A little while ago I blogged about legal bibliographies and highlighted some of the work that John Eaton at the University of Manitoba has done in this area. It is very nice to see that John's work has been recognised as he is the 2012 recipient of the Association of College and Research Libraries Marta Lange/CQ Press Award. This award recognises librarians who have made a significant contribution to bibliography and information service in law or political science. The press release from the American Library Association announcing the award can be found here.

Congratulations John!

Library Boy told us last year about some tentative steps that courts were making to embrace – or to sniff around tentatively – the whole subject of social media. Today's announcement from the UK Supreme Court that it will start official tweets of judgments – this in anticipation of the Assange extradition decision – represents the first wholesale adoption by a final court of appeal.

It overshadows Chief Justice McLachlin's announcement within a speech at Carleton University on the Media and the Courts, that the Canadian judiciary should start to think seriously about social media.

See the Globe, the Star, CTV and the Halifax papers

You can see a brief video clip here.

I understand that the Australians may be thinking about the issues too.

CanLII President Colin Lachance has just now released his plan for that organization's next three years. "Strategic Priorities 2012 to 2014" is available in a variety of formats: HTML, PDF, and large print PDF. Versions in French are also available, of course.

The report elaborates on four strategic priorities for CanLII:

1. Secure permanent role as foremost source of free law in canada.
2. Continually enrich content to meet the needs of public and professional users.
3. Deliver easy to use professional grade tools and a compelling site experience.
4. Continuously promote and defend free access to law

As readers will likely know, CanLII receives from Canada's courts and justice departments a welter of documents under a variety of terms and conditions:

CanLII will seek to bring as much of that content as possible within a common contractual or policy framework guided by principles of open access and fair dealing.

In addition, CanLII will, among other things:

• seek "supplementary funding" to add to the $34 per lawyer base it currently receives;
• consider incorporating secondary sources and facilitating searches of materials hosted elsewhere;
• improve access to the service for users of mobile phones;
• develop "tools, tips, and training" to make research easier;
• continue to support free access to law here and elsewhere.

Lachance is seeking feedback and can be reached at clachance @ canlii.org

I have a tendency to want to keep my gravy out of my peas — control issues, I know. This makes me work to keep my social media in silos as much as possible, fearing, I suppose, the further loss of privacy if Facebook gossips to Twitter about me and vice versa. The devil — or the deity, if you prefer — is in the intersections, the linkages, the relationships.

This desire for some crafted anonymity or at least a tad of privacy is a forlorn hope, I realize, if I'm online and tweeting, blogging, "plus"-ing and the like, whether or not the right hand knows what the left hand is doing. And it seems that folks younger than me, which is to say most folks by far, are blithely uncaring about privacy when it comes to social media: the more the merrier and let it all connect.

In that spirit, IFTTT ("if this, then that") has launched an intriguing set of functionalities that allow you to explicitly establish linkages among your online activities to suit your particular needs. These linkages are, in effect, simple programs established on the coding model "if this, then that." So, for example, I can tell IFTTT that if I star an item in Google Reader, then send a note of that item to my Evernote account; or, if my Facebook profile picture changes, then change my Twitter photo to the new one also.

The units that you get to control are your social media accounts, which IFTTT calls "channels," and there are some 40 of them (Twitter, Facebook, email, LinkedIn, your telephone, etc. etc.). Channels are connected via "recipes," IFTTT's term for the condition and action parts of the program. There's no list of which actions are available or permissible, so far as I can tell, though there's a long list of "recipes" cooked up by others that will give you a pretty fair idea of what's possible. As you build your own recipe, the site offers you the various options available. When you've done, you've created a "task" that will execute itself.

I've only begun to explore what might be useful to me or, indeed, to those in the legal professions. But off the top of my head, it seems that you might want to keep a record of your tweets (which Twitter won't do for you); in which case a task that archives your tweets to another app so that you've got a good record of what you've said and when you said it might make sense. (As might the ability to trigger your phone to ring when you send a text message — if you find yourself in a lot of meetings.)

Take a look at see what you can come up with. Let us know by way of a comment if you cook up a recipe that might be of interest to others. Peas can taste good with gravy on them.

A couple of weeks ago the academic library blog and twittersphere was ablaze reacting to a tweet that “[a]ll of Harvard library staff have just effectively been fired”. As more news came out of a January 19 Harvard town hall meeting it appears that the reorganization at Harvard will not be that extreme – but these will be very challenging times for the Harvard library. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice short piece on this situation here. The text of the presentation that sparked the reaction is here. More news is expected next month.

An obvious question is what this type of restructuring may mean for other academic libraries. My gut sense is that Harvard is so big and so different than most academic libraries that their issues are not the same as most. Were many academic law libraries inspired to follow John Palfrey’s approach to restructuring at the HLS library? Academic libraries (not to mention private law libraries) have been quite nimble in facing (and leading) the challenges of the digital age. Perhaps the Harvard situation is more of an example of how much more challenging it is to change the direction of a huge ship than a smaller one.

In any case it will be interesting to see how this proceeds and its impact on libraries and research.

It just so happened that as Slaw columnist Ed Prutschi's "Crime & Punishment in 2012" appeared today, I received the latest emailed copy of Criminological Highlights from the University of Toronto's Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies. I thought I'd pass on the link to those of our readers who are interested in criminal law or the intersection of law and social behaviour.

Criminological Highlights is a digest of selected academic articles,

designed to provide an accessible look at some of the more interesting criminological research that is currently being published. Each issue contains “Headlines and Conclusions” for each of 8 articles, followed by one-page summaries of each article.

The current issue, for example, addresses the following questions:

1. Are long sentences more effective than shorter sentences in reducing reoffending?
2. Why do western countries vary in their imprisonment rates?
3. Do intensive foot patrols reduce crime?
4. Does being apprehended and arrested for a crime act as a deterrent?
5. Why aren’t people deterred by harsh sentences?
6. Will new and better community sanctions reduce imprisonment?
7. How is a period of imprisonment more punishing for Blacks than Whites?
8. Do trustworthy looking people have an advantage at trial?

These are the sorts of issues, I think, that it might be useful to learn about as we proceed with the contentious omnibus crime bill in Parliament.

A number of months ago (but unremarked here on Slaw) The Canadian Judicial Council released a "Reference Guide for Judges Appointed to Commissions of Inquiry," [PDF] those investigative, often palliative, and sometimes corrective events with which all Canadians are familiar. This acts as a resource guide to accompany the Protocol [PDF] governing appointments of judges that the Council released back in August of 2010.

Part I serves as an Introduction to orientate the reader and briefly describe the purpose of the Protocol.

Part II offers a checklist of the types of things any commissioner will likely wish to consider as critical first steps in undertaking the inquiry and ensuring its smooth and effective operation.

Part III provides a list of past commissioners and information relating to the inquiries over which they presided.

Part IV includes sample provisions from previous Orders-in-Council (OIC), which are intended to assist the commissioner in determining whether the enabling OIC contains the necessary powers and authority to complete the commission’s mandate or whether revisions will be required.

Part V provides a list of reference materials including textbooks, academic journals and case law to which the commissioner might refer, when needed.

Most interesting, perhaps, for those of us not on the bench, is the Appendix which contains a "summary of key elements" of nearly 40 past federal and provincial inquiries, the names of which read like a "Who's Who" of Canadian disasters: Ipperwash, Walkerton, Dziekanski, Pickton, Neil Stonechild, and on and on. Surprisingly—or perhaps not—a number of the summaries of earlier inquiries consist of the repeated phrases "Unknown at present," "Terms of reference not available," or simply "Unknown."

Which points up the lack in the Council guide of any hyperlinks to inquiry materials online. As far as federal inquires go, the Privy Council Office and Library and Archives Canada have done a great job of putting a very large number of these reports online, even scanning earlier ones as graphic PDFs. For a semi-relevant blast from the past, you might enjoy looking at the inquiry into Canada's earlier spy scandal, the Gerda Munsinger affair.

Fair use (s. 107) is an intentionally drafted ambiguous provision in the U.S. Copyright Act for the purpose of defending users of copyright works from a variety of otherwise infringing acts. Although often compared to the Canadian fair dealing, the two defenses are quite different. Two interesting documents on the analysis of fair use and its interpretation were recently released.

General Counsel from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office released a memorandum on 19 January 2012 on: USPTO Position on Fair Use of Copies of NPL Made in Patent Examination. The memorandum looks at three issues: Whether it is fair use of the USPTO to make copies of copyrighted non-patent literature (NPL) and provide such copies to an applicant in the course of patent examination? Whether it is fair use for the USPTO to provide certified copies of entire file histories, including copyright NPL to members of the public, for a free? Whether it is fair use for an applicant to make a copy of a piece of copyrighted NPL and submit it to the USPTO?

