Hugh & Hazel Darling Law Library

Posted by Donna Gulnac at 2:07 PM | Permalink

See Madeleine Peyroux in Royce Hall on Friday, October 6 at 8 pm!  Don't miss the opportunity to see this incredibly talented singer/songwriter right here on campus. Students can get tickets for $15!  What are you waiting for?  Tickets are limited so don't delay.  Here is the description from the UCLA Live Website:

"Peyroux’s bittersweet, brokenhearted alto earned her comparisons to the late Billie Holiday and Patsy Cline. Born in Georgia and raised in Paris and New York, the young singer, guitarist and songwriter fell in love with French culture on the streets of Paris, and sang jazz and blues with a touring band. An original interpreter of songs from earlier eras, Peyroux channels vintage jazz and blues with chilling accuracy. Her 2004 release, Careless Love, is a seamless blend of acoustic blues, country ballads, torch songs and pop, featuring songs by an array of artists including W. C. Handy, Bob Dylan, Hank Williams, Leonard Cohen, Elliott Smith and Edith Piaf. Peyroux’s concert will include songs from her new album, Half the Perfect World."

Posted by Donna Gulnac at 12:10 PM | Permalink

The Regina Carter Quintet will be performing at the Jazz Bakery Oct. 10-15, 2006.  Regina Carter has been described as the "reigning queen of jazz violin."  She is a younger artist, and is, in my opinion, the best jazz violinst since Stefan Grappelli passed away.  If you haven't been to the Jazz Bakery, this is a good time to visit -- small, intimate and non-profit, this is a serious venue for jazz performances.  There are even student discounts available.  For more information: http://www.jazzbakery.com/.

Posted by Nancy Berkowitz at 11:55 AM | Permalink

Technology continues to develop and new gadgets are constantly being invented.  The best way to stay on top of these new technologies is by searching relevant weblogs.  There are a growing number of websites dedicated to reviewing and introducing new technology.  A few examples of these cutting edge weblogs can be found below.  

Engadget is a popular technology weblog that is updated multiple times a day.  It features articles on consumer electronics and gadgets.  The site is categorized into many subjects and provides podcasts on a variety of topics.

Gizmodo is another popular technology weblog featuring information on consumer electronics, gadgets, and gizmos.  Recommendations, reviews, and news for the latest technology can be found on this website.

Popgadget is a weblog that focuses on technology from a woman’s point of view.  Because there is little technological information to be found in most women’s publications, this website was initiated in order to change that.  Many of the gadgets and technologies featured on this weblog are relevant to the lifestyles of woman.  Some of the categories include babygadgets, pet gear, and an eco/green category.     

Ubergizmo is an independent weblog that includes advertisements but does not rely on them for operation.  This site includes reviews, bargains, gadget news, and a search feature.  The authors also include hands on reviews of products that they have personally tested. 

Posted by at 9:59 AM | Permalink

The Hugh and Hazel Darling Law Library is pleased to offer two specialized collections to our law school students, faculty and staff.  Please come to the library and check them out!!

Tower Reading Room Recreational Reading Collection

The Tower Reading Room Collection contains books for recreational reading including novels, biographies, travel guides, poetry and other non-law related reading. We welcome your suggestions for additions to this collection (hard-cover only, please). The PDF suggestion form can be filled in online, printed and dropped off at the Circulation Desk.  Paper forms are also available at the Circulation Desk or you can e-mail your suggestions to June Kim. 

Law and Popular Culture Video Collection

The Law and Popular Culture (Law 595) Video Collection contains a large collection of law-related videocassettes and DVDs (we now have most titles in both formats) to support the Law & Popular Culture course (Law 595). These can be checked out from the Circulation Desk for use in the Library's Video/DVD Rooms or for home use (generally a one week loan is given). During the semester when the Law 595 is being taught, the loan period is reduced to overnight and priority use of these materials may be given to the students who are enrolled in the course.

Posted by Donna Gulnac at 2:51 PM | Permalink

I recently received an issue of Real Simple Food in which the editors reported on a taste test of 100 frozen meals.  I thought this would be useful information for students, so I am passing it along.  They also mentioned a helpful website that rates microwave meals called HeatEatReview.com (their motto is “We eat it so you don’t have to”).  The site also arranges meals by rating, brand and ingredient. 

If you would like to read my abbreviated report of Real Simple’s results, please follow the link below.

Real Simple divided the meals into 4 categories and listed the winner and runner-up in each division:

• Winner:  Marie Callender’s Beef Salisbury Steak & Gravy ($3.50) – The meat is tasty, the gravy is “rich, peppery, and not over-salted like most packaged gravies.”  It comes with red-skinned potato wedges and green beans with bits of bacon.
  
• Runner-up: Boston Market Country Fried Chicken ($4) – “…tender and juicy, with a crisp, ungreasy coating.”  The mashed potatoes and glazed peas with carrots were also described as delicious.

