FAOLEX Legal Office

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has online legal office called FAOLEX.

A multilingual team summarizes and in many cases translates laws and regulations on topics falling within FAO's mandate - agriculture, cultivated plants, environment, fisheries, food, forestry, land and soil, livestock, water and wild species and ecosystems. Legal information is received by FAO from Member Nations pursuant to Article XI of the FAO Constitution.

The website offers advanced search, which allows a user to narrow search by the following subjects: agriculture, forestry, cultivated plants, environment generally, air & atmosphere, fisheries, land & soil, water, mineral resources, energy, food, livestock, wild species & ecosystem, sea, and waste & hazardous substances. The website is available in English, Spanish, French, and Arabic. It also offers Basic Texts, Fishlex, Waterlex, Water Treaties, Publications, Right to Food, and Treaties generally.

Computer-Literate vs. Research-Literate

Via Chronicle of Higher Education, in an article titled Not Enough Time In the Library, the author Todd Gilman points out an interesting fact; being computer-literate doesn't mean and/or guarantee being research-literate. Todd discusses the existence and importance of technological tools, such are smart classrooms, interactive whiteboards, Web 2.0 tools, social networking tools, citation tools, and many others. But he states that those are only to convey substantive content. He says,

Research education is not tools education. Research education involves getting students to understand how information is organized physically in libraries, as well as electronically in library catalogs and in powerful, sometimes highly specialized commercial databases. It means teaching students to search effectively online to identify the most relevant and highest-quality books, articles, microform sets, databases, even free Web resources.

Read the full story to see some of his tips and hints on how to augment students' research skills. Though Todd is a librarian for English literature at Yale Memorial Library, his suggestions might be useful to legal researchers as well.

Be Aware Of Wikipedia!

Via WisBlawg, a post titled Student's Wikipedia Hoax Fools Journalists, Bloggers, writes about an example of unreliability of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. I think it is safe to say that everyone of us, at least once, received the warning to verify information found online against a reputable source. We all heard the advice to always make sure information found online is reliable and authenticated.

This story goes:

When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.

His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.

The sociology major's made-up quote -- which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death March 28 -- flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India.

Just to make sure, it is fine to use Wikipedia for a quick look up to gain a general idea of a topic, but to cite to Wikipedia or completely rely on the information found within, without verifying the reliability against a reputable source, well - that is just a gamble! So, let's warn ourselves once again! And I'll take advantage now to mention the Pace Law Library Research Assistants Guide that contains a section on evaluating Internet Resources. Take a look!