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries was published on 25 January 2012 by the Association of Research Libraries and the Center for Social Media. This document addresses various questions such as how to make libraries' special collection available online; what can be digitized for student use; and, reproducing materials for faculty, staff and other users.

Those who apply fair dealing or fair use or are generally interested in these topics will find the discussions and analysis interesting in both of these documents, though at the end of the day, the application of either of these defenses very much depends upon the circumstances in each particular situation.

I was writing a comment in response to Melanie Bueckert who pointed out that Manitoba is reviewing their law society library services, much like Nova Scotia when I realized the comment was longer than my usual Slaw post. I hope that Slaw readers will indulge me with their attention to issues facing law society libraries, especially in less populated jurisdictions.

Let me preface this post/comment by sharing that I have never worked in a law society library. As a law firm librarian, I rely on law society libraries, locally and in other jurisdictions, their services and collections, to supplement and augment what my team and I provide to our lawyers.

Melanie, Thank you for pointing to the Manitoba situation. I found portions of the linked document disturbing:

The major agenda item was a discussion about the way lawyers do research and the impact of that on how we will provide library resources in the future. We started by talking about why we are in the library business at all. The basic conclusion was that libraries are a tool to enhance lawyer competence which is part of the mandate of the Law Society. We talked about what has changed since Benchers last looked a libraries (2003) and, in particular, at the amazing progress of CanLII, the Law Society-owned virtual library. CanLII is hugely important in this discussion. Not because it is free, or because it holds a huge collection of cases (over one million), or because it has all Canadian statutes with point-in-time searching, or even because it has a powerful search engine.

It is unique and special because we own it. While there are many excellent commercial on-line research products, the most popular ones all have a major flaw. They are owned by American parents and the Canadian product will continue only as long as they feel it is commercially viable. When you buy books you own them. If it is a series like, say the Canadian Criminal Cases, and the publisher stops publishing the books, at least you own the books you already have. If, however, an on-line publisher goes out of business, you have been essentially “renting” the service and the day it shuts down you have absolutely nothing.

Because we own CanLII, we know it is a secure collection and that, Benchers agreed, is very liberating. It enabled us to explore library services in a whole new way.

Benchers noted that in today’s environment, paper libraries are not much utilized. We have already closed the libraries in Brandon, Dauphin and The Pas. We already provide free on-line access for lawyers practising outside of Winnipeg to Carswell’s LawSource in addition to CanLII. Thanks to the hard work of LDRC, the Winnipeg court house is already WiFi equipped. As the discussion continued, a vision for the future of libraries emerged. It looked something like this:

1. Continue to enthusiastically support CanLII and offer training to assist lawyers to take advantage of its amazing potential;
2. Over time, stop maintaining our paper collection;
3. Keep the historic collections and some texts and up-to-date technology in our libraries;
4. Train people on other free on-line research tools that are available;
5. Continue to provide free access for out-of-Winnipeg lawyers to LawSource as long as it is required to ensure access to adequate research materials.

Over the next few months we will be developing a business plan to implement this vision."

I LOVE CanLII. It should absolutly be fervently supported by the bar and bench in Canada. As this document states, it is OURS.

CanLII + free online research tools do not and cannot make for a competent complete, reasoned, and effective path to answer a legal research. Law society libraries could decide to discontinue purchasing print reports and statutes in favour of CanLII, but that is no more than a potentially useful cost saving collection development measure.

Would anyone suggest that free internet sources could replace their favourite text? Closing law society libraries, or reducing them to ineffectiveness through budget restraints, will put more money into the pockets of legal publishers as individual lawyers are forced to grow their individual collections. This in turn will increase the cost of legal services to the population.

Why would you hire a lawyer if you could answer your own question with CanLII and Google. Richard Susskind, do you have any comments???

I have updated my Legal Research and Writing website with a new page on resources for teaching legal research and writing.

Included on the page are links to:

• online training video tutorials,

• legal research and writing journals, newsletters and selected articles,

• legal research and writing associations and blogs, and

• general teaching resources for teaching legal research and writing.

I suspect my page may not be complete, so if I have missed something, I welcome comments and suggestions for other resources.

I was shocked to read this headline in yesterday's issue of INFORUM The Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society semi-monthly e-newsletter: "Society to reduce Library & Information Services department". The NSBS Library review project has been ongoing since April 2010.

There has been mention of the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society Library and Information Services on Slaw, most notably, when this worthy group of librarians and library technicians received the Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing.

The NSBS offers documents surrounging the review on their website:

• Library & Information Services Monitoring Report (April 19, 2011)
• Memo to Council, Organisational Review – Library & Information Services (January 4, 2012)

From the April 2011 document:

The Society received the Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing at the Canadian Association of Law Libraries annual conference held in May 2010 for the Nova Scotia Annotated Civil Procedure Rules. The annotations are created in much the same way as the Nova Scotia Law News digests, using the roster of volunteers to vet the work of our digesters. Staff process the information and manage the quality. We are very proud of this product and statistics show that it is receiving an average of approximately 3770 visits per month. In this fiscal year (to March 31, 2011) there were 43,117 visits by 18,179 unique visitors.

Of particular note is the cost of maintaining a commercially produced set of annotated Rules. It ranges between $800 and $1,000 annually. The NSBS product is electronic, searchable, with an excellent index and more current than the commercial services. LIS staff routinely report inconsistencies in Rules and amendments to the Courts.

And later in the document:

Libraries are not warehouses of books. This has been true as long as I have been a librarian. Libraries provide services and help users become competent information seekers. It is not only important to find what you need but to understand what you have found and the reliability of your source. Librarians are equipped to help members with this dilemma. In the next year the librarians will shift their training from product specific training to subject specific training – using the research guides as a starting point.

From the January Memo to Council:

In reviewing L&IS under the parameters of the organizational review, the following points are noted:

• Society activities are to be limited to those of regulation that ensure competent and ethical lawyers, maintain public confidence in the regulation of lawyers and uphold the public interest in the administration of justice.
• Council has previously determined, in the course of the organizational review, that it is not the Society's role to deliver programs that contribute to lawyer competence but rather its role is to set the standards for competence and point out to lawyers where programs are available to them. In light of this decision the Society has ceased delivering most of its continuing legal education and other programs.
• In 2004, at the time of the last library study, CanLII was in its infancy. Since then it has become a robust and generally reliable resource for Canadian case law and statutory material including those from Nova Scotia. Like other resources it is not intended to be the sole source for legal research as there are, and will likely continue to be, gaps in its coverage and its reliability. It also fulfils the role of making law publicly accessible.
• Since 2004, the Courts of Nova Scotia have expanded their role as a source of case law and other court-related information including the Civil Procedure Rules. They have assumed their responsibility to preserve case law in the Province.
• The Government of Nova Scotia through the Legislative Counsel Office and the government website preserves authentic Nova Scotia Legislation.
• L&IS consumes approximately 17.1% of the Society's budget and costs about $470.00 per practising lawyer (see page 5).
• It is difficult, if not impossible, to compare the library program of one Society with a similar program in another. L&IS developed to meet the perceived needs of the Society and lawyers as it was evolving. Whereas some other law society libraries receive Law Foundation funding (sometimes this is required by statute), in Nova Scotia, we have determined that but for the Law Stamp, library costs should be borne by the membership…

While I empathize with the Barristers' Society and its need to control costs, I strongly suspect that their decision about the Library & Information Service will cause significant detriment to the bar and citizens of the province.

The January 2012 document confirms that the net library expense has shrunk by nearly a hundred thousand dollars since 2009 – see page 6. I doubt that service provided by the library staff has decreased.

The memo seems to suggest that the cost of library materials at $273,539 can somehow be measured against the cost of CanLII (to the Society) at $57,900. When I look at my own law firm library budget, the cost of collection items that are not available on CanLII is 88% and the cost of decsions and legislation makes up only 11% of my budget – though these are not necessarily availabe on CanLII. The seeming hypothesis that CanLII can replace a law firm library collection – including the texts and other resources necessary for lawyers to competently address legal issues for their clients – is simply absurd.

The memo acknowledges that the L&IS has developed into a modern library. "Its various products and services are designed to anticipate and meet the needs of Nova Scotia lawyers and, to a lesser extent, the public."

There is contact information for the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society in the INFORUM publication for those who wish to communicate with them about this decision.

Canada's newest student-run law review just released its first issue.

The University of Western Ontario Journal of Legal Studies is published entirely online, and is the first student journal coming out of UWO for over 25 years. The contents of the first issue are as follows:

Editors' Note Lisa Di Valentino and Benjamin D. Tinholt

Niqab vs. Quebec: Negotiating Minority Rights within Quebec Identity Nafay Choudhury

Protecting Your Personality Rights in Canada: A Matter of Property or Privacy? Amy M. Conroy

The Rules of Professional Conduct: A Conflicting Guide for Counsel in Child Custody and Access Proceedings Jennifer L. Hiatt

Background on how this online law review was put together, approved and launched is available here on Slaw. Coverage from the UWO site is available here.