• Winner: Kashi All Natural Lemon Rosemary Chicken ($4) – “Best part: The seven-whole-grain pilaf—rich and nutty.”  The chicken is “moist and tender; the sugar snap peas, sweet and slightly crunchy. The light lemon, rosemary and white-wine sauce perfectly complemented both.” (Note:  HeatEatReview.com's reviewer preferred the Southwest Style Chicken.)
  

• Runner-up:  Lean Cuisine Fiesta Grilled Chicken ($3.50) – “Tasters were wowed by the herb-coated chunks of white-meat chicken.”  Also contains black and pinto beans, sweet roasted red and yellow bell peppers and Spanish-style rice.

• Winner: Stouffer’s Lasangne with Meat & Sauce ($6.50, serves 5) – Noodles weren’t rubbery or gooey like most.  “The meat sauce had ‘a simmered-all-day taste’ with 'a nice balance of herbs and spices.'”
  
• Runner-up: Trader Joe’s Cheese Enchiladas ($4, serves 4) – I know you’ve all had these, so I’ll skip the description!

• Tandoor Chef Chicken Curry ($4) – “It tastes like it came from a restaurant.” This one “garnered raves” for an authentic tasting sauce and tender chunks of chicken breast.  (Note: This doesn’t come with rice)
  
• Runner-up: Amy’s Teriyaki Bowl ($4.50) – Almost all organic.  Vegetables are “remarkably crisp” and the brown rice “perfectly cooked.”

Posted by Donna Gulnac at 4:14 PM | Permalink

Don’t miss  the musical genre-defying Andrew Bird when he plays at the Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood next Thursday, September 21 (tickets are still available).    Bird is a classically trained violinist, who bows, plucks and, at times, strums his instrument like a guitar along to his unique and mesmerizing songs.  Of his latest album, The Mysterious Production of Eggs, Billboard magazine says: “…Bird can be noisy, charming, frivolous, haunting and playful all at once, with each song an adventure and, as the title implies, a mystery. As compulsive as he is obsessive, Bird's attention to detail in ‘Production of Eggs’ assembles all his finest gifts into one breathtaking basket.”

Regarding his live sets, Amazon.com says: “Equally impressive is Bird's solo live show at which, with the aid of a sampling pedal, the songwriter takes his often dense, orchestrated recordings and rewrites them anew each night, adding hypnotic layers of instruments to his vocals and other-worldly whistling - you have to see it to believe it.”

Posted by Donna Gulnac at 1:54 PM | Permalink

Well week 2 is almost upon us. If you stuck with the Library Staff picks, you made out pretty well. How did you do? Here are this weeks picks (minus Brett’s – he is out researching in person for next week). Follow along and see how your favorite Staff picks do. Or compete head-to-head and see how you match up. Best of luck on all your picks!

Posted by Adam Sexton at 1:46 PM | Permalink

Rhonda Lawrence, the Library’s Head of Cataloging, has worked in the UCLA Law Library since 1989.  As the co-author of three editions of Cataloging Legal Literature: a manual on AACR2R and Library of Congress subject headings for legal materials, Rhonda is one of the foremost authorities in American legal cataloging. She is also very active and well-known in national library associations.

Law librarianship is a second career for Rhonda.  Fresh out of college with her B.S. in English and a minor in Inner City Education from Iowa State, she taught junior and senior high school English for four years at an inner city school in Knoxville, Tennessee.  Rhonda originally decided to go to library school to become a school librarian.  But she entered the UCLA Graduate School of Library and Information Science in Fall 1978, just after California’s Proposition 13 was passed, which made employment prospects for school librarians pretty dismal. While in library school she became interested in government documents and legal research after working at the now defunct Public Affairs Service on the A-level of the Young Research Library.

Rhonda’s first job after library school was as a government documents librarian with the L.A. County Public Library. Returning to UCLA to take courses in law librarianship and legal bibliography,  she was offered a job as a cataloger for the L.A. County Law Library while interviewing the library director for a research paper. She had taken four or five cataloging classes while in library school, and discovered that she really enjoyed it.  She had always wanted to return to UCLA, so seven years later when a cataloging job opened up in the law library, she applied for it.

Rhonda loves working at UCLA and enjoys her wonderful colleagues (in fact, she met her husband of 13 years here, Professor Arthur Rosett).  Rhonda confesses that she also has a thing about organizing, to the extent that she arranges her husband’s shirts by sleeve length, color and pattern!

Her personal interests include gardening (the library often benefits from her gorgeous flower garden), playing Mah Jonng with other law library staff, reading mysteries, and singing in a choir, which she has done for as long as she can remember.  In high school, her honors chorus was selected to attend the Salzburg Music Festival.  Rhonda still sings in her church choir and she loves belting out the “Star Spangled Banner” at sporting events.

