Pop Culture Makes Mark on Social Security’s Most Popular Baby Names List: Elvis Rises to Number 676

The top ten boys and girls names for 2007 are:
Boys:

1. Jacob
2. Michael
3. Ethan
4. Joshua
5. Daniel
6. Christopher
7. Anthony
8. William
9. Matthew
10. Andrew

Girls:

1. Emily
2. Isabella
3. Emma
4. Ava
5. Madison
6. Sophia
7. Olivia
8. Abigail
9. Hannah
10. Elizabeth

Emily has topped the list since 1996. Jacob has done so since 1999. Elizabeth returns to the top ten after a two year absence.

+ Popular Baby Names page

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration

Resource of the Week: World Legal Information Institute (WLII)
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

Believe it or not, we stumbled across this awesome resource while poking around in the Wirtz Labor Law Library at the U.S. Department of Labor website.

Officially launched in November 2002, the World Legal Information Institute (WorldLII) is a “free, independent and non-profit global legal research facility” affiliated with several academic legal information institutes, among them Cornell’s Legal Information Institute and others from Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, South Africa, Britain and Ireland, and the University of the South Pacific School of Law. WorldLII provides a single search facility for over 270 databases from 48 jurisdictions in 20 countries.

The user may select a resource area, among which are: legislation, case law, superior or high court decisions, journals, treaties, law reform, domain name decisions, and secondary materials.

Alternatively, a jurisdiction or geographic region may be selected, with an emphasis on Pacific and Commonwealth countries (for the United States only Supreme Court decisions are included).

Among recent additions to the website are World Trade Organization Panel Decisions from the last few years to present, New Zealand Privacy Commissioner Cases 1996 to present, and materials from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice (CanLII).

And then we noted, at the end of this description, a hat tip to ResourceShelf contributing editor Stuart Basefsky of Cornell University, School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Martin P. Catherwood Library. Which sealed the deal for us. Stuart routinely brings to our attention quality resources that we otherwise might never have seen.

World LII currently provides access to “891 databases from 123 countries and territories via the Free Access to Law Movement,” which comprises legal information institutes from all over the world, including the venerable Legal Information Institute at Cornell University School of Law — online since 1992.

The collection of databases is basically one-stop shopping for everything available via its University-based LII members:

• Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII)
• British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII)
• Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII)
• Hong Kong Legal Information Institute (HKLII)
• Legal Information Institute (Cornell)
• Pacific Islands Legal Information Institute (PacLII)
• Wits University School of Law (Wits Law School)

Contentwise, these databases include case law, legislation, treaties, legal reform, law journals, and subject-specific information. These are organized geographically, by continent and then by country. Almost everything is in the English language, unless otherwise noted. A powerful federated search tool allows you to choose which databases to search. A dropdown menu provides Boolean options; additional options include sorting by relevance, word counts, and number of results displayed at one time. Extensive help is available.

You can also browse the offerings here by subject category — from Accounting & Auditing to Women & the Law. Clicking the Other Indexes link at the top of this page displays a list of law-oriented subject indexes available via other websites. (Scroll down below the main subject index.)

The World LII Catalog “provides links to over 15,000 law-related web sites in every country in the world. WorldLII’s Websearch makes searchable the full text of as many of these sites as WorldLII’s web-spider can reach.” Or browse by country. A Recent Additions page links you to the newest resources.

Other features include:

• Law Journals Project:
  

  The Law Journals Project aims to provide a comprehensive search facility for all academic law journals available via WorldLII and other Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) and the nearly 20,000 law journal articles and academic papers available through the Legal Scholarship Network (LSN). Currently, the search facility below allows searches over 45 law journals databases.

• International Treaties Library
• Global Legal Information Network
  

  (GLIN)
  GLIN is a public database of laws, regulations, judicial decisions, and other complementary legal sources contributed by governmental agencies and international organizations. These GLIN members contribute the official full texts of published documents to the database in their original language. Each document is accompanied by a summary in English and subject terms selected from the multilingual index to GLIN. All summaries are available to the public, and public access to full texts is also available in participating jurisdictions.

• International Courts & Tribunals Library
  

  The International Courts and Tribunals Project (ICT Project) aims to provide a comprehensive search facility for final decisions of all international and multi-national courts and tribunals, whether global or regional. The search facility below allows searches over the decisions of 20 International Courts and Tribunals, comprising over 20,000 decisions. Most databases contain complete backsets and are updated regularly. A few are still being completed.