The start of the winter term means a happy return to the University of Toronto Faculty of Information where I am again part of the team that teaches the perennially oversubscribed Legal Literature and Librarianship class. This year I am co-teaching with two of my colleagues Susan Barker and John Bolan and we will once again feature a guest lecture from Ted Tjaden who taught this course from 1998-2004. (Ted has blogged about his impressions of the class here , here and here).

It might strike some of my non-librarian colleagues odd or quaint that such a course continues to exist. Legal Literature and Librarianship is one of a handful of masters-level courses at Canadian library and information schools that teach future librarians about the literature and tools of legal research as well as the practice of law librarianship. While students in this class obviously do not learn about legal writing and analysis, they do learn a lot about research and the literature. By the end of the course their ability to find just about anything and quickly identify the best secondary sources on any topic, coupled with their ability to advise others on research strategy, impresses me every year.

With it becoming ever easier for any novice legal researcher to muddle through and find something relevant, we continue to need people who can identify the best sources and know how and when to use them. In fact, given how easy it is to find just something there is less incentive to learn the tools and sources well enough to find everything when required. Getting new librarians on the road to becoming this kind of expert is exactly why classes like Legal Literature and Librarianship continue to exist.

I have updated the Reference Tools page of my legal research and writing website with a new section on Law Reform Commission Reports, a topic that – in retrospect – was likely insufficiently treated in my book.

I believe it may currently be the most complete, online collection of links and other resources for researching law reform commission reports. Included, of course, are links to the BC Law Institute Law Reform Database as well as links to individual law reform commission reports websites.

For the older, online Ontario Law Reform Commission Reports, I linked to the listings from the Open Library (sorted from most recent – currently 1976 – to oldest – currently 1965), which act as an "interface" linking to the digital versions on the Internet Archive.

I was also not previously familiar with an excellent online article by Gavin Murphy, "Law Reform Agencies" (Department of Justice, 2004) (PDF, 126 pages), linked to on this section of my site.

I welcome comments or suggestions for improvements.

__________________________

On an unrelated note, I added two "missing" movies to my list of 123 law-related movies:

• Evelyn (2004): Pierce Brosnan, as an unemployed, single-parent father in 1953 Ireland battling for custody of his children taken in by a Church-run orphanage

• Michael Clayton (2007): An obvious oversight on my part, with a stellar cast of George Clooney, Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson playing lawyers caught up in an environmental class action lawsuit.

Leading London barrister Jonathan Sumption (now Lord Sumption) was sworn in last week as a member of the United Kingdom's highest court, the first barrister in 50 years to be appointed to the jurisdiction's top court without having served as a full time judge.

My SLAW post on 14 November last reported on a speech Sumption made about that time on the dangers of the widening scope of judicial review.

He returned to that topic in his recent interview with The Times, warning judges to keep out of politics.

Sumption also spoke of his views on judicial appointments. He opposes any change to the principle of appointment on merit alone to increase the number of women or other under represented groups. (Only one of the eleven members is a woman.) He questions American style Parliamentary scrutiny of judicial candidates, but points out that if judges are involved in reviewing policy, pressure for input into their selection will inevitably follow.

JSTOR—Journal Storage, I think—keeps a good portion of English language scholarship, a thousand journals and more, in digital form to serve up to subscribers. Some have felt that corralling scholarship so assiduously behind a paywall is wrong, wrong as antithetical to the fundamental principle of disinterested scholarly inquiry, and wrong as creating a barrier to knowledge that the relatively poorer members of society can't afford to cross. See, for example, this talk by Larry Lessig at CERN, and the politically motivated "hacking" of JSTOR by Aaron Swartz talked about here on Slaw.

But JSTOR, a non-profit venture aimed at taking some of the financial burden off libraries, has made a couple of steps towards open access, the first not quite six months ago and the second scheduled for a couple of months from now. Back in September of 2011, JSTOR made freely available something on the order of half a million journal articles that have entered the public domain, specifically those published in the US from before 1923 and those from Europe published before 1870.

Now JSTOR has announced its intention to institute Register and Read, a program to let anyone have reading access to articles from a small selection (70) of its journals. A viewer can select up to four articles each fortnight and will be unable to print or copy from them. This is explicitly said to be a test, and one presumes that if publishers' revenues don't plummet as a result, some cautious expansion of the program will come about in time.

A list of the participating journals is available in spreadsheet format. Though lawyers are interested in everything, potentially, the journals in the program that are most clearly of interest are: American Society of International Law, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Modern Law Review. (Various publishers appear on the list as such, so it's hard to tell at this point which of their journals will be made available.)

Small as this advance appears to be, for what it's worth Professor Lessig has felt the announcement important enough to merit a tweeted "BRAVO."

The 2011 Website Award of the International Association of Law Libraries (IALL) went to the Kenya Law Reports.

The winner was announced in December at an IALL meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The Award seeks to recognise and promote free legal information websites that are authoritative, comprehensive, up-to-date, useful, and user-friendly.

Other nominees in 2011 included:

• Europeana
• Global Legal Information Network
• HuriSearch
• International Comparative Legal Guide Series
• Legifrance
• openDOAR
• RIS – Bundeskanzleramt Rechtsinformationssystem
• THOMAS
• War Crimes Research Office, Jurisprudence Collections
• WebLaw

A list of winners from previous years can be found on the IALL website.

Does your law library have a strategic plan? Is the plan available, aligned, and has it been shared? Is process measured against the plan? Is your plan in a document, embedded in your budget report, unwritten?

I have some work to do this January to assemble the strategy of my firm library into a working document that can be referenced by my team and by other members of the firm. While we have a strategy and we are executing it, it is less available than it should be.

Confidence in our library team is high, we had excellent response to a recent survey, our budget and other plans for 2012 were approved without question, and we are very busy with a high volume of work. Why spend time documenting the library strategy when we are very, very busy and there is no present external demand for it? I have a few reasons:

• It is easier to make quick decisions if you have a written strategy to test options against.
• A written strategy is useful for questions where the answer is "No, because…"
• In a commercial enterprise very, very busy can suddenly become not so busy and can also become swamped to the point of adding staff. Having a written strategy will give clues on how to manage volume spikes and dips.
• We have made some significant changes to our library strategy going in to 2012

Does your law library have a strategic plan?

David Mao this week became the 23rd Law Librarian of Congress. The Law Library of Congress was established in Washington in 1832 by the United States Congress and is the world's largest law library.

Before joining the library, Mao worked for the Congressional Research Service. He also held positions at Georgetown University and the law firm Covington & Burling.

The Law Library of Congress blog In Custodia Legis published an interview Mr. Mao earlier this week:

The Law Library issued its Strategic Plan for 2011–16, and, in the short term, I aim to continue the progress toward achieving the goals set out in that plan.

One of the major goals of the Law Library is the formation of the One World Law Library (OWLL). This will bring authoritative and authenticated global legal and legislative information from the Law Library of Congress and external sources under one domain and provide access to these resources in a seamless way for the researcher (…)

One of the most interesting facts I’ve learned is that the Law Library holds the world’s most geographically comprehensive collections of foreign legal materials.

The physical and digital collections contain the earliest and the latest publications and reflect the legislative histories of past, current and future jurisdictions. It’s rather astounding to think that, even if a nation hasn’t yet been officially formed, the Law Library will have all the materials necessary for someone to create the legislative history of that nation once it comes into being.

Colleague and fellow law librarian Sarah Sutherland let me know of her article "On Hiring Library Staff in Rural Areas" in Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research.

The article of course is good and worth mentioning for that reason alone but Sarah's email made me realize I had forgotten about this online journal, which was mentioned a number of years ago on SLAW. As such, I thought I would also remind SLAW readers since many of the articles would be relevant to most of you. In the current edition, for example, articles include such titles as "Optimizing Our Teaching: Hybrid Mode of Instruction" and "Roaming Reference: Reinvigorating Reference through Point of Need Service."

I like that the journal has an open access policy, making it available to anyone and includes peer-reviewed articles.

Unfortunately, the journal does not appear to have RSS feeds, but I registered just now in order to be alerted to new issues.

The Supreme Court of Canada announced today that judgment in the National Securities Regulator Reference will be delivered at 9:45 a.m. EDT on Thursday, December 22, 2011. That's In the Matter of Section 53 of the Supreme Court Act, R.S.C. 1985, C. S-26 and in the Matter of a Reference by the Governor General in Council concerning the proposed Canadian Securities Act, as set out in Order in Council P.C. 2010-667, dated May 26, 2010 (33718)

We'll link to it and commentary when it comes down.

Perhaps the word "Judgment" implies that it will be the decision of the Court, as a whole. No individual judgments, like Chief Justice Dickson's in National City Leasing to cause uncertainty.