Rhonda has two cats in her household: a 14-month old Maine Coon cat, Dr. Watson (left), and the recently adopted Don Pio Pico (right), a 12-week old Ragdoll cat. She had hoped that the new cat would distract Dr. Watson from one of his favorite pastimes, hanging out in her bathroom sink, but now she finds that she has two cats in her sinks. (Follow the web link to see that this is appears to be a common practice among cats!)

Rhonda is quite the movie buff and has won the library’s Oscar pool more often than not.  I am trying to encourage Rhonda to contribute regular movie reviews to this blog, so look for those in the future!

Posted by Donna Gulnac at 1:44 PM | Permalink

QUESTION:

I'm a law student trying to find out if somebody else has already written about my journal/law review topic. Where should I go to cover all my bases? Note: My topic primarily focuses on California law.

RESPONSE:

To ascertain whether there are any law review articles on a particular topic, you should run searches in a number of indexes and full-text databases, some of which are available through Westlaw and Lexis and some of which are available through the Library’s electronic subscriptions. We have prepared two guides that provide instructions on how to access and use these resources: Guide G8--Finding Law Review & Journal Articles Online, available at http://www.law.ucla.edu/docs/guideg8.pdf; and Guide G7—Online Research: Beyond Lexis and Westlaw (see Section III on Periodical Indexes) available at http://www.law.ucla.edu/docs/guideg7.pdf. 

We also encourage you to visit the reference desk, where a reference librarian can provide you with additional assistance.  Thank you for your question!

Please note: It is helpful to refer to the entry on Web accelerators before using the databases listed in the resources above.
 

Posted by Donna Gulnac at 2:55 PM | Permalink

The popular French band M83 will be playing at the Groud Zero Coffeehouse on Sept. 28th.

Their musical style owes something to the shoegazing genre in its extensive use of reverb effects and lyrics spoken softly over loud instrumentals, though M83's songs employ considerably less guitar than most shoegazing bands.

Posted by Salman Quazi at 2:22 PM | Permalink

Welcome to the beginning of this year's NFL season. For those of you interested in the weekly games, times, lines and of course our resident "expert" picks you are in the right spot. We will feature the weekly line up of games, start times, dogs & favorites and the total over/under line. In addition to this, a few members of our staff (Brett - Access Services Supervisor, Gabe - Document Delivery & Interlibrary Loans Manager & Adam - Daytime Circulation Supervisor) will provide you with weekly selections (straight up, no points). So test your skills and see how you line up. Want to suggest a pick? You can find us at the Circulation Desk at some point during the day. 2006 Kickoff is near!

Posted by Adam Sexton at 12:52 PM | Permalink

The California Digital Library licenses numerous databases, covering a variety of disciplines, to meet the research needs of students, staff and faculty in the UC System.  Today the CDL issued the following important notice outlining problems caused by the use of Web accelerators to access licensed content:

The use of web accelerators can be a great convenience. As accelerator use is becoming more and more prevalent it is necessary for campus library staff to be aware of the potential problems caused by their use and to communicate this information to their faculty and students. Web accelerators are applications that use various techniques to make web pages load faster or to download links, images, or files more quickly. Google Web Accelerator and the Firefox plugin “DownThemAll” are some commonly used products.

The two main problems caused by the use of web accelerators:

1) Users cannot access licensed content from a valid UC IP address.
2) Triggering of vendor “excessive downloading” thresholds which can result in the user’s IP address being blocked by the vendor.

This second situation can be especially problematic if the user is accessing the vendor’s content via a campus proxy server or VPN. In cases like this, the actions of one person can shut down access to a vendor’s resources for all users of a campus proxy server or VPN until the problem is resolved and the vendor removes the IP block!

Examples from the CDL Helpline files:

1. Google Web Accelerator & JSTOR

A user accessing licensed content from on-campus was blocked from viewing JSTOR’s online content because JSTOR did not recognize the user’s IP address as a valid UC campus IP address. JSTOR displayed the following message, “We’re sorry. You do not have access to JSTOR from your current location.”

The user was blocked because Google Web Accelerator sends the user’s page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic, thus, the request comes from a Google IP address, not the UC user’s IP address. JSTOR Technical Services advised the user to add JSTOR’s domain (“.jstor.org”) to the “Don’t Accelerate These Sites” text area in Google’s Web Accelerator Preferences section; see http://webaccelerator.google.com/support.html#preferences2 for more information.

2. Access to Ejournal Site Blocked by the Vendor

With web accelerators it becomes very easy to trigger “breach of contract” issues. Recently, CDL was notified by a vendor that a user’s IP had been blocked because of “excessive downloading”, in this case, the downloading of an entire issue of a specific online journal. IP blocks can be triggered when an excessive number of files are downloaded from a single IP address within the vendor’s pre-determined period of time (whether or not the files appear in the same online journal issue).

What you should know and do:

* Most of UC’s access to licensed electronic resources is controlled by IP addresses.
* If a patron is using the campus proxy server or VPN service and initiates a breech, this can result in a lockout to that vendor’s site for all proxy or VPN users.

Posted by Donna Gulnac at 10:13 AM | Permalink