Library Training Materials

LibGuides Manual

Created during the 2010-2011 academic year at Florida State University Libraries. This manual was distributed to library staff who had accounts on the libraries' LibGuides system. It provides guidance on link maintenance, proxy logins, usability, and how to complete specific tasks in the LibGuides system. The guidance is intentionally difficult for librarians to xerox and informally pass to one another, in order to attempt to have outdated guidance die off.

- Microsoft Publisher (0.44 MB). Best format for viewing.

- Adobe PDF (0.54 MB).To view this, print double sided, then fold into a booklet.

Adobe Contribute Manual

Manual for end users: Created during the 2010-2011 academic year at Florida State University Libraries. This manual was created in preparation for a rollout of Adobe Contribute to library staff. It provides guidance on use of Adobe Contribute to edit the website.

- Microsoft Publisher (0.36 MB). Best format for viewing.

- Adobe PDF (0.44 MB). To view this, print double sided, then fold into a booklet.

Recommended User Account settings for use by technical staff: This is guidance to technical staff in how to configure Adobe Contribute accounts created for librarians.

- Microsoft Word (.docx, 0.02 MB).

- Adobe PDF (0.11 MB).

 

Subject Guides

Florida Legal Research LibGuide

A pathfinder used for a workshop I presented on Florida Legal Research in Spring of 2011. The workshop was 1/3 the research process, 1/3 database specific tips, and 1/3 substantive information on where to find specific sources. This pathfinder was also used in the Advanced Legal Research (LAW 7930) course taught to 2L and 3L law students at Florida State University College of Law in Summer 2011.

(And, in case the guide is edited or removed over time, here is a pdf printout of the guide.)

 

Digital Projects for Libraries

Sarita Kenedy East Law Library Digital Repository

An open source digital library platform implemented in Omeka. The repository meets some needs for a university institutional repository: content is presented online in an attractive user interface, commonly used metadata schemas can be stored and meaningfully shared, and Dublin Core records can be shared with an OAI-PMH harvester. Additionally, the file structure has been modified so that md5 checksums can be periodically run against files, and changes can be detected (monitoring of md5 checksums is not implemented, but is planned for the future).

Collection development was accomplished by locating personal digital archives of materials kept by individuals within the university, and soliciting these materials for donation. In this way, the history of the School of Law from the past 15 years was made available. Digitization projects for older material have been identified and can be pursued in the future as funding becomes available.

Florida Administrative Code (1970-1983)

This is an interactive database to represent a looseleaf resource with monthly update pages over a 14 year period. The search interface allows the user to pull a single page at a time as that page appeared on a specific date.

The search is built in MySQL and PHP. The most interesting aspects of this project are the attempt to represent a resource which has different states over time (ie. different pages are in play during different time periods), and use of automated indexing to extract metadata for the pages. Click here for documentation on the database to represent a looseleaf resource and on automated metadata creation using Visual Basic in Excel.

Florida Supreme Court Oral Arguments

This is an ongoing project to digitize videos of court proceedings which were recorded by the Florida State University Law Research Center in the 1980s and 1990s. Videos are in .wmv format and posted with court documents with coverage beginning in 1984 and ending in 1997 when the Gavel to Gavel project took over video recording. The videos are part of a grant-funded project to digitize print materials. Digitization of print material began in 1998, and due to lack of access to IT infrastructure and support, all discovery is done by search engine optimization.

I was the first employee who worked on this. I digitized videos for this from Summer 2008 until Winter 2009. When I left, I wrote workflows and troubleshooting instructions which were used by the worker who followed me.

(Context: In a trial court, proceedings before the court occur in hearings. Hearings have variable length, and any case can have any number of hearings. In an appellate court (such as a court of appeal or supreme court), each side writes an essay (called a brief) explaining why it should win. The court then asks each lawyer questions in a structured session called the oral argument, which usually lasts 20 minutes.)

Florida Attorney General Opinions

A more-with-less project I did for the Florida State University Law Research Center in October 2011. More than 3,000 Florida Attorney General Opinions which had never before been published online were obtained in digital form through personal connections in state government. These were made available with an input of 25 hours of work to prep and link 3,165 documents.

Florida Governor's Executive Orders and Signing Statements

A simple demonstration of the potential in scraping pdfs off an existing government website. When new governor, Rick Scott, took office in 2011, he removed online versions of executive orders and signing statements by Florida's two previous governors. These were eventually put back online. However, the incident highlighted the importance of libraries in ensuring access to government information, and the potential to build collections of materials which are readily available now, but may not be later.

Using the very simple Firefox ad-on DownloadThemAll!, I scraped documents from the State Archive's website. I then pulled metadata from the governor's October 2011 site in order to fill the table in.

Once again, this is a more-with-less project. In this case, the easy (but tenuous) availability of source documents and metadata on a public website allowed easy harvesting of documents, and is somthing that library staff with minimal technical backgrounds could do. The entire project took about 20 hours to harvest and link to about 1,500 documents.

Geneaology Library with Face Tagging to Identify Unknown Persons

This is a digital library of old photographs built in Greenstone for a Digital Libraries course taken in Fall of 2010. In a team with Kirk Brittain of Washington, and Adrienne Serra of Florida, we digitized old family photos, tagged known persons in photos, and used the API for face tagging software made by face.com in order to try to identify unknown persons in photos.

 

Working Papers

Randtke, W.V. (2011). Deriving a Limit on Copyright Term from the Fixation Requirement in the U.S. Constitution. SSRN eLibrary. Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1908318 .

 

Presentations

Legal Informatics

A PowerPoint on computers to aid practice of law. In the past, advances were in legal research databases. In the future, computers may apply laws to facts.