing Legal Education Resources
Have you checked out our CLEs Lately? If not, you should. Harris County Law Library is home to hundreds of volumes of Continuing Legal Education (CLE) coursebooks published annually by the State Bar of Texas. These resources are often overlooked as a form of research, but they can provide valuable insights into a particular area of law. They typically include legislative updates, focused discussions regarding specific issues, court trends, and recent case law developments. The articles are written by experienced attorneys who are recognized experts in their field and regularly practice in that area.
The library collects CLE materials for many subject areas, including family law, wills, trusts, & probate, employment law, litigation, real estate law, criminal law, and much more. Just look at our catalog to see what we have. Coursebooks usually hit the shelves at the beginning of the year following the year in which they are published. This means that you can now find 2016 course materials in our library.
For those of you who may not have visited our library in a while or for those of you who are regular visitors who may not have noticed, we have rearranged and moved our CLE materials. All CLE resources, including the criminal law coursebooks, are now shelved in one location of the library. Also, in an effort to make the collection more accessible, we have aligned our CLE categories to more closely match those set out by the Texas State Bar and the various law sections comprising the Houston Bar Association. Thus, some of our familiar categories may have a new name. For example, estate planning coursebooks have been moved to a new category: Probate, Estates, & Trusts, and DTPA materials are shelved in the Commercial and Consumer Law section. If you have any trouble locating a particular topic or are wondering whether we have a particular resource, just ask one of our helpful librarians for assistance.
In addition, we have added the tables of contents of the CLE coursebooks to our library catalog. So, if you are looking for a specific presentation or a particular topic, you can now search our catalog to see if we have it. The contents are included on CLEs from 2014 to present.
PowerNotes: Organize Your Research In a Whole New Way
The Harris County Law Library recently discovered a new browser extension for Chrome that allows you to capture, customize, and organize your research in a more efficient and accessible way. Instead of highlighting content, cutting and pasting it into a Word document, adding notes, and then returning to your source material to capture additional content or the URL of the website you are visiting, PowerNotes lets you perform all of these tasks in one self-contained platform.
For a limited time, throughout the beta testing phase, download the PowerNotes Chrome browser extension for free. Try out the only online research platform that saves what's important and keeps it organized for you in customized project folders, which you create yourself for the various legal matters you manage. Read more about the features that make PowerNotes the new must-have legal research management tool, and download it for your Chrome browser today.
Latest & Greatest – The Copyright Librarian: A Practical Handbook
By Linda Frederiksen
Published by Chandos Publishing
Z 649 .L53 F74 2016
Suppose a patron or professor or lawyer wants to photocopy an entire chapter of a multi-volume treatise. Can he? Is such copying considered fair use? Perhaps. Ask the copyright librarian; she will know. Ask the copyright librarian? Huh? Who's that? Look at it this way: you know what copyright is (well at least theoretically) and you know what a librarian is. Putting the two together results in a copyright librarian or a copyright specialist or as the author terms it, an information professional who educates others about the “ethical use and best practices surrounding copyrighted materials.”
In her book, The Copyright Librarian: A Practical Handbook, Linda Frederiksen points out that as the intermediary between the creators of information and the users of that information, librarians should be well-versed in copyright laws as to know and understand when an infringement of a creator’s copyright has occurred or to provide guidance when faced with a copyright dilemma. Considering the confusing, complex, and often ambiguous, nature of copyright laws, the task is far from simple and incredibly daunting. The Copyright Librarian is not a book for those seeking an explanation of the law of copyright but rather is intended for librarians and information professionals who are interested in becoming a specialist in the field of copyright, thereby enabling them to respond to questions about copyright and how it affects the use of information. The author describes how copyright is necessarily intertwined in library functions, from acquisitions and collection development to cataloging and circulation. She further explains how a librarian interested in copyright can acquire the necessary knowledge to become a specialist through professional development, continuing education, and current awareness and delineates what a copyright librarian ought to know.
If this a field that you would like to explore further, come to the Harris County Law Library and have a look at The Copyright Librarian: A Practical Handbook. Perhaps you can get in on the ground floor of this emerging specialization.
Celebrating National Poetry Month 2017
April is National Poetry Month, and the Harris County Law Library is celebrating. We're shining a spotlight on the Poetry of the Bench and Bar with an exhibit featuring poetic judicial opinions and poems written by and about attorneys. Visit the Law Library all month long to view the exhibit.