Microsoft’s Live Search has a “Books” section that lets you search for and within the books that Microsoft is scanning for those libraries with which it is partnering. Material in the public domain is 100% searchable, readable on line and, typically, capable of being downloaded in PDF.

I did a very crude search (Canada and Canada AND law) — there doesn’t seem to be an advanced search feature in Live Search Books — and came up with hundreds and hundreds of hits. There is truly a treasure trove here for legal historians and historians of law. . . . [more]

Daily routine in the trenches of an active legal research practice affords little time for exploring technological innovations in the legal field. Alas, I am therefore often left in the dark even after reading posts on Slaw about such technology. I’ve confessed my confusion and ignorance to Simon F, and he has responded by encouraging me to give a different perspective on issues that surround legal research and technology.

I acknowledge that much of the research I do can be, and often is, conducted by searching online legal databases, as well as internet sites and search engines. In particular, the . . . [more]

From the International Herald Tribune article, “Research libraries close their books to Google and Microsoft,” by Katie Hafner:

The Boston Library Consortium, a group of 19 New England institutions ((:The members of the BLC are Boston College, Boston Public Library, Boston University, Brandeis University, Brown University, the Marine Biological Laboratory & Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, MIT, Northeastern University, the State Library of Massachusetts, Tufts University, University of Connecticut, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Massachusetts Boston, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, University of Massachusetts Lowell, University of Massachusetts Medical Center, University of New Hampshire, Wellesley College, and Williams College” . . . [more]

The TED blog continues to delight and amaze. What caught my eye this time is a piece on graphic artist Maira Kalman, “The Illustrated Woman” (“I’m trying to figure out two very simple things: how to live and how to die. Period… And yell at my children and do all the normal things that keep you grounded.”). Kalman has illustrated many New Yorker covers, has written and illustrated many children’s books, and, if you can imagine, done 56 illustrations for a new edition of Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style.”

Because of the TED video . . . [more]

I’ve just come across the site for a conference given at Berkeley early in the year: Law and the Emotions: New Directions in Scholarship and I have to say the topic was a new one for me. A couple of the papers may give you a sense of the thing:

• Cheshire Calhoun, Department of Philosophy, Colby College, “Hope Matters” [abstract] [full paper PDF]
• Owen Jones, Vanderbilt University Law School & Department of Biological Sciences, “Biology, Emotions, and Law” [abstract PDF] [precis PDF]
• Dan Kahan, Yale Law School, “Two Conceptions of Emotion in Risk Regulation” [

I attended an amazing session today at NE2007. In “Reveille! Roll Call!: Communicating Our Value to Management,” Steven Lastres (Director of Library & Knowledge Management, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, New York) and Donna Purvis (Firmwide Library Manager, Morrison & Foerster LLP, San Francisco) energized me by discussing practical examples of what researchers/librarians can do to contribute to our organizations’ bottom lines. Some best practices discussed:

• Learn about your organization’s business goals and objectives.
• Find out what your organization’s leaders are saying about the firm in the media, trade publications, etc.
• Use the same language as your firm when promoting

The inventive Dave Winer has produced two “newsrivers” for those of you on mobiles. He’s taken the news feeds from the New York Times and the BBC and republished them as HTML streams of stories, updated every ten minutes, suitable for reading on a small screen. The Times is at http://nytimesriver.com/ and the BBC at http://bbcriver.com/. Seems to me that, because of their regular updating feature, these would also please news junkies who have widgets on their start pages.

In addition, because Dave has been talking on Twitter recently about the N.Y. Times’ keywords, I discovered Times . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of Canada has just added a section to its website about its Courtroom Modernization Project.

Over the summer, Court staff installed new audio-visual equipment and wireless connections as well as imbedded laptops in the judges’ benches. Judges started using the new equipment last week to call up cases and other appeal documents directly on-screen during hearings.

Display screens for counsel and media will be added in the Spring of 2008.

Future modernization initiatives include a web-based portal for electronic filing of appeal documents and webcasting of hearings.

Cross-posted to Library Boy. . . . [more]

Here’s a Library Journal article, referenced by Steven Cohen of Library Stuff on how to use 2.0 tools to help manage some of the flood of incoming info.

While librarians and users have been inundated with advice on how to produce content for MySpace, blogs, and other Web 2.0 services, there’s been much less discussion about using newer technologies to consume all this new content efficiently.

I was surprised to learn that a number of colleagues from other firms had not heard of Legal OnRamp and that it does not appear to have yet been mentioned on SLAW. The idea behind the site is that law firms and in-house counsel can register for free as a means of “online networking”. The condition for law firms to register is that they must contribute substantive content on one or more legal topics in their area of expertise and introduce a client to the service.

The idea is that in-house counsel would have an online source of expertise when . . . [more]

I thought I was on top of the management/leadership literature but was surprised to have only come across the concept of “servant leadership” (while at a KM meeting in New York last week that I recently mentioned) when a colleague mentioned the concept in a list of suggested readings.

Although the Wikipedia entry for this topic notes that the principles date back thousands of years, the concept entered the management literature a number of decades through writings by Robert Greenleaf. It is a philosophy of “serve first” and then lead by seeing that other people’s highest . . . [more]

In a recent post, I raised the (common) issue of the desire to allow users to tag, rate or bookmark internal or external sites or documents with the challenge being that most current document management systems (DMS) do not easily allow this to happen.

While looking for something else, I came across an August 12, 2007, post from LawyerKM discussing ConnectBeam, an enterprise social bookmarking and tagging system that works behind the firewall. Searching on a keyword brings up a list of all items tagged with that word. There is also a bit of an expertise locator that . . . [more]