Yesterday the Digital Public Library of America launched a partnership with HathiTrust, marrying the preservation mission of one with the access strengths of the other. The partnership will have the DPLA—itself only a couple of months post-launch—employ HathiTrust's metadata to improve discoverability of and access to that content in HathiTrust that is in the public domain or otherwise freely available. HathiTrust's own discovery and access platform will continue to develop as well. As has been noted previously here and elsewhere, HathiTrust preserves a fair amount of content useful for legal research.

Details of the partnership are in yesterday's . . . [more]

Twitter has been ordered by French courts to reveal the names of people responsible for anti-semitic tweets (using a standard hashtag) to a number of public interest organizations. Though Twitter said it would cooperate if it received an order from the American courts acting on the request of the French courts, the Court of Appeal said it has to cooperate because the direct order of the French court.

Would such an order be made in favour of private parties here? Would the private bodies first have to begin a legal proceeding against the pseudonymous tweeters – a civil action? a . . . [more]

So do I need to point out that the NSA cell phone snooping story broke on the 64th anniversary of the publication of Orwell's 1984?

By all accounts, privacy is dead, the question is do people care? Personally, I do; but I cannot deny that if you go online then you must accept that you are leaving a trail, but that does not mean that we have to exchange our love of the interwebs and mobile computing in exchange for our privacy.

I observed this comment by a friend of mine and I feel it needs to be spread more . . . [more]

With today’s release of The Future of Legal Services in Canada: Trends and Issues, the consultation phase of the CBA’s Legal Futures Initiative begins.

Trends and Issues puts data and insight from original research commissioned by the CBA into a single document meant to provide an overview of major challenges facing the profession. The report – and the questions it raises – form a starting point for discussions and further consultations with stakeholders in the legal services industry.

We’ve been showing you bits of those papers here, and on the interim Futures website, for the last seven weeks. If . . . [more]

Earlier today, Jennifer Stoddart, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, presented her office's annual report on the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) for 2012. Last month, she was making her case for reforming and strengthening the Act to better protect Canadians' privacy in the digital age.

All of these activities will not surprise anyone.

What is less well known is that the Office of the Privacy Commissioner also funds a whole series of research initiatives. Recently, it published a compendium of results from many of these projects:

From tapping our smart phones to transfer funds, to swiping an

. . . [more]

Many Slaw readers will be familiar with the guides and resources made available at Catherine Best's LegalResearch.org. Over the past 15 years, Catherine has invested thousands of hours into this project, making it one of the most respected (and fluid) resources for introducing legal research here in Canada. "Best's Guide to Canadian Legal Research" has helped to introduce an entire generation of researchers to the topic. I would also consider it to be one of our earliest examples of a digital guide published entirely over the web.

So I'm very proud to announce the re-launch of this . . . [more]

The British Columbia Court of Appeal recently (May 30) released a practice directive dealing with the citation of authorities. Based on the McGill Guide, as you'd imagine, it sets out in detail what the court (the directive would have "Court") requires, down to the level of periods and point size. Importantly, it recognizes the supremacy and sufficiency of the neutral citation, noting that "[a]dditional (parallel) citations are optional." The directive also encourages the use of hyperlinked citations and requires citation to paragraph number rather than page number, inferentially acknowledging the death of print versions.

The comparable directive from the . . . [more]

Two resources I'd like to share with you, each touching on the topic of flipped classrooms. The first is Matt Homann's 6 minute contribution at lexthink.1 where he talks about disrupting CLE. Moving beyond technology supported learning, Matt makes some interesting points on the physical structure of learning environments, telling us to "flip that classroom!". (Click into this post to view the embedded materials.)

The second piece is from Rich McCue's recent presentation at UVic on Flipped Classroom Benefits. The preceding link routes to a summary of Rich's presentation, and his prezi slides are embedded below:

I would consider . . . [more]

With 10 years of experience as Privacy Commissioner of Canada behind her, and her term reaching its end, Jennifer Stoddart has released a report titled "The Case for Reforming the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act" which describes how to modernize Canada's private-sector privacy legislation to ensure it is able to meet the current and future challenges of the digital age and protect Canadians’ right to privacy.
. . . [more]

It seems that law enforcement agencies are commonly using the records of people’s cell phones to establish where the people (or at least their phones) were at material times.

A US court decision has recently refused to admit such evidence, as not being properly based on science. One expert quoted in the article calls this use ‘junk science’.

Have there been attacks on the use of cell phone records in Canada on the ground that they are not reliable indicators of location? Should there be?

The US case referred to tracking by use of the relation of the phone to . . . [more]

Back in March I lamented, along with many others, the announcement that Google Reader is being discontinued. As I wrote, I have been exploring the use of Outlook for RSS. I also said that I dislike it, and my opinion has not changed. My team uses RSS to selectively gather information from specific feeds that we then pass along to others. We have found a replacement for Google Reader and a new method for sharing that Slawyers may be interested in.

Jennifer Merchant, one of the fantastic library team members at the Field Law Libraries, was tasked with . . . [more]

The Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (known as CPSR) has decided to wind up, having pushed for responsible – and notably peaceful – uses of information technology for over 30 years. As they say in their notice, back in 1981 there was no one else with their message. Now there are many – though the task remains to be done.

As the official announcement states:

CPSR was launched in 1981 in Palo Alto, California, to question the
computerization of war in the United States via the Strategic Computing
Initiative to use artificial intelligence in war, and, soon after, the

. . . [more]