For those who missed them the hearing webcasts are here and here

I read Steve Matthew's Slaw.ca column today Web Law Predictions for 2012 with great interest. I noted especially the prediction that "Firms Abandon Content, Blame Subsequent Failures on Social Media," with the implication that firms can't just by-pass creating great blog content and expect to get traction and otherwise build their reputations online.

One great start to blogging is to think about commentary that would have previously gone out via newsletter or email to clients, and make that available on the internet via a blog. However, writing for the printed text and writing for the web are two different things.

Write for your audience

First, you must consider your audience. Who are you writing for–lawyers? Or clients? Lawyers tend to like text-heavy documents, but most other audiences do not. If you are writing for clients, do not assume they will have time or the inclination to read long tracts.

Have a look at what else your audience reads and figure out what appeals to them. Perhaps video is the way to go instead with the audience you are trying to appeal to? It is very possible that clients in different industries consume content in different ways and prefer their content in different formats.

Make blog posts more readable

It can be more difficult to parse text online, and so we use a number of techniques to break up text for a blog:

• Consider breaking up a longer written article into a few smaller blog posts. You will get more mileage out of the content, and it will be easier for your audience to dip into.
• Use smaller paragraphs. I am always surprised at how a standard paragraph looks so long in a blog post. You will likely need to break these down more than you otherwise would think necessary. For example, the first two paragraphs in this blog post were originally one, but when I previewed them as a blog post, looked far too dense and so I broke them up.
• Use headings and bulleted or numbered lists inside longer blog posts to help the reader easily scan the content.
• Consider putting key words or phrases into bold to make them stand out, as I have done with this bulleted list.
• Use images to make blog posts more visually interesting. There is an interesting post today from Problogger: How to Use Images in Your Blog Posts. It is a nice introduction to using images.
• Use other media such as audio and video to lend some variety to your content. Selecting a video from another source, dropping it into your blog post with the "embed code," and then adding your own commentary to it is a nice way to change things up. If you get daring, you can try creating your own audio or video content. However, for a professional setting I suggest getting professional assistance to learn this part since it can be difficult to do well and is therefore time-consuming to get started on your own.

Vary the content

You need to keep the audience interested and engaged. Writing just commentary about recent case law is probably not going to keep them coming back for more. (I am assuming you want them to come back!) Don't forget to add a personal touch, lending a human voice with some personality. As audiences, we relate far better to other people than we do to faceless organizations.

Here are some additional ideas for content, and no doubt you can think of many more:

• discussion of newly introduced legislation
• other developments in the industry, such as new requirements from government
• what you learned at a conference or seminar
• a summary of recent surveys or report findings
• upcoming events
• a good, related article you read and your additional comments
• a review of a related book
• an interview with someone in the industry

What other types of blog posts do you like to read or write?
Image: courtesy of brainloc via stock.xchng

Words have meaning. The context, tone, and interplay give rise to nuances that is the basis for statutory and case law interpretation. But sometimes the iteration of words have meaning too. The frequency and repetitiveness of certain words can at times given insight into a culture or society.

At Jurix: The 24th International Conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems in Vienna, Austria earlier this week, Daniel Martin Katz, Michael J. Bommarito II, Julie Seaman, Adam Candeub & Eugene Agichtei proposed the idea of Legal N-Grams in conjunction with a beta pre-release of Legal Language Explorer, a new web interface that graphs every decision of the United States Supreme Court between 1791 and 2005.

They explain the concept of n-grams in their paper,

While well known to linguistics scholars for some time, the concept of n-grams has recently been popularized by the release of the Google N-gram explorer. A byproduct of the Google Books Library Project, the n-gram explorer allows end users to use language as a prism to explore institutional and cultural transformation processes.

Simon Fodden raised the issue of n-grams here on Slaw back in 2009.

The authors envision legal researchers looking at the origin of a phrase and its subsequent usage by providing quick aggregate insights of temporal importance. Social and political scientists will also be able to look at terminology within broader legal philosophies, doctrines and paradigms,

Judges who create dominant common law rules often use words in new and novel ways. Distinctive language and verbal formulae are the raw materials by which judges help establish their reputation as intellectual thought leaders…

This is especially true in common law systems where the strength and importance of a legal rule often correlates with its pervasiveness in opinions and its persistence through time.

The Legal Language Explorer might be useful for a variety of different applications. Consider, for example, the following query that I inputed:

Of course the term "black" can arise in a wide variety of different contexts that have absolutely nothing to do with racism, which is what could be described as "noise," there is a small increase where Jim Crowe laws were enacted, followed by a more substantial increase in the interwar era which precedes a very sharp increase during the Civil Rights era up to the modern day. Although the term "African-American" doesn't substantially plot at all, the more contentious term "Negro" can be noticeably observed even after it fell into disuse in academic and socially acceptable discourse.

Here's the plot of some of the legal n-grams related to doctrines of statutory interpretation:

Although it appears as if "legislative intent" has always been discussed at SCOTUS, it has been featured far more prominently in recent years, especially from the 70's to the mid-90's. Though the term "original intent" also mirrors the trend of the term "legislative intent," the term "originalism" only pops up once, in Missouri v. Jenkins (1995). Even in this case it's not used to explicitly refer to the doctrine of originalism aside from citing a law review article using the term in its title, which again demonstrates the limitations of using this software to make general assumptions. Although the concepts can be found over the years in case law, an explicit reference may suggest a greater acceptance or familiarity with the concept. Similarly, the search for "living constitution" only provides three results, two of which are also references to titles of law review articles during the 60's and 70's. It's only in Rummel v. Estelle (1980) that the court expressly uses "living constitution" to refer to a dynamic application of constitutional interpretation,

It is also true that this Court has not heretofore invalidated a mandatory life sentence under the Eighth Amendment. Yet our precedents establish that the duty to review the disproportionality of sentences extends to noncapital cases. Supra, at 289-293. The reach of the Eighth Amendment cannot be restricted only to those claims previously adjudicated under the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause. "Time works changes, brings into existence new conditions and purposes. Therefore a principle to be vital must be capable of wider application than the mischief which gave it birth. This is particularly true of constitutions. They are not ephemeral enactments, designed to meet passing occasions. They are, to use the words of Chief Justice Marshall, `designed to approach immortality as nearly as human institutions can approach it.'" Weems v. United States, 217 U.S., at 373 .

We are construing a living Constitution. The sentence imposed upon the petitioner would be viewed as grossly unjust by virtually every layman and lawyer…

[emphasis added]

The authors intend to expand the database to include Court of Appeal and other court decisions, and has tools to modify graph format and export data. You can read more about the tool on the blog post here.

On December 15, 2011, Quebec's Minister of Justice and Attorney General Jean-Marc Fournier announced the filing of a draft regulation aimed at making the Gazette officielle du Québec available free of charge on the Internet.

The "Gazette" provides the province's official government record of proposed regulations, proclamations and other statutory notices, as well as private sector notices that are required by statute to be published in the Gazette officielle du Québec .

It's a valuable source of information for the legal profession as well as any Quebec citizen.

A consultation period of 45 days is required before the regulation is adopted. Once adopted, Publications du Québec will provide free access to parts 1 and 2 of the Gazette officielle du Québec on their website. It will also change the price of the paper based annual subscription as well as fees for notices, advertisements and documents published in Parts 1 and 2 of the Gazette officielle du Québec.

It's about time. Just saying!

I have always loved law reform commission reports. They are great sources for legal research. Many of the reports provide historical background on an issue and you can often find comparative information about how other jurisdictions have responded to a legal problem.

My highlights from the fall of 2011:

• Of course, the great news is that all of the reports of the former Ontario Law Reform Commission have been digitized (as reported December 12 right here on Slaw)
• The British Columbia Law Institute (BCLI) is launching a two-year project to consider reforms to judge-made rules governing when a person is determined to have the mental capacity to carry out a transaction or enter into a relationship
• Earlier this week, the Law Commission in England published its final report on Intestacy and Family Provision Claims on Death. The report proposes 2 draft bills to bring inheritance law into line with the needs and expectations of modern families, and simplify the law to help the bereaved deal with the property of a deceased family member.
• In late October, the Law Reform Commission of Ireland released its Consultation Paper on Sexual Offences and Capacity to Consent. In the Consultation Paper, the Commission made 15 provisional recommendations for reform, including the repeal and replacement of the existing law on sexual offences involving persons with intellectual disability. The Commission argued that section 5 of Ireland's Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act 1993 (a) fails to protect people with intellectual disability from unwanted sexual contact generally and (b) fails to empower people with intellectual disability to realise their right to sexual expression (it does not clearly provide for situations of consensual sex between two persons with intellectual disability). The Commission also looked at practices and laws in England and Wales, Scotland, Canada, and New Zealand.
• In September, the British Columbia Law Institute released a Report on Proposals for Unfair Contracts Relief: "This report recommends reforms to the leading concepts used by contract law to tackle the problem of unfairness. These concepts are unconscionability, duress, undue influence, good faith, and misrepresentation. Over the past years, they have been considered in an increasing number of court decisions. This has led to an expansion of, and a degree of confusion about, their scope. It is now timely to rationalize and consolidate these concepts." The BCLI website also includes a consultation paper on the issue as well as 4 backgrounders.
• The Alberta Law Reform Institute (ALRI) released a discussion report on Estate Administration.

