Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Labor Day Weekend Schedule

The LaValley Law Library will be open normal hours this Saturday (9:00 am to 9:45 pm) and Sunday (9:00 am to 11:45pm) with a later opening 9:00 am on Monday (normal closing time of 11:45 pm). There will be no reference on Monday.

Have a good weekend!

Monday, August 27, 2007

EDotW part 2 -- OhioLINK. Library Catalog

This week's spotlight is on the OhioLINK Library Catalog

OhioLINK is “a consortium of Ohio’s college and university libraries and the State Library of Ohio. Serving more than 600,000 students, faculty, and staff at 85 institutions” It includes private as well as public colleges and universities and community colleges.

From the OhioLINK homepage you can search multiple Ohio schools’ catalogs at once using the OhioLINK Library Catalog . So if an UTMOST search doesn’t show that we have an item, use OhioLINK catalog. If the resource is in another school’s collection, you will be able to request it directly from OhioLINK, although you can still ask us to do an interlibrary loan request at our reference desk.

OhioLINK is accessible via the Legal Research Links page on the LaValley Law Library's website.
There are many very useful databases within OhioLINK that I will blog about in the coming weeks.

Monday, August 20, 2007

Electronic Database of the Week (EDotW)

The first database I want to highlight is UTMOST. UTMOST is the University of Toledo’s online library catalog. It contains records of all the materials available in the University of Toledo libraries. With the recent merger with MUO this does now include the medical library's records. You can search by title, subject, author, call number or keyword. For me, unless I know who the author is or the title, I prefer using the keyword. Subject searching can be tricky, for example searching "Tort Law" as a subject won't bring up any results. Using them as keywords will bring up books on tort law. Choose one of the results, and towards the bottom of the record there will be a subject line or lines. You can then click on those subject headings to call up more results on the same subject.

We have upgraded the catalog so that electronic resources we subscribe to are also now available through the catalog. For example, searching for the “ABA/BNA Lawyers' Manual on Professional Conduct” will bring a record for our paper copy, the record for the serial copy that has current reports and a link to the electronic version. Please note that access to the electronic version is limited to the law library.

In the library there are two computers dedicated to UTMOST opposite to the circulation desk. You can also access the catalog from the LaValley Library homepage. It is the top link on the lefthand side “Search our catalog.”

Friday, August 17, 2007

How to Read a Legal Opinion

Orin Kerr, a professor at George Washington University Law School has updated his guide:
"How to Read a Legal Opinion" It is a seven page pdf file.

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Welcome Incoming Students!

Welcome to the University of Toledo College of Law and the LaValley Law Library

We are starting up the LaValley Library Blog again. We will be providing announcements about the library, highlighting various electronic databases available - in the Electronic Database of the Week (EDotW) section - and other news about the law. So check back often.

Robert