Election websites

There are a couple websites that may be of interest to Lucas County voters.

First off there is http://www.lucascountyvotes.org/ which goes to the Board of Elections section of the Lucas County government website. There are lists of the candidates and for all the issues on the ballot. The issues list is nine pages long, though not every issue, such as various levies, will be on every ballot.

The second website comes from The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and is named Election Law @ Moritz: http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/electionlaw/index.php. This site is an excellent way to stay abreast of Ohio election law issues.

Tax Time links

Once again it is time for the taxman, er, taxperson. Here are the links to the Federal, state of Ohio, and Toledo income tax information and forms.

IRS publications and documents

Ohio income tax links

Toledo income tax links

Update, the Toledo Lucas County Public Library also has links to tax forms, including the City of Oregon and the State of Michigan. The link is here.

FBI Crime Statistics, prelim 2007 first half

Crime rates fell in the first half of 2007, according to premilinary FBI statistics.

Here's the link to the FBI's story, which has a link to the statistics themselves.

Google Toolbar 5

The newest version of Google's toolbar is out.

You can download it here.

PC Magazine has a review of it here.

Personally, I have never cared for the toolbars, they tend to clutter up my browser. As I use Firefox, they have a nice little bookmarks toolbar, that I have set to show text only. This gives me my most often used bookmarks, such as Google, Ask, Westlaw, Lexis, Weather and Yahoo right of the bat.

USAspending.gov

There's a new way to track spending by the Federal Government, mandated by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, 31 USC s6101.

www.USAspending.gov is a "relaunch of www.FederalSpending.gov, that provides citizens with easy access to government contract, grant and other award data."

Online searching and privacy

Search engines will keep a record of what searches a user requests. Search engine companies will say that this helps them refine their search methods. And while that is true, many people are uncomfortable with leaving a trail of their searches. Ask.com now has a feature called AskEraser that deletes a user's search activities from the ask.com servers.

AskErase is available in the upper right hand corner of the Ask.com homepage.


Update: D'oh, made the ask.com a hyperlink. Who knew you could do such things on the intertubes.

EDotW Part 5 HeinOnline

HeinOnline is a subscription based website of legal information databases. Perhaps the most important database is the Law Journal Library, which contains virtually every American law school law review going all the way back to the first issue of each law review. This is a much more comprehensive holding than what is available on Westlaw and Lexis. Itdoes not always have the most current issues however, possibly due to licensing issues preventing a current law review volume from appearing there.

The Law Journal Library link at the top gives an alphabetical list of law journals. There is a search function that lets you search by author, title or full text. Westlaw and Lexis search interface may be easier to use, but their drawback is that for most law reviews they do not go back to the journal's inception. You can also use HeinOnline's navigation feature, if you have a citation to an article. For example if you need to get 4 U. Toledo L. Rev. 25 (from 1972-73), go to the alphabetical listing, click on "U" scroll down to University of Toledo, click on the title. This will bring up the list of all University of Toledo L. Rev. volumes. Clicking on 4 will bring up volume 4. HeinOnline shows the articles in PDF format, so you can view it just as it appears in paper (helpful for when you are cite checking). There is a downloading/printing option as well.

HeinOnline is continually adding new content on a monthly basis, you can keep up with their announcements at their blog:
http://heinonline.blogspot.com/

A few of the other HeinOnline databases are:
Philip C. Jessup Library which access to all of the top moot court competitions since 1960.
The historical Code of Federal Regulations from 1938 through 1983, the Federal Register database and the Government Printing Office's (GPO) CFR site, which has the CFR from 1996 onward.

To use it, go to our Legal Research Links page and click on the link. You will get a "Subscribers, Please Click Here" page. Click on that link, it will take you to their welcome page/index.
Access is limited to computers in the law school building, though UT Law faculty also have access with a password.