Of course, people often ask whether law reform commission reports have any real impact. Not always, but sometimes. In November, the proposed Family Law Act was introduced in the British Columbia legislature after a major review of family legislation in the province. It is intended to overhaul the Family Relations Act. The proposal contains recommendations for changes to family law contained in four reports of the British Columbia Law Institute:

• Report on Pension Division on Marriage Breakdown (BCLI Report No. 44, 2006);
• Report on the Parental Support Obligation in Section 90 of the Family Relations Act (BCLI Report No. 48, 2007);
• Report on Appointing a Guardian and Standby Guardianship (BCLI Report No. 30, 2004); and
• Report on the Need for Uniform Jurisdiction and Choice of Law Rules in Domestic Property Proceedings (BCLI Report No. 1, 1998).

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about some of my favourite print bibliographies. Most academic law library and law society websites include some research guides or bibliographies – here are some of the ones I use the most:

Queen’s Law Library Select Bibliographies. Very comprehensive lists of Canadian materials for all of the core law school subjects. These bibliographies also lists materials from other jurisdictions.

Osgoode Hall Law Library’s Research Guides also cover many of the core subjects but tend to be more selective in their coverage which is useful to the student looking for just the key resources.

University of Ottawa Law Library’s Law Research Guides are using the very versatile LibGuides format which is popular with many academic libraries. These LibGuides move beyond the core first year curriculum and are excellent starting points for identifying key resources. See their Aboriginal Rights LibGuide for an excellent example of the potential of this format

The University of Alberta Law Library also has a good collection of Subject Guides using LibGuides.

At the University of Toronto Law Library, we are working through the process of moving our subject based research guides from behind our “student-only” site to our general site. We will be using LibGuides as well.

Outside of the academic law library world a couple of noteworthy bibliographies include the Suggested Textbooks section of Catherine Best’s Guide to Canadian Legal Research and the Legaltree.ca website’s Resources by Subject Area

Lexpert Magazine has just launched a blog. It's early days yet—the blog only launched last week—so it's hard to say how it will fare. The editorial staff (Jean Cumming, Tim Wilbur, David Dias, and Gena Smith) will do the blogging, likely filling in the "blanks" and doing follow-ups between issues of the magazine. One to follow, in any event.

Welcome to the blogosphere Lexpert.

I had an opportunity to download the new Irwin Law iPad app recently along with a copy of Ted Tjaden's Legal Research and Writing text. We have a copy of this excellent title in our firm library in print or course, but for testing purposes, I thought it would be a good choice for an eBook.

First I want to congratulate Jeff Miller and his team at Irwin Law. They made an excellent choice of partners in Nubook. The Irwin Law app was easy to find in the Apple App Store, the download process was simple. It was also very easy to register, and visit the Irwin Law eBook Store to acquire my purchase.

The app came with three pieces of documentation: a Quick Reference Guide, a lengthy User Guide, and a short user guide specific to Irwin Law. The Quick Reference Guide shows most of the features available in Nubook partner apps. The longer user guide shows the possibilities available, including embedding video clips in an eBook.

The content and readability of this Irwin Law text transfers very well to the eBook format. The electronic advantages of having a linked table of contents available on the page at will, the ability to highlight, underline, and annotate, not to mention searching the content, are excellent use cases for having a personal copy of your favourite title on your own device.

My favourite feature of this text is the ability to link out from the footnotes and the way that the app ensures you want to open a webpage.

My only problem now is budgeting so that anyone in my organization can have any item they need in any format that strikes their fancy. A better problem to have than content in only one format.

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read." (Groucho Marx) "Unless you have a backlit eReader." (Shaunna Mireau)

The English media came back this weekend to re-examine the health of Thomson-Reuters and reached wildly different conclusions. The BBC talks of Thomson moving to establish hegemony over business data, whereas the Guardian focuses on the weaknesses of post-merger integration and the long-term challenge that Bloomberg presents.

The doyenne of the DC law library community, Jean O'Grady has a fascinating piece suggesting that Thomson may well acquire Wolters-Kluwer

Her analysis is:

Factors Favoring Such a Merger

1. Thomson Reuters Leadership Changes.Exane BNP suggests that TR appears to be "in restructuring

and crisis mode" since they failed to achieve top line growth through some new products including Westlaw Next.. The new CEO Jim Smith with his track record in legal, tax and scientific professional publishing may be better positioned to create new value from asset consolidation than top line growth.

2. Wolters Kluwer May be Ready to be Acquired. Former WK executives suggest that a merger has always been viewed as a good exit strategy if top line growth could not be achieved. CEO and Chairperson Nancy McKinstry has been in the Netherlands for 8 years and has not delivered expected revenue growth.

3. TR's new IT  Platform Designed for Mergers. Since both companies generate over 80% of their revenue from electronic software and services, TR has the infrastructure to allow both companies to consolidate and reduce their IT costs. Apparently TR's new IT platform was specifically designed to be able to integrate content from acquired companies. I have also heard this comment  from insiders at TR. (I whole heartedly agree that at least in the US, WK's technical infrastructure as demonstrated by their "new " Intelliconnect platform would benefit from an IT overhaul). Both companies have been trying to go global and have expanded their sale forces in some new and similar markets. The proposed merger would allow them to reduce duplicative effort in expanding their global footprint.

4. TR's Balance sheet is Ready. TR's balance sheet has absorbed the Reuters acquisition and the company  now has the financial capacity to launch such an acquisition over the next 12 months.

But remember that Bloomberg bought BNA for $990 million in August. Meanwhile Techbytes reminds us that Thomson and Bloomberg's fates are inextricably linked.

It concludes:

Perhaps it’s time for Thomson Reuters to take their cue from Bloomberg and migrate from the costly dedicated terminal to a web platform in order to meet the changing needs of its customers. The legal market underwent tremendous changes in platforms between the 1980s and the 1990s, as user demands, technological advances, economic changes and ultimately the practice of law changed. Legal terminals morphed from huge dedicated stand -alone machines, to small customized boxes dubbed “ubiqs”, to multi-purpose personal computers. Lexis and Westlaw survived the loss of monthly revenue from equipment and created other revenue streams. Executive turnovers, reduced demand for some of its products, and mergers and changes in divisions have all befallen Thomson Reuters. Maybe this is the time to re-engineer the way its products and services are packaged, delivered, and priced to the financial market. Tune in for the next installment.

The Daily Beast describes (in apocalyptic terms) Bloomberg's Plan for World Domination. The Law Librarian Blog suggest that Bloomberg's hunger for content makes Reed Elsevier's Lexis product the likely target for a Bloomberg acquisition.

Anyone think that antitrust might constrain concentration in these sectors of the information industry?

The American group blog Concurring Opinions has posted A Guide to the Eight Most Suspect Types of Law Review Articles. My favourite is number 4:

4. The One-Off

“In my previous article, I made a significant contribution to the literature. In this piece, I will coast on the vapors of that article.”

In the comments section, someone has suggested a ninth category be added:

9. Straight from the Framers!

“In this article, I uncover the original meaning of a clause (phrase, word, or letter) that no one has ever heard of, that no court (or litigant) has ever referred to, and that will never again be relevant.”

When John Palfrey was appointed vice-dean of library and information services at Harvard Law School a couple of years ago, one of the first things he did was create the Harvard Library Innovation Laboratory. Under the direction of Kim Dulin and David Weinberger (also of Berkman Center fame), HLIL explores the ways in which software can "hack libraries…in the good sense of discovering and delivering more capability and value." Specifically, as they say on the FAQ page,

1. We think in public.
2. We build software that demonstrates how libraries can bring yet more value to scholars and researchers.
3. We amplify our effect by eagerly partnering with other groups with similar passions.

Though they're more interested in proof of concept than in the development of generally usable code, there are two interrelated projects that I think Slaw readers would be interested in having a look at, ShelfLife and LibraryCloud. These might be best understood by starting from the point of view of the Digital Public Library of America, an online place, as it were, to demonstrate the power of these tools used in collaboration with a number of institutions. LibraryCloud is a meta-data server that aggregates circulation data, among other things, from participating libraries, making it available through APIs. In the service of the DPLA it makes available millions and millions of bibliographic records. ShelfLife then provides a cunning, visual front end for this mountain of data.

