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PRIMARY AUTHORITY THE NEWSLETTER FOR THE NEW ENGLAND LAW | BOSTON LAW LIBRARY MAY 2014 Notes from the Director By Anne M. Acton Crowdsourcing Legal Information You have probably heard of the term ―crowdsourcing‖. Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary notes that the word was first used in 2006 and defines it as: the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. Contributions can sometimes be monetary for fundraising purposes, but I am going to present about some new crowdsourcing projects that have sprung up to give access to legal information. Though most of these projects make information freely available to the public similar to Wikipedia, these particular ones have some editorial vetting and are affiliated with law schools so they are worthwhile to check out. This search engine developed by Pablo Arredondo as a fellowship project at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, gets at judge-generated case summaries and descriptions of legal principles contained in case opinions. If you put search terms or phrases in quotes in the Google-like box, such as wiretap or ―felony murder‖, in return you see results from a number of cases and a brief blurb from the opinion. These cases are not available in fulltext, but they are accompanied by citation. Searchers can then go and find the fulltext of the cases on Westlaw or Lexis or via free sources such as Casetext, Courtlistener, and Google Scholar. Though there are several free sources for fulltext opinions, case citators have long resided only on fee based sources like Shepard’s on LexisNexis and Keycite on Westlaw. From this same Center at Stanford and in sync with their Casetext database, comes: The WeCite Project …designed to allow users to seamlessly input analysis as to how opinions impact each other. In keeping with the community spirit behind the company, Casetext's citator is called WeCite. How do you benefit from WeCite? Let's say you are reading Brown v. Board of Education. To research how subsequent decisions have treated Brown, simply click the WeCite button on the lefthand toolbar. Continued on page 9 INSIDE THIS ISSUE Summer Extension 2 Staff News 2 Book Review 3 Totally Unofficial Faculty Law 4 Library Committee: A Student’s Perspective Boston Public Library 5 Online Resources Marathon Scarf Project 5 Book Review 6 The System Hold that Pose! 7 Legal Research 8 in the Law Reviews