I stumbled on an odd site that values Blogs – and who knows what the methodology is but it values slaw at $4,084.20

http://blogshares.com/blogs.php?blog=https://www.slaw.ca%2F

Funny that it doesn’t know what industry we’re in.

At the base of the page is its valuation of our links out.

Top 100 Incoming Links
This is a list of the most valuable incoming links at the time OTHER blogs are indexed. It is indicative of FUTURE value not CURRENT value.

Xanada (B$1,086.76)
Vancouver Law Librarian Blog (B$939.06)
excited utterances (B$325.98)
CS-SIS Blawgs Committee (B$296.85)
Stark County Law Library Blawg (B$185.51)
Connie Crosby (B$124.28)
Out

When I started using QL back in 1975 – a statement which dates me I realize – I recall being struck by the crudity of Boolean searching and its scant contact with the concept and context driven research behaviour of experienced searchers. Search questions had to be bent out of shape to fit into Boolean: paradoxically legal jargon and Latin was easier to search. The entire process put a premium on knowing the vocabulary and logical structure of the law.

Then we learned how to game Boolean. With nested searches and lengthy synonyms and then proximity locators. We overcame the . . . [more]

It seems that my initial bookmarklet Canlii Find won’t work in IE on Windows (but does in IE on a Mac — which is where I made it). I’ve done another version that should work on IE in the way that the original works in Firefox.

So here they are, renamed for clarity: Canlii Find (IE) and CANLII Find (FF)

Thanks for the feedback. Keep it coming with respect to the new one, too, please. . . . [more]

1. CANLII
2. QuickFind
3. bookmarklets
4. CANLII Find
5. Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL-L)
6. Toronto Association of Law Libraries (T-LAWLIB-L)
7. American Association of Law Libraries
8. LLRX.com (various)
9. Law.com (various)
10. Eugene Meehan’s SCC Law Letter
11. CanLII (and links to SCC, FC and TCC lists)
12. Tarlton Law Library Table of Contents to Law Journals Service
13. BeSpacific
14. CBA Practice Link
15. Bar-ex
16. Jurist Canada
17. The Lawyer.com
18. CopyrightWatch.ca
19. Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing
20. CALL/ACBD
21. WestlaweCARSWELL IP Source
22. Hill Times
23. AUCC: Claire Morris on Access Copyright
24. University of Texas’s Institute of Transnational Law
25. French judgments translated into English
26. German judgments translated into English
27. Israeli judgments translated

Sabrina I. Pacifici on her BeSpacific website/blog mentions the US GPO website providing free online access to an annotated US Constitution prepared by the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress. This site appears to be an excellent (and free) source of information for online researchers.

The Canadian equivalent (but not quite) are the Canadian Charter of Rights Decisions Digests prepared by Graham Garton of the Department of Justice and available on CanLII. . . . [more]

This is a link to an article on the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Microsoft, Joining Growing Digital-Library Effort, Will Pay for Scanning of 150,000 Books.

http://chronicle.com/temp/email.php?id=93ohnmza2fvcsjur1iqon9hkj8v1vbgu

Six of the participants are Canadian universities: Toronto, York, McMaster, Ottawa, Memorial, and UBC. . . . [more]

I was a guest at a meeting of Toronto research lawyers today (see Ted Tjaden’s post below) and found it very interesting. Among other things, I got a couple of ideas from it for research tools that might be helpful, one of which is set out in this post.

I’m an academic and for me the commercial databases are free; so it always takes me a moment to remember that practitioners have to pay — correction: their clients have to pay — for these services. Moreover, I don’t think I properly appreciated how careful practitioners can be about whether . . . [more]

A question arose today among colleagues how best to stay “current” with law-related information without becoming overwhelmed.

Certainly, technology has a role to play but I also suspect there is no “one size fits all” solution for every person. For example, I find my information-seeking habits and needs now (as an academic law librarian) are quite different from when I was a practicing research lawyer. Set out below are some of the various techniques I have used, along with a list of some of the standard websites I would ordinarily visit on a regular basis. . . . [more]

Welcome to http://www.copyrightwatch.ca/ which Larry Lessig’s blog led me to. Exploding the myths of Canadian copyright law, one fallacy at a time. . . . [more]

I only just noticed now that WestlaweCARSWELL has added “IP Source” as one of its “modules” – perhaps it has been there for awhile but I only noticed it now (by default, the system only appears to accept a maximum of 6 tabs and adding IP Source to existing tabs results in 7 tabs, so you would need to drop one of your other tabs).

I don’t want to seem too “promotional” here but the IP Source looks interesting for IP practitioners/researchers and includes a number of Carswell-authored IP texts, including those by Fox/McKeown, Joliffe and Dimock, in addition to . . . [more]

In an October 24, 2005, op/ed piece in the Hill Times – available for free on the website of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC) – AUCC President Claire Morris accuses Access Copyright of distorting the position of Canadian educators who merely want the right, as educators, to access material that is “publicly available” on the Internet. An important piece in the debate on Canadian copyright reform and an eloquent plea for a balanced approach. . . . [more]