The best way to understand, of course, is to "do." There's a ShelfLife DPLA Demo that offers a video (also reproduced below), a guided tour, and also the chance to thrash about unguided.

Among the many smaller projects that are still in the works, the most useful perhaps is Library News, a simple stream of material (à la Hacker News) on technology and libraries, available on the web and via RSS and contributed by anyone who wishes to create an account.

ShelfLife Welcome from David Weinberger on Vimeo.

When you search for flights between two cities Google now provides you with a chart of options as the first (non-paid) result, making the peripatetic aspect of a lawyer's life just a little bit easier. Thus, for example, a search for flights from Winnipeg to Vancouver yields the result you see below:

Click on the image to enlarge it.

And perhaps I haven't noticed, but new to me is the fact that when you mouse over the chevron beside a result of a Google search, you not only see a thumbnail of the found page, a feature that's been around for a while, but a callout as well that shows you where on the page a sought-for phrase occurs. For instance, my search for definitely not the last time turns up a result from trip advisor.co.uk with the relevant phrase emphasized (on a black background) and shown in context:

Click on the image to enlarge it.

I have just created a custom search engine of Canadian military law journal articles, publications, reports and news. It is available here: http://www.uwindsor.ca/law/library/canadian-military-law-articles

My guide to researching Military Law in Canada (as well as some documents pertaining to Guantanamo Bay) is located here: http://www.uwindsor.ca/law/library/guide-to-researching-military-law

Users can use the new search engine for one-stop shopping for military law journal articles, publications, reports and news from the following sites:

Canadian Army Journal
Army Lessons Learned Bulletin
Army Lessons Learned Dispatches
Canadian Forces College Papers
Canadian Forces College Review
Canadian Military Journal
Canadian Naval Review
Jane's Information Group
Canadian Army News
Canadian Defence Academy Publications
Chief Military Judge Documents
Chief of Defence Staff Publications
National Defence Key Documents
Judge Advocate General Publications
The Maple Leaf
Military Police Complaints Commission Documents
and National Defence News Archives

I used http://www.google.com/cse

In the not too distant past law librarians were valued for their knowledge of "legal bibliography". Great librarians who built the collections of law schools libraries across Canada were experts in knowing what had been published across jurisdictions and legal topics. With the explosion of print and online legal publishing a knowledge of bibliography gave way to the need to know and understanding how to find relevant information when needed.

Still, the art of knowing the literature on a topic and organising and making that literature available to users both expert and novice is still an important (if perhaps somewhat undervalued) role of librarians. I was reminded how important this art is when consulting with Lakehead on what they might want to include in their planned law library. Here are a few bibliographies that I recommend:

John Eaton & Denis Le May, Essential Sources of Canadian Law, (Toronto: Irwin Law, 2009). This gem of a book provides short bibliographies of the most essential titles for 105 areas of law. Most law librarians will be familiar with the titles in this book, but I have found this an excellent source to keep on my desk to jog my memory when researching an unfamiliar area. It's an excellent tool for new librarians, and I would expect that public libraries and other non-law libraries would find this a very useful entry point to identifying the key titles in an area. A nice feature of this book is that it lists both French and English language titles.

Two of the more recent books on Canadian legal research: Tjaden's Legal Research and Writing, 3rd ed (Toronto: Irwin Law, 2010) and McCormack, Papadopoulos & Cotter's The Practical Guide to Canadian Legal Research, 3rd ed (Toronto: Carswell, 2010) also provide bibliographies by topic – Tjaden in chapter 8 and McCormack in the appendix. Since Tjaden's first edition, I must have said "let's look in chapter 8 of Tjaden to see what's out there" to hundreds of law students. Ted's bibliography is a bit less granular, looking at 45 topics, but he goes beyond the essential books and also lists relevant journals, encyclopedia entries, reporters and websites. McCormack looks at 44 topics with many topics including lists of sub-topics where appropriate. For example there are 22 sub-topics for "Criminal Law" including the Charter, Evidence, Sentencing and Youth Criminal Justice. Like Tjaden the approach aims to be more comprehensive than Eaton's focus on essentials.

Outside of Canadian literature, John Eaton has recently published Finding English Law: Key Titles for Non-UK Lawyers and Researchers, (London: Wildy, Simmonds & Hill Publishing, 2011), which like his Canadian book takes a granular approach listing 97 topics. John's approach is perfect for a Canadian audience, as he gives us just enough information to find the right literature without becoming too esoteric. This is an excellent reference source for librarians as well as an aid to collection development.

I've had less reason to find US books, but the "Legal Treatises" chapter of the annual Legal Information Buyer's Guide and Reference Manual by Kendall Svengalis has been useful – although aimed at US librarians who are purchasing titles, its annotated list of titles for 61 topics provides a good starting point.

In a future post I'll take a look at some of the best online bibliographies find on law library and legal research websites.

Reading some posts and tweets (p&t's?) on standards for legislation and opinion metadata lately, I was surprised to bump into a side-issue, "side" at least in this context, on whether the US Bluebook can have copyright in its citation styles. Apparently some development of legal style at Zotero has been hindered because of objections from Bluebook. See this contribution to a discussion on the Zotero forum on September 18, 2011:

Hi, I'm the author of the "Bluebook 19th ed." style. The style itself is incomplete, which is the cause of the "bb-periodical-subsequent" string that you're seeing in the output.

I was at the point of putting in further work on the project when, in connection with negotiations over access to Bluebook Online (or so I thought), the Bluebook editors expressed the view that a full implementation of the style, even if based on a paper-printed copy of their manual, might be a breach of their rights. Needless to say this came as a complete surprise, but legal risk being what it is, I've suspended work on the style for the present.

To prevent frustration (such as you have just experienced) I will soon be asking that the style be removed entirely from the CSL repository. Meanwhile, you will either have to cope with an earlier version of the style, or do your Bluebook citations by hand.

I'm very sorry about this situation, but it's not entirely within my control.

Frank Bennett

It would seem from a tweet yesterday that Bennett, an Associate Professor of Law at Nagoya University, Japan, is in fact going ahead. He says of the Bluebook people:

They growled at us, without clearly staking a copyright claim. On good advice from a friend, I'm ignoring them.

I don't think a style or a standard such as that developed by the Bluebook editors could be copyrightable, under Canadian law at least, though I'd welcome correction on this score. It strikes me as more akin to a process for which patents have been given. But in either case, it would be odd indeed, because the point of a standard is to be used, taught and otherwise promoted, no?

This is a little like the problem with taxonomies, in which copyright has in fact been claimed.

Well today is Friday, and if our friends at CanLII have predicted correctly, they will soon be delivering more than one million search results!

Congratulations to everyone involved in making CanLII happen. It's quite a milestone!

A question at a LESA seminar I was involved with brought the thought of republishing to mind. An attendee at the seminar asked if articles posted to SSRN as prepublications to a peer reviewed journal release were altered or whether they could be the same text as what the journal published. My answer off the cuff was that I had a sense that the articles could be edited after posting to SSRN and before publication, but I confess that I have no proof of this.

The republishing that I am thinking of is not the actions the SCC contempated in Robertson, but where an author submits a work to more than one forum,or provides submitted works to SSRN.

The Social Science Research Network site provides:

Each of SSRN's networks encourages the early distribution of research results by publishing Submitted abstracts and by soliciting abstracts of top quality research papers around the world. We now have hundreds of journals, publishers, and institutions in Partners in Publishing that provide working papers for distribution through SSRN's eLibrary and abstracts for publication in SSRN's electronic journals.

SSRN includes a copyright message for authors uploading a paper:

You will be shown a brief copyright message which you need to read and agree to by clicking "Continue" before you begin entering information. The statement reads: IMPORTANT: SSRN does not take a copyright. When you upload a paper, you give SSRN the non-exclusive right to post and electronically distribute your article. You retain the right to remove your paper from SSRN at any time.

SSRN was founded in October 1994, and is a clear example of successful republishing. In July 2011, SSRN was again named the Number 1 Open Access Repository in the World.

My question for Slawyers: Is it republishing or is it open access, or are they essentially the same?

In an interesting intersection of two of my favourite areas (law and technology), Apple Insider reported last week that Apple recently announced that it was going to be conducting mandatory union awareness training to educate its employees on "how to deal" with unions. According to the article, the course is described by Apple as follows:

"This course is intended to provide managers with a practical understanding of how unions affect the workplace, how and why employees organize, and the legal do's and don'ts of dealing with unions," … "This is a mandatory class for all new managers, and is required biannually for all managers."

There is no news if this program is coming to Canada. If they try, Apple's mileage may vary as the laws in many of our provinces severly restrict an employer's right to communicate with employees regarding unionization. There is however a debate raging before many labour tribunals as to how much that right can be restricted.

Does training like this have a place in Canada? Should it be allowed?

