Wednesday is usually our day for profiling a subscription resource. Today, instead, we'll tread the line between "freesearch" and a subscription profile, and address both a fee-based resource and a tool designed to leverage much of its content into the realm of the free. PACER is the system used by the federal courts to allow access to case and docket information. While run by the courts themselves, PACER is not free (and in fact has a rather cumbersome paywall mechanism). RECAP is a project of Princeton researchers, and aims to augment PACER in ways that should make the use of federal dockets and filings cheaper for the researcher while also putting pressure upon a business model for PACER that the RECAPpers view as excessively closed and proprietary and arguably in violation of the E-Government Act.

Cornell's Law Library has launched yet another custom search engine. Like the ABA's recently-launched search-engine for law journal content on the Web, this is based on Google's Custom Search functionality. Users should be aware that this is still based on Google's crawling/indexing and, presumably, Google's ranking but the array of sites and pages that can be returned as results is essentially pre-limited by whoever crafts the custom search function. Betsy McKenzie has more, and some useful tips on search technique, at Out of the Jungle. Andrew

This post from Marcie Baranich on Hein Online's blog includes some useful information about accessing the Hein Online content newly indexed in Google Scholar. The take-away is that the experience should be relatively seamless IF you are authenticated to our subscription (on campus or VPN'd in) but, she points out, Hein still offers compelling reasons to interact directly with their interface and finding tools. The new post is an update of this one. Andrew

While I'm busy cross-referencing blog posts from our cross-town colleagues, I should point out this post from Sue Altmeyer at CSU regarding integrating Google Scholar into your legal, secondary-source, research. Of particular use are the tips about configuring Google Scholar to work with OLinks (OhioLINK's "link server" tool that allows linking from citation finding tools, including but not limited to Google Scholar, to subscription full-text sources).