Diverse Voices: Websites

This post in our Diverse Voices blog series highlights selected websites for exploring African American history, literature, and culture. Happy browsing! 

Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald.

BlackPast

The BlackPast website was created by a UW History Professor Emeritus named Quintard Taylor, whose academic interests include African American, Nationalism, Race and Ethnicity, and Urban History. This website is dedicated to providing the general public with accurate and first-hand accounts of African American history and of African descendants around the world. Spend some time browsing through the African American History or Global African History sections. Each has a wealth of knowledge that can be found in primary documents, institutions, speeches, and perspectives. The Special Features section includes topics on 101 African American Firsts, Black Inventors and Inventions, Historical Black Churches, and more! 

African American History Month

Although February is over, that doesn't mean we can't continue to learn about African American History. This website hosts a wide variety of exhibits and collections, audio and video, and images collected from multiple libraries, archives, and museums. The goal of this website is to pay tribute to generations of Black Americans who struggled with adversity to be recognized as full-fledged Americans. Explore exhibits on African American Educators, Education, and Schools. Find resources on African American Jazz artists like Ella Fitzgerald and Eric Dolphy. Listen to a video or audio recording on African American Poetry and Literature. There are even resources for teachers! 

African American Intellectual History Society 

In 2014 the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) was started by Christorpher Cameron as a blog. Today, AAIHS is a flourishing scholarly organization that hosts communication regarding writing, researching, and teaching black thought and culture. AAIHS also publishes Black Perspectives, which is a popular blog that focuses on global Black history, culture, and thought. The AAIHS website also provides an in-depth collection of resources which are subdivided by topic. Read up on the Civil Rights-Black Power Era or find your next book club reading under the African American Literature section.

Northwest African American Museum

Looking to do something with the family one evening? Then look no further than Seattle's own Northwest African American Museum. This museum's website includes virtual exhibits and events. Join NAAM every 2nd Sunday of the month on their YouTube channel for interactive storytime. Take some time to look through their Educational section which includes their blog and a Think Like Malcolm section. There are activities and resources for the whole family!

Want to do more than browse through websites? Think about supporting Black-owned businesses by visiting the Support Black Owned website. Use the website's directory to find items on sale by category or by location. Know a Black-owned business and don't see it on the website? Become an SBO member and add a business to the website. 

Image Citation: Gottlieb, William P. Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald, New York, N.Y., ca. Nov. United States, 1946., Monographic. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/gottlieb.02871/.

Law Librarian Research Hack: Go to Oxford for Help

Sometimes you want something more scholarly and deeper than Wikipedia—and yet you still want an accessible source to start with, rather than devoting several weeks to reading a shelf of books. Like Goldilocks, you want something just right. 

For that certain set of information needs, I'm a big fan of Oxford Handbooks Online (available to UW users through the University Libraries). 

• If you want to find a good introduction to what law-and-economics scholars say about medical malpractice, start with Ronen Avraham & Max M. Schanzenbach, Medical Malpractice, in 2 The Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics (Francesco Parisi ed., 2017). You'll find a 30-page PDF—21 1/2 pages summarizing the area, plus pages of references to lead you to important studies.

• Suppose you want to get a framework for comparative constitutional law. What are the themes that scholars look at? What are the big topics? Take a look at The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law (Michel Rosenfeld & András Sajó eds., 2012).  

The Oxford Handbooks can be especially useful if you want to get an introduction to a concept from another discipline. The law library has licensed a lot of the law titles, but we also get the benefit of using the ones licensed by other campus libraries!

• If you come across a law review article that's talking about Foucault and you don't know Foucault from Kung Fu, you might try Andrea Mennicken & Peter Miller, Michel Foucault and the Administering of Lives, in The Oxford Handbook of Sociology, Social Theory, and Organization Studies: Contemporary Currents (Paul Adler et al. eds., 2014).

• What if you want to sample social psychologists' work on social justice? Browse The Oxford Handbook of Social Psychology and Social Justice (Phillip L. Hammack Jr. ed., 2016).

"Brasen Nose College, Radcliffe Library & Part of the Schools," from
The Perambulation of Oxford, Blenheim, and Nuneham (1824),
available in the British Library's Flickr photostream

When you search the Oxford Handbooks Online, you can choose to search within one subject. Caution: sometimes a handbook might not be where you expect it. For instance, the handbooks on law and economics aren't in Law (they're in Economics).

You can also run a general search and then filter by subject. And you can also search for words to be in certain fields, like an article's headings or summary.

How do you get to Oxford Handbooks Online if you don't have this link handy? 

• Go to the University Libraries homepage.
• Choose Encyclopedias & Dictionaries.
• Choose Oxford Handbooks Online. 

Now you try it. Search Oxford Handbooks Online for one of these:

• "star wars"
• "game of thrones"
• "hello kitty"
• seattle

This is #2 in our series of posts with short explanations of some of our favorite legal research and writing hacks (shortcuts and work-arounds that can make you more efficient).

Celebrate #NationalPunctuationDay with a Salute to the Octothorpe

National Punctuation Day, celebrated Sept. 24 each year, gives us a chance to have a little nerdy fun or to rant about our pet peeves. Maybe I should I say pet peeve's: making plurals of uncommon words with an apostrophe is one of mine. One of my favorite restaurants had Banana's Foster French Toast for years. Even if I wince at a menu, I can still love the restaurant.

So what the heck is an octothorpe? It's that eight-pointed symbol more commonly known as a number sign, pound sign (another pound sign is £), or hash mark.

