The draft program for the 2007 conference of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries is up on the association’s website.

The event takes place in Ottawa from May 6 to the 9th, 2007 at the Fairmont Château Laurier, located just east of Parliament Hill.

Conference topics include:

• Managing the impact of technological change in law libraries
• Change management case studies
• Developing a Core Foreign and International Law Collection
• The Ultimate End-User: the Public’s Access to Law Libraries and Legal Information
• The Trail of a Trial
• Leveraging Library Skills and Competencies to Promote Knowledge Management Initiatives
• Are we becoming a secret

This is in the way of a postscript to Connie Crosby’s previous entry on January 5th. As I commented on the posting, I was in New York last week, and had some time to visit the New York Public Library and to look at some of their special collections. Its one of the few places where the general public can do this, subject to understandable restrictions. They have some amazing stuff, but I was impressed by the amount of visual material that they were scanning and making available in the NYPL Digital Gallery. I did a brief search using . . . [more]

Un peu dans la lignée d’Howard Knopf relativement au droit d’auteur canadien, qu’est-ce que 2007 est susceptible de nous apporter de retentissant, croutillant, en droit des technologies de l’information? Je me limiterai à 10 éléments avec, comble du ridicule, une prévision; prévisions qui s’apparentent souvent à des souhaits. On en reparle en décembre 2007. Pourquoi 10? Parce que!

1 – Commençons avec l’actualité: ce matin même, ont eut lieu les audiences de Kraft c. Euro-Excellence dont j’ai déjà parlé ici et là, et dont je reparlerai, assurément. Dans la même lignée que plusieurs décisions majeures de la Cour suprême, . . . [more]

Wednesday’s Jerusalem Post has an interesting story about a Harvard law student working at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, using our tools to track down war criminals.

As the student says he never suspected his addition of legal research databases to the 60-year hunt would enable him to find four suspects within a month.

He used simple database programs such as LexisNexis, Westlaw and New Detective that lawyers have at their disposal, and searched voting records, land transfer documents, professional licenses, property sales and death records.

A warm welcome to a new blog by Osgoode faculty and select students on Supreme Court hearings/decisions. Looks like it is attempting to duplicate the excellent USSC blog.

As Patrick Monahan puts it:

Welcome to The Court, Osgoode’s newest publication.

Osgoode has an unsurpassed record of scholarship and the Law Journal continues to publish research of the highest quality. But since the advent of the internet we are not limited to publishing in print: we can offer nimbler and more timely research online, and we can reach a wider audience more quickly. The Court will provide just such scholarship and,

This week’s Lawyers Weekly has a feature bylined donalee Moulton in Halifax on what’s keeping corporate counsel up at night.

Transpires that 50% of corporate counsel have liability concerns about blogs.

And that David Fraser has conferred perpetual youth upon us:

“Blogging is a young person’s interest. It is reflective of a comfort with technology. And it can’t be ignored.”

Thanks David. . . . [more]

Some recent notables from other Canadian law blogs:

(1) Michael Geist highlights the recent changes to Canada’s legal deposit regulations, and the administrative effect on LAC:

Stats Can has released a survey of maintenance enforcement statistics for 2005/2006, examining data from the various provincial agencies that enforce family maintenance orders registered with them. The full report in PDF is free. And The Daily has a summary of the results. The news appears to be good news: payments are made on time in the majority of cases (which are overwhelmingly child support orders); and in most cases that were in arrears when registered with the agencies, the payor has made inroads into the debt. . . . [more]

There’s a great story on the NY Times website, T. Zeller Jr. “Documents Borne by Winds of Free Speech“, about a court’s likely misguided attempts to recall information that has found its way on to the web. It’s part of a suit against Eli Lilly concerning Zyprexa, an antipsychotic that Lilly makes. I can understand the court’s indignation that its order to seal documents in the action was either flouted or circumvented, if there’s a difference; but it’s clearly a case of too little power applied to too great a mechanism.

The money quote comes from the title . . . [more]

An interesting piece in PhysicsWeb about the challenge that our current reliance on email will pose for future historians.

I was struck by three quotes:

E-mail is cheaper and encourages quicker thought, and it introduces a peculiar blend of the personal and professional. Science historians have detected a decline in the use of lab notebooks, finding that data are often stored directly into computer files. Finally, they have noted the influence of PowerPoint, which can stultify scientific discussion and make it less free-wheeling; information also tends to be dumbed down when scientists submit PowerPoint presentations in place of formal reports.

As Simon Chester reminded us, today is Martin Luther King Jr. day in the U.S. It occurred to me that as the March on Washington and King’s famous “I have a dream” speech took place in 1963, many — hell, most — Slaw readers are too young to have seen and heard these events at the time. I’ve found a site that has a movie of these events that you might like to see. I was young then and living in the States; these were portentous times for that country, and the events made a very great impression on me; . . . [more]

Not yet a Canadian issue, legal, IT, or otherwise; but it is IT, and may eventually become a Canadian IT issue involving some legal research, so … 

There’s no news, yet, about when the (it may not be called the iPhone, by then) Apple “iPhone” will hit Canada. In the meantime, for those following the nascent iPhone trademark war, here’s a side story.

Here’s the link to a Slashdot story on what might be another Jobian dilemma involving the iPhone, if the story is accurate. The story’s title is “iPhone Not Runing OS X”. The article’s point (I believe) is . . . [more]