Windows Central reports that LinkedIn now has a "no politics" button that you can enable on your LinkedIn account's news feed. It filters out content about political parties and candidates, election outcomes, ballot initiatives and more. This is a new feature that LinkedIn has added. "This is all about giving all of our members greater choice and control," a spokesperson for LinkedIn said ..read more

 Publishers Weekly has an excellent article about the court battle between the Association of American Publishers and the new Maryland library e-book law. According to the article, the AAP doubled down on their claim that Maryland’s library e-book law is clearly preempted by the federal Copyright Act, and said supporters of the law are seeking to “unravel decades of federal legislation and jurisprudence that delineate the contours of copyright law.” The article has links to the court filings.  ..read more

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports on Legislative efforts to increase access to PACER: "On December 9, 2021, the Senate Judiciary Committee favorably ordered reported the Open Courts Act of 2021, S. 2614. At the markup session, the committee ordered to be reported, by voice vote, the bill with an amendment in the nature of a substitute. It is one of two legislative proposals introduced this Congress to eliminate the U.S. Courts’ current user fee structure for searching and accessing federal court filings on PACER. While S. 2614, as amended in committee, would make PACER free for ..read more

 The Reuters headline grabbed me: "Free PACER? Bill to end fees for online court records advances in Senate." It's a bipartisan bill called the Open Courts Act of 2021 and the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the measure on voice voate without any recorded opposition (who could be against it?). It would certainly be a nice New Year's gift to law libraries and law librarians ..read more

The Research Information Services Team at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has developed a micro-credentialing program on data literacy skills for librarians. The program is free. It is administered via the Canvas CMS.  From the blurb: The Research Division at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis is widely known for its flagship data service FRED®. An integral part of our work facilitating access to data is building capacity among consumers to use data effectively and accurately. Our Library Services and Economic Education teams have developed a fully asynchronous online professiona ..read more

An organization called SeamlessAccess warns that because of new privacy protections enacted by browser vendors, IP authentication, the predominant means of authorizing access to scholarly resources, may become obsolete.The article title is "FAQ on Browser Privacy Changes and Library Resource Access (Or Why Your IP Authentication is About to Break). The article reports that Apple recently announced that subscribers to their iCloud+ service will have their IP address obfuscated from website operators; other browser vendors are also moving in the direction of supporting consumer privacy and may f ..read more

There's an interesting article in The Verge titled "FILE NOT FOUND: A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans." Apparently college faculty are increasingly finding that students are confused about the concept of hierarchical organizing. (The professor) came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students. (Another professor) noticed that students in his clas ..read more

 A welcome announcement from the Government Publishing Office and the FDLP: "The Office of the Federal Register (OFR) and the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) have formally launched a new eCFR website (CFR = the Code of Federal Regulations.) Over the last few years, OFR and GPO developed significant improvements that are now available on the new eCFR website, including the ability to: • Show which sections have been recently updated. • Display and compare previous versions of text. • Link references between content within the CFR and the Federal Register. • Link references wit ..read more

 The ABA Journal has an article titled "When it comes to studying for the bar exam, how much is too much?" - which may be of interest to all sleep-deprived Class of 2021 law school graduates. The article reports on a study of 107 California law school grads, and how they fared in taking the bar exam in 2017. Some of the results:  The study group had a 77% bar pass rate. The median for daily study was 8.1 hours, and candidates who studied that amount had a better than 75% likelihood of passing the bar exam. Candidates who studied 10 or more hours daily were more likely to report runn ..read more

 Professor Victoria Sutton of Texas Tech School of Law has published the results of a study she has done comparing law student perceptions of online learning in May 2020 and May 2021.  Her article, titled "Perceptions of Online Learning and COVID-19 Countermeasures Among Law Students in a One-year Followup Study" is available on SSRN.  From the abstract: ..."preference for online courses is increasing by 17%, despite the fear that burnout or frustration from the COVID-19 transition to online learning for law schools would create a general dislike for online courses. There are st ..read more