The odd name was made up by someone in Bell Labs during the development of the Touch-Tone phone. Obviously, it hasn't caught on, because thousands of automated answering systems advise us to "press the pound key" or enter our PIN, "followed by the pound sign"—and even the most annoying phone tree doesn't mention an "octothorpe." For more on the history of this and other punctuation marks, see Keith Houston, The Ancient Roots of Punctuation, New Yorker (Sept. 6, 2013), or Houston's book, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks (2013).

Who cites who?

Do you ever wonder what works cite a particular article you've read? How about an article you've written?

There are many tools for finding citing references, in free and commercial online services, such as SSRN, HeinOnline, Lexis, and Westlaw. We have a new guide explaining some of them, with lots of examples to illustrate the different searches you can use. Check out Finding Citations to Articles.

Graphic: "A Learned Discourse," from Edith Nesbit, Our Friends and All About Them (1893), available in the British Library's photostream on Flickr.

Law Firm Search Engine

Need information about local law firms? Looking for a source of free legal research? Try the new Law Firm Search Engine!

http://lawfirmsearchengine.com/

Developed by librarian Jeffrey H. Buckley, this search engine allows you to search across more than 4,500 law firm websites. This is a useful resource for free legal information, as law firms are constantly publishing insightful commentaries and legal memos on their websites.

The Law Firm Search Engine's other features include:

• A list of Law Firms on Twitter,
• A description of Best Practices for Law Firm Websites,
• A list of Milestones in the History of Legal Research, and
• Law Firm Website Traffic Rankings (congratulations to Campbell Cohen, currently #1).

Bestlaw – Improving WestlawNext Citations and Functionality

Have you ever been searching in Westlaw or Lexis and experienced that wonderful moment when you finally locate the perfect case for your argument or the best law review for further research?  Whether that moment occurred two minutes or a couple hours into your search, relief should set in, but all too often the most difficult and stressful part of research and writing has only begun: citing to your source in proper Bluebook format!

Well, fear no more!  Your citation needs have finally been answered, or so touts Bestlaw designer Joe Mornin, a law student at UC Berkeley School of Law.  Bestlaw is a Google Chrome extension, which can be installed from their site.  Bestlaw adds functionality and citation assistance for WestlawNext. 

 

The Bestlaw toolbar is located just below the "Return to list" tab on left side of the screen.

Over the past few days, I have utilized this extension and realize there is great potential for this free support product, but that there are currently many limitations that prevent this from being truly revolutionary.

Using SSRN for Research

SSRN (the Social Science Research Network) can be very useful for legal researchers. Even better: you can use most of it free!

SSRN is a huge repository for scholarly papers. Law, economics, and business dominate, but other disciplines, from Anthropology to Sustainability, are also represented. You can search it free. And you can download hundreds of thousands of papers free. (Did I mention? Much of SSRN is free!)

Check out UW Law's page on SSRN to see some of the recent (and not so recent) papers by our faculty, staff, and students.

To help you get started, we've posted a guide explaining some of the ways you can use SSRN.

Fast Cases at HeinOnline

You were excited and eager, and rightly so, but in case you missed the arrival of HeinOnline's newest friend Fastcase then here you go: the wait ended over winter break, new hyperlinked cases are here!

HeinOnline partners with Fastcase

Hein is hyperlinking to Fastcase cases, and the coverage includes:

• Supreme Court opinions (1754 – present) 
• Federal Circuits (1924 – present)
• Board of Tax Appeals (vols. 1 – 47)
• Tax Court Memorandum Decisions (vols. 1 – 59)
• U.S. Customs Court (vols. 1-70) 
• Board of Immigration Appeals (1996 – present)
• Federal District Courts (1924 – present)
• Federal Bankruptcy Courts (1 B.R. 1 – present) 
• State case law (all 50 states, nearly half of the states dating back to the 1800s and coverage for the remaining states dating back to approximately 1950) 

You can access these cases by clicking through hyperlinked text, or retrieve cases by citation within Hein. You'll see a brand-spanking new Fastcase tab on the Hein homepage

HeinOnline Fastcase Tab

and you'll find that same tab allows you to search for citations even when you're within a library:

HeinOnline Fastcase Tab

HeinOnline Hyperlink

And you'll get the chance to simply click through to cases as you come across them in your research; links are denoted as usual by Hein's blue highlighting.


When you click on a blue hyperlink you will remain inside the Hein site like you normally would, but with the Fastcase case link you will notice a slight difference in the formatting of your results. Hein provides replicas of original documents, but Fastcase's cases arrive reformatted to plain text.

Screenshot of a HeinOnline case

Screenshot of a Fastcase case

The difference is a departure from Hein's original images, but the convenience of more cases quickly at your fingertips may be well worth it. You'll get used to seeing some cases in Hein's original format - like early cases in the Federal Reporter or cases in the United States Reports - and others in the plain text of Fastcase.

In exchange for contributing cases, Fastcase gets links to some of Hein's libraries, like the Law Journals and Session Laws. Fastcase users will see lists of Hein results for free, with the option of accessing the full results on a subscription basis.

If you want to hear it straight from the horse's mouth, visit the press releases from Hein and Fastcase. And if you have questions for HeinOnline, try their new Fastcase FAQ.

Track what our legislators are up to with Capitol Words!

If you've been frustrated by Congress' lack of productivity, you might be interested in tracking the legislature's activity with Capitol Words. Capitol Words is a project launched by the Sunlight Foundation; the project "indexes and tokenizes the Congressional Record" allowing users to see which issues lawmakers address daily, weekly, monthly and yearly as well as the most popular words spoken by lawmakers on the House and Senate floor.

The Capitol Words start page

The utility of Capitol Words is wondrous! Let's say you read this recent CNN article on the child custody rights of rapists, and were shocked that in "31 states, rapists do enjoy the rights of a father." You might wonder how frequently or infrequently each party in the legislature has discussed rapists in the Congressional Record: