Blog Posts by Subject: Government and Law

President Barack Obama officially declared Tuesday, April 9, 2013 as National Equal Pay Day. In a statement issued Monday, April 8, Obama said, "Women, who make up nearly half of our nation's workforce, face a pay gap that means they earn 23 percent less on average than men do. This disparity is even greater for African-American women and Latinas. On National Equal Pay Day, we recognize this injustice by marking how far into the new year women have to work just to make what men did in the previous one."

Fact: Hardly a day goes by without some discussion in the press about "drones" — unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS).

Free legal resources on the Internet are great for everyone's needs. Until they aren't. So, what do you do next?

I was super excited to tour the National Archives at New York City (part of the National Archives and Records Administration or NARA) on February 12, 2013 because I thought that it would be a terrific experience for the staff of the library. I became even more convinced that it would be a great experience when I saw a photo of the new location of the NARA library at a METRO (Metropolitan Library Council of New York) conference. The architecture in the building is spectacular! The new location is as follows:

Of what concern are drones to librarians and other information professionals? I mean those drones, scions of the remote-control model airplanes of a more innocent age — now grown up and more sinister and troublesome than anyone might have predicted in their youth (or might they?)

In honor of President Obama's upcoming inauguration, the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound would like to present a compilation of historic presidential speeches selected from our collections.

In 1869, James Alexander Hamilton published a memoir. The third son of Alexander Hamilton was a Columbia-educated district attorney, colonel, writer and diplomat who addressed many aspects of his "varied life" in The Reminiscences of James A. Hamilton.i But while The Reminiscences have often been used as a source in the biographies of the father, they have never been used to tell the story of the son. A selection of Hamilton's papers and correspondence made it into the published work but the archives of the New York Public Library holds the James A. Hamilton papers; a complete, non-digitized collection of his life.

In the aftermath of the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is hiring local employees to help with the recovery of many communities impacted by the storm.

As a graduate student whose dissertation examines the development of Brooklyn in the nineteenth century, I have spent more hours than I care to count the past several years poring through documents in the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Brooklyn Public Library and other repositories in what was formerly the nation's third-largest city and is now New York City's most populous borough. Recently however, through the New York Public Library's Short-Term Research Fellowship Program and assistance from staff in its Manuscripts and Archives Division, I was able to research in Manhattan, examining NYPL's substantial archival collections relating to Brooklyn during the period it was an 

With the current United States presidential election approaching, I thought it appropriate to share a couple items from the Timothy Leary papers relating to Ron Paul.

The U.S. economy and the upcoming presidential election are on my mind as well as on the minds of many Americans.

I'm not an economist, a political science major or an historian.

I'm a librarian at the Mid-Manhattan Library who specializes in health and medicine — but, I am interested in understanding what has happened to our country over the past ten years.

The Republican and Democratic National Conventions are over, and the presidential nominations from the two major U.S. political parties are official: incumbent President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. With the general election less than two months away, here are resources to help you get ready to vote.

We pride ourselves on our United States patent system. But, to misquote, all patents are local (or at least national). So anyone who wants patent protection in another country will have to meet the filing and legal requirements of that national government. And, of course, do a patent search!

For about a decade now it has been feasible to conduct prior art research for a U. S. Patent entirely online using free search tools available on the USPTO website. Although the availability of patent research resources online has not diminished the challenges of prior art searching, it has certainly made the activity more convenient.

Some may regret the passing of libraries receiving goverment information in paper form. But the goal of digitization isn't sensory deprivation; and anyway, paper materials started to disappear before the Internet came along — think microfiche, microfilm, even microcards (and yes, we have some of those at NYPL). Maybe someday all official goverment documents will be available online. However, not yet — there are still paper, and microform, collections here at SIBL.

• Landlord-Tenant Disputes: Heat and Hot Water, Eviction, Foreclosure
• Complaints with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTA)
• Consumer Fraud and "Rip Offs"
• Discrimination based on Race, Gender, Sexual Orientation

The New York Public Library's Manuscripts and Archives Division is honored to safeguard a copy of the Declaration of Independence penned by Thomas Jefferson. Because the Declaration was featured in the Library’s 2011 Centennial Exhibition, it will not be on display in July 2012. However, the occasion offers a chance instead for a closer look at the document through the Library’s website. In the days immediately following its ratification on July 4, 1776, Jefferson made several copies of the Declaration that had been submitted to the Continental Congress and underlined those passages to which changes had been made. This blog post will summarize the 

Did Cole Porter steal the music for some of his most popular songs? Ira B. Arnstein thought so. He took Porter, and several other songwriters, to court for copyright infringement during the 1930s and 1940s.

For a while now, it's been a pretty sure thing: U.S. Federal Government Documents are posted online, for anyone with Internet access to find. Or at least to look for - you can give the U.S. Government Printing Office (which we'll be calling the GPO) website a try. But if you might be researching older documents, you still may have to pay a visit to a U.S. Federal Government Depository Library like SIBL. And to help readers prepare for such a visit, this post will offer information about traditional resources we recommend to search for Government Documents in our library.