On Wednesday the Canadian Association of Law Libraries will be presenting a webinar with Michel Gamache, Director of Documentation Services, Heenan Blaikie in Montreal. Michel will be explaining how to get started with Yahoo Pipes for working with RSS feeds to customize information for practice groups. Even if you do not work in a law firm, this webinar will help you get started taking your use of RSS feeds to the next level. I myself dabble in the use of Pipes and am looking forward to learning more.

The webinar takes place this Wednesday, November 16, 1:00 – 2:30 p.m. ET. Cost is $45.40 for members and $67.80 for non-members (tax included). For more information and to register, visit the CALL/ACBD website: http://www.callacbd.ca/en/content/webinars.

Here is the full description:

Yahoo Pipes: Slicing and Dicing RSS Feeds for Legal Practice Groups
SPEAKER: Michel Gamache

Yahoo! Pipes has been around since 2007, yet it doesn't seem to have caught the eye of many librarians. However, this is a valuable and simple tool that can be used in the context of web monitoring and information delivery.

This webinar will help you understand what Yahoo! Pipes is all about. You will learn how to create, aggregate, filter and customize feeds. You will also learn how to create widgets so that the contents you manipulate can be made available on intranets.

Michel Gamache has been Director of Documentation Services at Heenan Blaikie since 1999. Previously, he was Library Manager at another law firm in Montreal.

Michel holds a MLIS degree and a Certificate in Industrial Relations both from Université de Montréal, as well as a Bachelor degree in Business Management from Université du Québec à Montréal.

CAIJ, the Centre d'accès à l'information juridique (the network of law libraries associated with the Québec Bar Association), has a revamped website with many new research features:

• the UNIK search engine that allows for simultaneous keyword searching in its caselaw, commentary and Quebec and federal legislation databases
• the eDoctrine collection of free full-text commentary and textbooks including the Développements récents (annual reviews of areas of law), the Collection de droit (Bar School materials), proceedings of the annual Quebec Bar Association congresses and a growing number of treatises from Wilson & Lafleur
• the eLOIS collection of annotated laws (right now in beta): so far, CAIJ offers the Civil Code of Quebec, the provincial Labour Standards Act and the provincial Business Corporations Act – for each legislative section, there is a legislative history, links to parliamentary debates, and links to case law and/or commentary
• enhanced legal news

Some great features that haven't changed include the free JuriBistro TOPO service, the CAIJ knowledgebase of some 2,700 questions and answers compiled by CAIJ's legal researchers based on real inquiries received from lawyers from across Quebec.

If you need to do Quebec legal research and you read French, I highly recommend the CAIJ site.

Save Library & Archives Canada. That is the heading on a new website recently launched by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT).

CAUT is using this site to outline some very valid concerns about issues at LAC, which some of you remember as the National Library and some of you remember as the National Archives of Canada.

In 2004, the National Archives of Canada and the National Library of Canada were drawn together by the Library and Archives of Canada Act to create a new knowledge institution for Canadians—Library and Archives Canada, a source of enduring knowledge and the continuing memory of the government of Canada and its institutions.
(links to the LAC About Us page)

Themes of concern that CAUT outlines include:

• Modernization
• Mandate
• Acquisitions
• Services
• Decentralization

The proposed changes at LAC have far-reaching implications for how Canada’s history and cultural heritage are preserved and understood. The "modernization" underway is a direct attack on our collective memory. To prevent the demise of this vital national institution, CAUT has launched a campaign to ensure that LAC maintains its commitment to preserve and make publicly available Canada's full documentary heritage.

I encourage you to read CAUTs open letter to Daniel Caron, linked, in order to understand the issues.

When an association of scholars publicly rasies an issue they feel concerns all Canadians, we should pay attention.

Yale law library's Open Access publishing initiative produces enormous download rates for its authors, and makes the material available to scholars and others all over the world, without regard to their location or their institution's budgetary priorities.

And many US libraries have taken this step: 55% of libraries in a just-released SPARC survey. Some other highlights:

• About three-quarters of the programs publish between one and six journals, the majority of which are only distributed electronically
• The vast majority of library publishing programs (almost 90%) were launched in order to contribute to change in the scholarly publishing system, supplemented by a variety of other mission-related motivations.
• About half of responding institutions centralize management of their publishing activities within one library unit. The number of staff allocated to publishing activities is modest—averaging 2.4 FTE for ARLs and 0.9 FTE for Oberlin Group institutions—with older programs typically being larger. Staff dedicated exclusively to publishing service programs are relatively rare, with responsibility for such services typically fragmented across multiple staff members.
• The most prevalent journal publishing platforms reported were Open Journal Systems (57%), DSpace (36%), and Berkeley Electronic Press’s Digital Commons (25%).

The Wall Street Journal has a new piece on Amazon's e-book lending service. Operating under the Amazon's $79/year Prime service, the e-book lending will only work on Kindle and Kindle Fire devices (not iOS friendly), and is intended to boost sales of the Kindle devices. And as you might guess, it's not available in Canada.

The article also has an interesting portion at the end on the relationship of Amazon's Prime lending program to its library lending program:

At the Seattle public-library system, e-book borrowing rose 32% in the month after Kindle books became available, said Seattle's electronic-resources librarian Kirk Blankenship. E-book borrowing had typically been rising 10% or 15% a month, he said.

Mr. Blankenship said he isn't worried about Amazon starting its own lending service.

"There's a lot of people that can't afford Amazon Prime," he said. "We also want to be a resource for people looking for other things beyond the best-seller list."

Followed by a statement from Arthur Klebanoff, chief executive of RosettaBooks LLC, on the value of making titles available via a flat fee arrangement:

"I'm attracted to the incremental promotion/visibility for participating titles," he said. "All site promotion, especially of backlist titles, drives sales in the Kindle Store." Mr. Klebanoff said that he's providing about 200 titles in all.

I find the intersections between these two programs interesting on two counts:

1. Loss leader remains a good strategy for publishers. Libraries have traditionally provided this value to the publishing industry, and it won't disappear in e-formats.
2. It doesn't matter whether Amazon is providing the lending program or a library system. The ease of access to related titles, and the subsequent sales, should make publishers open their eyes to the exposure e-lending services can provide.

Now, I recognize the reduced circulation of law library titles, but that's not much different than any other low-demand item sitting in the stacks at a public library. When Publishers need to tap into smaller audiences, gaining exposure with these readership groups is going to remain a critical challenge.

My point would be this: law library e-book lending may not only be important from an altruistic, educational standpoint – in my view, a required contribution from every publisher. But that in the future, these programs will be fundamental to connecting with readership, provide a 'proving ground' for secondary source materials, and will define each product's reputation and the demand for associated products (author & subject). Publishers must figure out which products to give away, and which to sell; but the question of whether or not to participate in e-lending programs? Doesn't seem like much of an option.

Libraries and librarians (legal or not) have a much stronger role in the book industry than most people recognize.

According to yesterday's press release, Irwin Law and Quebec digital publisher Nubook have agreed to distribute Irwin's ebooks on a Nubook reading app designed for use on a tablet computer.

Irwin publisher, Jeffrey Miller, says:

…the Nubook solution allows us to preserve the unique and attractive design that differentiates our law books, while providing our readers with great features like refined search, links, and markups set up according to our editorial choices for the best reading experience.

Nubook has already developed an equivalent app for Wilson & Lafleur, as well as its own general purpose app.

I've come across a couple of new law reviews that might be of interest to SLAW readers…

1) The Washington Journal of Environmental Law and Policy from the University of Washington in Seattle. WJELP is a student run journal. Issues will be available for free online and the first issue is here. You can sign up for e-mail alerts of new issues at the journal's website. All issues will also be archived at the University of Washington's digital repository.

2) The Southampton Student Law Review is a new student publication from the Southhampton Law School in the UK. There are two issues so far, both online.

And while not a new law review, I wanted to plug the recent Canadian law journals tables of contents service that the Bora Laskin Law Library has been offering via our Blog. The October listing will be up in a day or so. You can now sign up to follow our Blog by e-mail.

I have been remiss at mentioning the free online conference Library 2.0 that started today at 9:30 am ET and continues around the clock through to the end of tomorrow. This page has a schedule of sessions listed according to your time zone. For a quick look at the schedule, check out the Eastern Standard Time schedule – sessions typically run for a 1/2 hour.

There is still time to sign up! Register for the Library 2.0 site. All sessions will be run using the Blackboard Collaborate platform. Session rooms have a bandwidth-related limit of 700 attendees. Word via Twitter is that there are approximately 6,000 registrants. There are a number of concurrent sessions, and of course most people will not be watching the full 24 hours. There are over 150 sessions in all. All will be recorded.

The hash tag #lib2011 is being used on sites such as Twitter.

I hope you will at least stop by for one or two sessions!

