Skip to main content

The Main Library Can Help —Useful databases available through the M.D. Anderson Library

As followers of dame Law we tend to get locked into a narrow universe of legal research sources -- Lexis, Westlaw, Hein, and perhaps a specialty source that applies to our specific area of expertise or study (e.g., Kluwer Arbitration). You would think that given how encompassing law as a subject has become that our research tools would be equally broad. They aren’t and we rarely think beyond those services we are comfortable with. One of the greatest enjoyments of being a law librarian is introducing an unfamiliar database to a student or faculty member and seeing them light up (like the veritable kid on Christmas morning) when they realize how much easier their lives will be once they begin using this new database. Invariably these databases are those that the library subscribes to through the University’s main library – the M.D. Anderson Library.

The often overlooked, but always helpful, complimentary databases Reader’s Guide and Reader’s Guide Retrospective from H.W. Wilson are guaranteed to make a researcher smile. These databases are based upon the venerable Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. Reader’s Guide and Retrospective index articles that have appeared in general interest, special interest, and scholarly publications. Reader’s Guide Full Text has full-text articles published from 1983 to date. The Retrospective has citations to articles published from 1890 to 1982. Think about that for a moment-- these products allow you to find out what popular magazines were writing about since the 19th Century (and back to the Reagan era in full-text!). Together these indexes represent very powerful resources for historical research, and present the opportunity to see how historical issues were treated in both the scholarly and popular press. If you are a student on one of the law school’s journals, you will find these indexes very helpful in the cite-checking process.

A wealth of informational goodness is at your fingertips if you just take the opportunity to check out the databases the M.D. Anderson Library makes available to you.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Amazing, but True, Deportation Story of Carlos Marcello

Earlier this week, the University of Houston Law Center was fortunate to have as its guest Professor Daniel Kanstroom of Boston College of Law. An expert in immigration law, he is the Director of the International Human Rights Program, and he both founded and directs the Boston College Immigration and Asylum Clinic. Speaking as the guest of the Houston Journal of International Law’s annual Fall Lecture Series, Professor Kanstroom discussed issues raised in his new book, Aftermath: Deportation Law and the New American Diaspora . Professor Michael Olivas introduced Professor Kanstroom to the audience, and mentioned the fascinating tale of Carlos Marcello, which Professor Kanstroom wrote about in his chapter “The Long, Complex, and Futile Deportation Saga of Carlos Marcello,” in Immigration Stories , a collection of narratives about leading immigration law cases. My interest piqued, I read and was amazed by Kanstroom’s description of one of the most interesting figures in American le

Texas Subsequent History Table Ceases Publication

This week, Thomson Reuters notified subscribers that publication of the Texas Subsequent History Table will be discontinued and no further updates will be produced, due to “insufficient market interest.” Practitioners have been extracting writ (and since 1997, petition) history from the tables since their initial publication in 1917 as The Complete Texas Writs of Error Table . The tables, later published by West, have been used for nearly a century to determine how the Texas Supreme Court or Court of Criminal Appeals disposed of an appeal from an intermediate appellate court. The purpose of adding this notation to citations is to indicate the effect of the Texas Supreme Court’s action on the weight of authority of the Court of Appeals’ opinion.  For example, practitioners may prefer to use as authority a case that the Texas Supreme Court has determined is correct both in result and legal principles applied (petition refused), rather than one that simply presents no error that requires

C-SPAN Video Archive Now Online

Legislative researchers and politics fans take note. C-SPAN recently completed a digitization project placing the entirety of its video collection online. The archives record all three C-SPAN networks seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. The videos are available at no cost for historical, educational, research, and archival uses. The database includes over 160,000 hours of video recorded since 1987 and the programs are indexed by subject, speaker names, titles, affiliations, sponsors, committees, categories, formats, policy groups, keywords, and locations. The most recent, most watched, and most shared videos are highlighted on the main page. To start watching, visit the C-SPAN Video Library and use the search function at the top of the page.