The last couple of years I have been living vicariously through Twitter, doing my best to follow the discussions at the Internet Librarian International (ILI) conference that takes place in the UK each October. When people who are attending start emailing me things they have learned (as happened this year), I really know I am missing something!

Some highlights from ILI2010

Dr. Hazel Hall, Director of the Centre for Social Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University, spoke about “relevance of social tools for information professionals” in her talk Getting Real About Social Media. Owen Stephens has a nice blog . . . [more]

This past week the Alberta Queen’s Bench released Pridgen v. University of Calgary, 2010 ABQB 644, a decision which quashed the academic discipline of students who had criticized a university professor.The applicants were participants in a Facebook group that used potential defamatory statements, which prompted in a complaint by the professor that resulted in non-academic discipline for misconduct.

The university did not allow the students to appeal the decision to the Board of Governors Discipline Appeal Committee, thereby preventing them from exhausting all internal remedies before seeking judicial review. . . . [more]

Readers will notice that we’ve added a small new feature to Slaw. Down at the bottom of entries, at the end of the after-post line that invites you to “Share,” you’ll see this: . . . [more]

There’s a time in the fall when I realize that colour is fading and we’re once again headed for the blacks, whites, and greys of winter — when, as it were, the world is putting on the drab of business clothing because the holiday is over. (How we wound up as a society that enforces dress in shades of dull is another story, perhaps.)

I comfort myself with the thought that great things are possible in black and white. Print. Early television. Yousuf Karsh portraits. The night sky…

And evocations, too, of our human “dark” side. Some of these can . . . [more]

Here’s an interesting paper outlining what looks to be a very interesting research tool currently being developed for Google: A “research trail” generator as a browser feature.

We propose the concept of research trails to help web users create and reestablish context across fragmented research processes without requiring them to explicitly structure and organize the material. A research trail is an ordered sequence of web pages that were accessed as part of a larger investigation; they are automatically constructed by filtering and organizing users’ activity history, using a combination of semantic and activity based criteria for grouping similar visited web

In the course of this profession you occasionally come across little oddities that catch your attention and amuse you. When it happens to me I often share them here at Slaw. The most recent oddity to catch our attention is an interestingly named case from Nova Scotia in 1919, The King v. Fifty Gallons Rum, (1919) 53 NSR 131, 31 CCC 10. Hitherto I had been unaware that an inanimate object could be named in an criminal case. In this instance it seems that Fifty Gallons of Rum, was caught at the wrong place, at the wrong . . . [more]

There is a commonly held myth that the gender gap in partner compensation is due to women billing fewer hours and spending less time on client development due to their greater responsibilities at home. This myth has been exploded in a recent study [PDF] published by The Project For Attorney Retention and sponsored by the ABA Commission for Women in the Profession.

Amongst other findings, the report states that factors that work against women partners include the lack of women on compensation committees where bonuses and compensation criteria are set; the lack of transparency around compensation criteria; the lack of . . . [more]

As it did a number of years ago with his earlier book, In the Public Interest, Irwin Law has just released a new book of essays edited by Michael Geist in both print and in PDF. And, as before, the version available online is offered under a Creative Commons license.

From “Radical Extremism” to “Balanced Copyright”: Canadian Copyright and the Digital Agenda is a book of 20 essays by Canadian scholars that tries to move the current copyright debate “toward an informed analysis of Bill C-32 and the future development of Canadian copyright law.” Bill C-32, as readers . . . [more]

I read with interest an article out today in the Law Society of BC Bencher Bulletin about virtual law firms.

Some quotes caught my particular attention. Specifically, a Practice Advisor at the Law Society of BC is quoted as follows:

Some lawyers are so keen on the technology and reducing overhead by having a ‘virtual law firm’ that they are not putting their minds to the professional responsibility issues regarding confidentiality, conflicts, client identification and verification, determining mental capacity of the client to instruct, undue influence over the client and so on.

There are currently very few law firms that . . . [more]

Leslie Wolf of the California Digital Library has written a quick point-by-point guide to how to organize smooth-running virtual meetings:

We spend our days attending lots of meetings, yet the well-managed meeting stands out as a rare gem. It’s not easy to run a good meeting, and in our increasingly virtual world it’s even harder to run an effective virtual meeting. But it’s a skill worth practicing, and your teammates will thank you for it.

The author provides a number of suggestions for what organizers should do before, at, during and after the meeting.

And here is Monty Python’s . . . [more]

The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) released last month a report out of the Oversight and Review Division, Office of the Inspector General (OIG). The mandate of the OIG is to conduct independent investigations and special reviews of DOJ personnel and programs. The purpose of this 200-page redacted report, A Review of the FBI’s Investigations of Certain Domestic Advocacy Groups, was to respond to media reports and Congressional inquiries alleging that the FBI had improperly targeted domestic advocacy groups between 2001-2006bsolely based on their peaceful exercise of their First Amendment Rights.

Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren’s letter to the . . . [more]

Today’s Dispatches on CBC Radio includes a four-minute report by Carol Rosenberg on the way in which reporters are treated at “Camp Justice” Guantánamo. Rosenberg is a reporter for the Miami Herald and has more experience covering trials there than anyone.

Now that the trial of Omar Khadr is back in the news — and lest you harbour any illusions that what is going on bears even a scant resemblance to justice — you might like to listen to the portion of the program featuring her. (The full broadcast of Dispatches is available here.)

You might . . . [more]