Aaron Swartz is that rare individual who is prepared to risk imprisonment in order to promote the cause of open access. And we're not talking about liberating "tunes" or movies or, indeed, anything of much "entertainment value"; Swartz goes for the serious, you might say earnest, stuff. At the moment the young man stands accused of various crimes associated with his downloading of 4.8 million articles from JSTOR. (Many, but by no means all, readers of Slaw will know that JSTOR stands for "Journal Storage" and is a not-for-profit, but paywall-protected, online archive for academic journals.)

There are good accounts of his career and escapades online, so I'll only hit some of the highlights here. If you'd like a fuller picture, try the New York Times article or the excellent recent piece by Nancy Sims in the College & Research Libraries News.

Of interest to law folk will be the fact that back in 2008 Swartz, then a research fellow at Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, used a program of his to download 20% of the documents made available by PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) — "more than eighteen million pages with an approximate value of $1.5 million," according to FBI documents — and released them to the public en masse. This brought the project to its knees but resulted in no criminal charges for him.

Click on image to enlarge.

The current spate of downloading, however, has gained him a number of criminal charges of a serious nature, in part because it's alleged he went into a closet at MIT containing access to the MIT network and hooked up his computer directly. According to the indictment on his arrest warrant (available online along with many other documents relating to the criminal matter), these charges are: wire fraud, computer fraud, theft of information from a computer, recklessly damaging a computer, and aiding and abetting. Click on the image above to see the document and the relevant US Code numbers. It would appear that the trial is about to begin.

A great many issues arise from Swartz's self-made plight, which is presumably what he intended. For academic institutions such as universities and scholarly databanks, it's important to consider the implications of their access policies having become the basis for criminal charges. On a broader plane, we need to continue to debate the degree to which it's appropriate to speak of "theft" of data in such a way that there's an equivalence, explicit or not, between taking data and taking someone's car or money, for example. In this respect, you might take a look at "Asked and Answered: Here’s What I Think the Aaron Swartz Case Means," by Rick Anderson, Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources and Collections at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library (in response to which one commentator believes it is an argument to repeat "stealing is stealing").

This has been Open Access Week across North America and even further afield. There have been many events. In Canada, CARL/ABRC has a list of OA Week events, but not everything is noted there. UVic's own events, for instance. The ACRL Blog has collected a few highlights.

Of course, it is libraries that are often organizing these events, as librarians are best positioned to witness the daily spectacle of publicly funded research given away for peanuts or less into private hands. These in turn do very well by it, whether it is delivered in print or electronically. Libraries seek relief from the escalating costs. Between 1984 and 2005, journal prices increased 637%, and Law titles by 386% (see Table 9) in the US, while distribution and printing/binding costs, presumably, were much reduced. This is compared to a CPI increase over the same period of 188%. Remember, remuneration to authors or universities for these materials is unheard of. And of course, the public is not allowed access.

I want to revist Crookes v Newton, 2011 SCC 47 which Simon C mentioned previously. What I find interesting about this case is the expansion of legally defined technology terms (yes I know I might be the only one who finds this interesting). There is currently a paucity of legally defined technological terms and Crookes v Newton has expanded that pool by only adding a few definitions.

Previously hyperlink has been legally defined in in the lower court ruling 2008 BCSC 1424 in para 29 where hyperlink was defined as: "A hyperlink is like a footnote or a reference to a website in printed material such as a newsletter. The purpose of a hyperlink is to direct the reader to additional material from a different source. The only difference is the ease with which a hyperlink allows the reader, with a simple click of the mouse, to instantly access the additional material."

The SCC in 2011 SCC 47 at para 2 has defined a hyperlink as: "…a device routinely used in articles on the Internet whereby a word or phrase is identified, often with underlining, as being a portal to additional, related information. Clicking on the hyperlink connects the reader to that information."

In para 6 of Crookes the SCC defined a shallow hyperlink: "…a shallow hyperlink, which takes the reader to a webpage where articles are posted". Additionally, at para 6 a deep hyperlink was described: "deep hyperlink, which takes the reader directly to an article" (this definition from Collins, Law of Defamation and the Internet 3rd ed.)

As Simon mentioned the SCC mentions social networking but does not describe it, at para 38: "The rapid expansion of the Internet coupled with the surging popularity of social networking services like Facebook and Twitter has created a situation where everyone is a potential publisher, including those unfamiliar with defamation law. A reputation can be destroyed in the click of a mouse, an anonymous email or an ill-timed Tweet."

Previously 2007 SCC 34 went to some length on hyperlinks in the context of contracts at para 97:

A Web page may contain many links, each of which leads in turn to a new Web page that may itself contain many more links, and so on. Obviously, it cannot be argued that all these different but interlinked pages constitute a single document, or that the entire Web, as it scrolls down a user’s screen, is just one document. However, it is difficult to accept that the need for a single command by the user would be sufficient for a finding that the provision governing external clauses is applicable. Such an interpretation would be inconsistent with the reality of the Internet environment, where no real distinction is made between scrolling through a document and using a hyperlink. Analogously to paper documents, some Web documents contain several pages that can be accessed only by means of hyperlinks, whereas others can be viewed by scrolling down them on the computer’s screen. There is no reason to favour one configuration over the other. To determine whether clauses on the Internet are external clauses, therefore, it is necessary to consider another rule that, although not expressly mentioned in art. 1435 C.C.Q., is implied by it.

These definitions represent a significant portion to which technological terms associated with Internet have been legally been defined in Canada. So while it is great that Crookes adds to the body of knowledge, the fact that Crookes adds so much to the body of legally defined internet technology terms is somewhat troubling. Even, a search for the term Internet in the CanLII SCC database returns 37 cases, which sounds like a significant portion but the Internet has been our constant companion for well over a decade and in light of that the number seems a bit low. As we march towards new copyright legislation and as more technology related cases reach the SCC, I wonder how quickly this body of definitions will expand?

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) is a Special Operating Agency of Industry Canada. Industry Canada is responsible for the administration of intellectual property in Canada. The Copyright Office is part of CIPO. Below is an excerpt of an interview with newly appointed Commissioner of Patents, Registrar of Trademarks and Chief Executive Officer of CIPO, Sylvain Laporte.

1. How many copyright registration certificates are issued in Canada each year? 

(Note that the fiscal year end of CIPO is March 31. The figures below and reported throughout this interview reflect this year end. For example, 2000-2001 reflects the period from April 1, 2000 to March 31, 2001.)

Statistics for the past few years are the following. In 2008-2009, 8,269 copyright certificates were issued; in 2009-2010, 9,021 copyright certificates were issued; and in 2010-2011, 8,824 copyright certificates were issued.

2. How does this compare to 5 or 10 years ago?

Registrations in 2010-2011 compared to 5 years ago (2005-2006) were higher by 7 percent. Registrations in 2010-2011 compared to 10 years ago (2000-2001) have increased by 27 percent.

3. Why is this number increasing?

Mr. Laporte did not provide any speculations on this question and merely stated that copyright registration is optional in Canada and that registration is a decision made by the copyright owner.

4. Are patent and trademark registration applications showing the same trend as copyright applications?

No. The trend in filings of applications for the registration of trademarks shows a decline in two consecutive years, 2008/2009 and 2009/2010, but returned to nearly identical levels in 2010/2011 seen 3 years prior.

Economic uncertainty such as that caused by the recent global recession impacts the number of patent applications filed. Fiscal years 2009–2010 and 2010-2011 are cases in point; the Patent Office reported mild declines in new applications during these years.

5. How long does it currently take to obtain a copyright certificate upon filing an online application? A mailed-in application?

Our service standards are 5 days for online filing and 7 days for paper filing. Currently, it takes 2.9 days for the issuance of a copyright registration certificate upon filing an online application, and 6.5 days for a mailed-in application.

6. Is it true that CIPO will not even look at deposits accompanying copyright applications and that they return them upon receipt? (Note that under the Canadian registration system, there is no requirement to deposit a copy of the work with the copyright application.)

Yes.

7. How many copyright searches are undertaken in the Copyright Registers each year? Is this number growing or shrinking?

The searches conducted in the Canadian Copyrights Database have been continuously growing for the past five years. The number of searches has increased by approximately 14% per year, with the exception of 2006/07, where 53% more searches were conducted online than the previous year. Searches conducted in 2010/11 have increased by 2% from the previous year.

8. What is the most misunderstood issue relating to copyright registration in Canada?

Although no formal research has been conducted, feedback received from CIPO’s Client Service Center indicates that some Canadians may not understand the role and scope of the Copyright Office. According to the Copyright Act and Copyright Regulations, the role of the Copyright Office is limited to receiving and processing applications for voluntary registration of copyright. The Office does not verify ownership or examine the work, nor is it able to offer advice on particular works as copyright subject matter, scope of protection, or matters of infringement. The public is advised that any such issues be resolved with the help of a legal professional knowledgeable in the area of intellectual property.