• Law Reform Project
  

  This project aims to make searchable from one location all of the databases specialising in Law Reform available on any of the Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) that are part of WorldLII. The databases currently included are listed below. Individual databases may be searched on their respective host LIIs.

• Final Appeal Courts
• Privacy Law Library
  

  This project aims to make searchable from one location all of the databases specialising in Privacy law available on any of the Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) that are part of WorldLII. The databases currently included are listed above. Individual databases may be searched on their respective host LIIs.

To keep track of new information on the site, you can subscribe to World LII News.

Articles include:

+ In Search of Certitude

+ Big Broadband Connectivity in the United States

+ Top-Ten IT Issues, 2008

+ The Need to Formalize Trust Relationships in Digital Repositories

+ A Steady Vision for Libraries (Podcast)

Source: EDUCAUSE (via Kept-Up Librarian & Pete W.)

All reports are PDF files.

+ El Salvador

+ Honduras

+ Suriname

Source: BuyUSA.gov

Library of Congress Digital Preservation Newsletter

In this issue:

* Digital Preservation Pioneer: Caroline Arms
* Information about open sustainable formats
* Updates from digital preservation partners

Source: LC

Happy Mother’s Day. Here’s a compilation of facts about mom’s in the United States.

Source: U.S. Census

From the article:

How a Civil War buff’s chance discovery led to a sting, a raid and a victory against traffickers in stolen historical documents.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine

Key figures on European business 2008 Edition
152 pages; PDF.

Summary/News Release

The pocketbook Key figures on European business1, published by Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Communities, summarises the main features of European business in a concise and simple manner. The publication consists of fourteen short chapters, focusing on particular aspects of the European business economy; from the size and structure of business sectors to the importance of foreign controlled enterprises. This edition includes a special feature on the factors of business success, which presents an analysis of the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs for 15 Member States. The special feature gives an insight into the issues that determine the success and growth of newly born enterprises, as well as the motivation of entrepreneurs and the difficulties they face.

Source: EuroStat (via Basefsky’s IWS Documented News Service)

Posted 9 May 2008 on DocuTicker:
+ U.S. Airline Industry: Issues and Role of Congress (Congressional Research Service)
+ Violent Islamist Extremism, the Internet, and the Homegrown Terrorist Threat (U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs)
+ The Context of Unwanted Sexual Experiences (University of New Hampshire)

From the article:

Each year, Weddle’s (www.weddles.com), a major U.S. publisher of print guides to Internet job hunting, invites the public to visit its Web site and vote for their favorite job boards. The 30 sites with the most votes at the end of the year are declared the winners of the Users’ Choice Awards. It’s not a scientific survey, since those polled are a self-selected sampling and tend to feel strongly about certain sites, both pro and con.

Source: Fortune

v.9, no. 1 (Spring 2008)
Table of Contents includes the following:

Trend Setters: Computers in the Commons Environment
Kim Granath and Sue Samson

Back to Basics: Reviving Ethical Practice in Library
Management
Suzanne Milton

Increasing Impact of Scholarly Journal Articles:
Practical Strategies Librarians Can Share
Laura Bowering Mullen

Old Maids, Policeman, and Social Rejects: Mass Media
Representations and Public Perceptions of Librarians
Maura Seale

Perceptions of LIS Professionals about Digital
Libraries in Pakistan: The Pakistani Perspective
Ashfaq Hussain, Khalid Mahmood and Farzana Shafique

+ Google moves to make Google Reader more social (via Computerworld)

+ Report from Google’s Annual Stockholder Meeting (via Forbes)

From the post:

The Web site will let residents compare inpatient procedure prices at more than 80 hospitals statewide. Meanwhile, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano issued an executive order to increase the use of electronic prescribing in an effort to boost patient safety.

Source: iHealth Beat

From iHealthBeat:

The Oregon Web site now provides the average hospital prices for more than 90 medical procedures and conditions at hospitals in the state, as well as cost and quality comparisons for eight common procedures, including heart failure and stroke.

Source: iHealthBeat

From the summary

A national-level update of characteristics of the nation’s more than 75 million students. Eight tables include number of students by attributes such as age, sex, race, Hispanic origin, family income, type of college and vocational course enrollment. This Internet-only release comes from data collected each October as part of the Current Population Survey. The full report with analysis of the details is expected later this summer.

Source: U.S. Census