InSITE
A Current Awareness Service of
Cornell Law Library

ISSN 1521-9046

ARCHIVE

Vol. 15, no. 6
November 9, 2009
InSITE highlights selected law-related World Wide Web sites in two ways: as an annotated publication issued electronically and in print; and as a keyword-searchable database.

The law librarians at Cornell evaluate potentially useful Web sites, select the most valuable ones, and provide commentary and subject access to them. These information can be accessed as following:

    1. Current Issue
    2. Archived Issues
    3. Searchable Database
    4. RSS Feeds RSS FEED of the Current Issue Editions [What is RSS?]
    5. E-mail subscription: send the following request to lyris@cornell.edu:
      join INSITE-L 'your name'
      where your name(include the quotation marks) is the name you want to be available to the list's administrator. You must send this message from the e-mail address where you want to receive the e-list's messages
    6. In print format for the Cornell Law School community

Enforcement & Compliance History Online (ECHO)
    URL: http://www.epa-echo.gov/echo/
    The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is responsible for maintaining the Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) website as a source of information about action taken by the EPA for the past three to five years, depending on the data being viewed. The EPA worked with states to develop ECHO and determine how the information is presented on the site. The site provides an online location for information that has been traditionally available through freedom of information requests. The data on the site is updated monthly and includes information posted to EPA’s databases. However, the information can take some time to reach the database so the result is that the data from an inspection, for example, could take two or three months to reach the ECHO site. The site includes information that is required to be collected and maintained by the following statutes: Clean Air Act (CAA) Stationary Source Program, Clean Water Act (CWA) National Pollutant Elimination Discharge System (NPDES), and Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). It includes links to some state databases that may contain additional environmental data. It’s not clear whether those states not included don’t have such a website or simply did not provide a direct link to their site to ECHO. As for the state links that are provided, many of these take a long time to open and some of the links are broken. The site also contains links to various EPA sites and other US governmental sites that contain environmental information. Those links work well. ECHO does contain original content and there are very detailed search engines for the various databases on the site. The site is easy to navigate and user-friendly for even the most computer-challenged, although those familiar with the statutes covered will no doubt find it more useful than the average citizen.
    [Author: C. Brown]
ExecutedToday.com
    URL: http://www.executedtoday.com/
    A blog begun in October 2007, ExecutedToday recounts each day an execution that took place on that same date in history. Posts often contain snippets of film, letters, witness accounts, artwork, photographs, and even pop culture. Topics range from war and domestic criminals to pirates, individuals who offended Roman emperors, and victims of colonial expansion. The author’s anti-death-penalty stance is evident. The identity of the author(s) is unknown, and readers should not assume that the site is authoritative. Previous posts are archived. Readers who wish to review the most recent posts can click on the “archives” tab in the horizontal menu to access a visually appealing display. Readers interested in older posts can use the dropdown menu in the sidebar and the calendar feature to select the month and day they wish to view. Because the author supplies subject tags for each entry, readers can use the handy dropdown menu of categories in the sidebar to browse for previous posts. Categories include geographic location, manner of death, reason for execution, and time period. Use the search box below the dropdown categories list to locate posts containing specific keywords. Links to an eclectic array of Web sites, among them death penalty, crime, and history sites, are available in the “links” tab in the horizontal menu. Readers can also subscribe to the RSS feed, leave comments, email the author, and add a widget containing ExecutedToday’s current post to their Web sites or blogs. ExecutedToday is an intriguing place to spend a few minutes or a few hours. It will be interesting to see how long the blog continues with daily entries.
    [Author: I. Haight]
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Digital Collection
    URL: http://www.law.harvard.edu/library/special/exhibits/digital/owh-dig
    ital-col.html
    Considered the second greatest U.S. Supreme Court Justice of all time by a 1971 Life Magazine poll, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935), is remembered as much for being “the Great Dissenter” in cases such as Lochner v. New York as he is for crisp, witty writing. (The Oxford Dictionary of American Legal Quotations quotes Holmes more than any other person.) Holmes is less known, however, for his lengthy military service during the Civil War (he was wounded three times) and for his family life. Harvard Law School, Holmes’ alma mater, is providing access to these more obscure parts of Holmes’ life by digitizing its entire collection of material associated with Holmes and making the images available online to the public. Harvard completed Phase I of the project in March 2009, digitizing documents related to Holmes’ military service (including letters, a scrapbook, and a diary), photographs and artwork of Holmes and his family, Holmes’ personal annotated copy of his influential book The Common Law, and personal objects such as Holmes’ military uniform, desk, and death mask. Phase II, which does not yet have a release date, will include additional manuscripts and an interpretive Web exhibit. You must click on one of the hyperlinked collections on the home page (such as the scrapbook) in order to access features such as Help and Search. The images are fairly easy to navigate using the viewer, but the Help option at the top right of the screen provides instructions. The Search feature allows very specific searching, but note that it will search across all of Harvard’s visual resources unless you limit by repository. For non-manuscript material, use the tabs below the menu bar to change your view of the images. The Grid/Text View offers the most descriptive information, while the List and Grid views permit you to see more images at once. For unbound manuscript material like letters, click on + to view the documents contained in each folder. A nice feature is the ability to download a PDF of selected images by clicking on Printable Version. You can also create your own collection by saving images to the default portfolio or to a portfolio you name, which you can download or email. This site is a nice resource for anyone interested in the life of one of our great jurists.
    [Author: I. Haight]


InSITE contributors: C. Brown, I. Haight, J. Pajerek (editor)
© 2009 Cornell Law Library

The contents of this publication and any recommendations therein are the opinions of the authors and do not reflect the views of Cornell University.