[via Joy London’s Excited Utterances and Tom Baldwin’s Knowledgeline]

A group of KM professionals recently gathered by conference call to discuss the need and interest of forming a national/international group focused specifically on legal KM.

We agreed that it was logical to form such a group but wanted to solicit feedback and gauge interest from a larger segment of KM professionals before taking the next steps at organization.

Please take a few moments to complete this survey and provide your opinion.

I did my part, and I know there are other Canadian KM-types in ‘the crowd‘ here . . . [more]

For anyone not paying attention, on the Google home page today there is a little celebratory graphic indicating that Google is actually seven years old.

My, how time flies!! . . . [more]

Google has released a stable (non-beta) version of its toolbar for Firefox. I won’t go through all of the features — some of you may already be using the toolbar for IE, though if you’re not using Firefox you should consider it seriously: tabbed browsing and popup blocking would alone make Firefox superior, but there’s lots more. Of the toolbar features, highlighting searched-for terms, word-find (finding your searched-for terms in a page), and Google suggest are those that make it interesting. . . . [more]

The Fogler Rubinoff library recently faced the daunting task of disposing of 200 boxes of books which had formerly occupied shelves in our library but were now, with a prior library downsizing, a recent move, and the availability of all of the material online, in a storage facility in the basement of the TD Centre. After many phone calls and listserv postings, we discovered that print report series have no value and that it is difficult and time consuming to find a home for them. Neither University of Toronto nor York University had any interest in the series. We had . . . [more]

1. Report by Reporters Without Borders
2. Stikeman Elliott
3. Stikeman’s Ad for Report on Securities Act Changes
4. Ontario Securities Act
5. OECD report on scientific publishing
6. W3T URL shrinker
7. LawHawk
8. Index to Common Law Festschriften
9. legal essays collection, Davis Library
10. CommonLII
11. NewScientist: cameraphone scanner
12. Boing Boing: cameraphone scanner
13. U Vic survey of incoming students
14. Reporters Without Borders report on internet surveillance
15. Bangoura case: Ont. SC
16. Bangoura case: Ont. CA
17. Intnl. Conf. on Computerization of Law via the Internet – 2002 – Montréal
18. Intnl. Conf. on Computerization of Law via the Internet – 2003
19. Intnl. Conf. on Computerization of Law via the Internet –

An important – and practical – report [PDF] by Reporters without Borders underscores the political importance of blogging in dissent.

It’s a salutary reminder that there are more things beyond all this fiddle. . . . [more]

I had a demonstration from a representative of WestlaweCarswell yesterday: they are developing keycite links to related documents to full-text cases, so that you will be able to link to factums, pleadings, etc. This now works on Westlaw US. I don’t know who if anyone is betatesting this in Canada, but it would be a good idea for Canadian researchers to check the US Westlaw version to see if all the panoply of documents available in the US is relevant or necessary in Canada, outside of the factums that is.

nc . . . [more]

Globe and Mail subscribers may have noticed the ad from Stikeman Elliott offering a free “a comprehensive analysis of Securities Act amendments that expand the potential liabilities of Canadian public companies and income trusts – as well as their officers, directors, trustees and advisers.” You can see their ad online at:
http://www.stikeman.com/pdf/LitUnleased_05_GMad.pdf

To get it you have to email or phone Stikeman’s. I presume it’s available in digitized form.

The amendments have been incorporated into the online version of Ontario’s Securities Act, and can be found at Part XXIII.1.

[Wouldn’t it be great to be able to insert an . . . [more]

Larry Lessig’s blog has an advance copy of an OECD report on scientific publishing and the impact that digital distribution has on traditional models of intermediation through traditional commercial publishers.

I suspect that it has many echoes in the legal research field as well.

Reinforces my mantra that publishers cannot continue to make money simply funnelling public content to us at a markup, but must find ways to add significant value.

The report is at http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/oecd_sci.pdf . . . [more]

I recently posted about PURLs, the venerable OCLC service for providing persistent, and incidentally shorter, URLs. If it’s the shortening feature you want, and if you use Firefox (and who doesn’t?), you may be interested in the Firefox extension W3T URL Shrinker. Once installed, you right click on the page you want a short address for, choose “Shorten this URL” from the context menu, and up comes the brief address.

You can find it at a very long URL, or at http://w3t.org/?u=2yc . . . [more]

Pat Northey of LawHawk in New Zealand sends this to Slaw:

The Index to Common Law Festschriften is an exciting new addition to legal research is the culmination of a three-year project funded by the Law Foundation and undertaken by a small team at the University of Auckland Library and Law School under the direction of Professor Mike Taggart. This is the first index of contributions to common law Festschriften and fills a serious bibliographic gap in the literature of the common law. This collection is complemented by the Legal Essays collection available from the Davis Law Library.

There are . . . [more]

[S]oftware, developed by NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in Japan, goes further than existing cellphone camera technology by allowing entire documents to be scanned simply by sweeping the phone across the page….

Using the new software with a 1-megapixel camera held at least 20centimetres away, an A4 sized page takes about 3 to 5 seconds to scan. This produces between 21 and 35 images which the software merges together to extract the text and record any images….

[T]he concern now is that this technology will catapult the publishing industry into a copyright furore similar to