Current Cites, the excellent online annotated bibliography on information technology is now 15 years old. Roy Tennant, the editor, reminds us of this remarkable fact in an email to subscribers today. It seems amazing that the whole internet thing has been going for even more years than that. . . . [more]
I have marked up a version of the Copyright Act incorporating the proposed amendments from the first reading version of Bill C-60. My marked up version is here (additions to the Act are shown in yellow, deletions are shown in green and transitional provisions are shown in purple). I believe that my marked up version is accurate, but if readers spot any errors or omissions, let me know and I can update the marked up version. . . . [more]
The Association pour l’avancement des sciences et des techniques de la documentation (l’ASTED) has released an August 4, 2005, French-language PDF news release criticizing the Canadian federal government’s approach to Bill C-60 dealing with Copyright Act amendments (an English news release is apparently pending). The organization is critical of the lack of balance in the proposed amendments. From the news release: . . . [more]
Google News is reporting that IBM is about to give away a concept-based search engine for unstructured data:
This piece explains the concept
Search concepts, not keywords, IBM tells business
Mon Aug 8, 2005 12:02 AM EDT
By Eric Auchard
NEW YORK (Reuters) – IBM plans to give away key search technologies for corporate data retrieval that use concepts and facts instead of simpler “keyword” searches relied upon by consumer Web companies such as Google Inc., the world’s largest computer company said on Monday.
While simple but powerful keyword searches have revolutionized how Internet users locate and retrieve . . . [more]
Tobe Liebert writes to say that there’s now an RSS feed for his Current Copyright Literature service at Tarlton Library, UT. The feed URL is:
http://web.austin.utexas.edu/law_library/copyright/rss.cfm.
And once again the URL for the web site is: http://web.austin.utexas.edu/law_library/copyright/. . . . [more]
There was a recent news story on CBC about the stock of the Chinese search engine Baidu being traded on NASDAQ with an opening day gain of 354%. This reminded me of the important research being done through The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School on Internet filtering and censorship by the Chinese government. There is a full text report entitled Internet Filtering in China in 2004-200: A Country Study. From the executive summary of this report: . . . [more]
I’ve developed Top Five and Top Ten lists as part of the Boot Camp I teach, with my colleagues, to articling students at our law firm. While it started out in fun, I soon discovered that it was an effective teaching tool that students paid attention to (as opposed to anything else I said), and have spent time refining it recently. I thought I’d offer this one as my first post, (although it’s not very tech-y) and welcome comments.
TOP FIVE MISTAKES TO AVOID IN ELECTRONIC RESEARCH
1. Missed higher level of Court: This one’s a career-limiting move! Did . . . [more]
I was at a conference in San Antonio in July where Westlaw announced a new graphical interface for “shephardizing” US caselaw.
The dome url is http://west.thomson.com/gkc
I talked to the Canadian rep who said this is under development in Canada, but not yet available. I reccomended that they consult with the legal research and academic communities on features, specifically on being able to note up foreign cases in Canadian courts, as this is now a significant aspect of Canadian legal research.
I urge Slawites to do the same.
I think graphical keycite is great, but I’d like to hear other . . . [more]
Wireless searching on blackberries check out
http://www.lawofficecomputing.com/EDC/eloc/searchsnippets.php . . . [more]
A few months ago, in connection with a project to create a research “desktop” for the faculty and graduate students, I interviewed a number of my colleagues at Osgoode Hall Law School about how they do their research. I was particularly interested in how often and how well they used online databases, those to which the Osgoode library subscribes or the two commercial giants (which are free for academic use). I can’t say I was surprised by my informal findings, which can perhaps be best summarized by saying that faculty members use these databases far less than one might suppose . . . [more]
Statistics Canada has just released the “Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP), Canada, 2000”. This is the Canadian effort to match the U.S. CIP, which was first developed in 1980. These classifications may have a variety of uses beyond that for the collection of statistics.
Law as a “field of study” is listed under “Academic and Occupationally-Specific Programs” and is identified, as are all fields of study, by a double digit, in this case 22. That field is further broken up into: