Stray thought on a Sunday night. One of the most difficult places remaining in the Commonwealth, in legal research terms. is the West Indies. There are now more requests for assistance on law librarian listservs for assistance for materials from Caribbean jurisdictions than anywhere else – whether it be tax legislation from Jamaica or cases from Barbados. The region is not as well covered as most African or Pacific jurisdictions which, given its location on the North American doorstep, is inexplicable. And this is the case with respect to both free and paid services as far as I am aware. . . . [more]

The University of Texas’s Institute of Transnational Law has posted some 1,000 translated foreign judgments and statutes to the UT Law School website.

The material is from France, Germany, Israel, Austria and Italy. . . . [more]

1. World Trade Online
2. LawHawk
3. Google toolbar
4. Wikipedia: PageRank
5. Google
6. Googleblog: Googlebombing
7. Research Buzz: Google Librarian Center
8. Google Librarian Center
9. Google Reader
10. Cindy Chick: on Google Reader
11. Wikipedia: OPML
12. International Herald Tribune
13. IHT article by Smiers on no copyright
14. Palm, Inc.
15. Research In Motion
16. Research In Motion press release

. . . [more]

This is an unashamed plug for one of my favourite online databases – World Trade Online. I’ve set up access from every law school I’ve worked in (Monash, UofT, Queens, and now Osgoode Hall at York) and it occured to me while arranging access here just now that there may still be some out there who have not heard of it. If you or your library users are interested in world trade issues you can’t beat this resource. As well as the online version of Inside US Trade it includes a vast array of reports and special analyses on aspects . . . [more]

Thomson Announces New Alliance with AUSTLII Thomson Legal and Regulatory is pleased to announce a new strategic alliance with AUSTLII, (the Australasian Legal Information Institute), which expands and enhances the provision of full text legislation content to our online customers.... The new alliance with AUSTLII enables Thomson to significantly improve the range of services that are enriched with hypertext links to legislation, and to expand jurisdiction coverage to cover the States and Territories, as well as the existing Commonwealth coverage.... When a user clicks a link to a particular section of legislation on Lawbook Online, a new window will appear containing the full text of the relevant section of legislation.

The Google Toolbar PageRank (PR) has finally been updated, and Slaw has received a PR5! To see this for yourself, you must have the Google Toolbar installed, and have the PR bar indicator ‘checked off’ under ‘Options…’.

Google PR is updated on a continual basis, but the only glimpse we get into this algorithm factor is via the Toolbar. It’s also important to note that PR is only one of over a hundred estimated elements in how Google calculates the search results. In reality, it’s not a great indicator of how a website will rank in the SERPS (search engine . . . [more]

For anyone who doubts the accuracy of Google searching, here is a wee challenge from cyberspace:

1.) go to www.google.ca

2.) type in “failure”

3.) press the “I’m feeling lucky” button (instead of the Google search one)

4.) laugh

5.) Forward to others before the Google folks fix this!

I did a bit of sleuthing and found this is not actually a mistake, but clearly explained in this Google Blog post. . . . [more]

And while I'm on about Google, this via Research Buzz: Google has created the Librarian Center, currently a page that, in their words, “is a first step toward improving and expanding [the] support�? for librarians, who, together with Google, “share a mission: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.�?

To read my RSS feeds I use a dedicated newsreader application, as opposed to a browser-based reader such as that in Firefox, or a reader offered up as a web application. I guess it's the old-fashioned part of me that likes to have a program under my control for each of my purposes. But one clear downside to this preference is that when I'm not at my computer I can't read my feeds.

A colleague on a private email discussion group I am involved with made reference to an interesting article in the International Herald Tribune from October 8, 2005, by Joost Smiers and Marieke van Schijndel called “Imagine a World Without Copyright” which posits, in part, that a world without copyright law would free up the public domain and prevent cultural monopolies. . . . [more]

Palm, Inc. and Research in Motion, Inc (RIM) announced today they will be working together to bring Blackberry technology to Palm Treo smartphones. As the software applications gradually converge, the companies will therefore be competing primarily on hardware.

See the press release “Palm and Research In Motion Bring BlackBerry Connect to the Treo 650 Smartphone”:

Through RIM’s BlackBerry Connect licensing program, Palm will enable its Treo 650 and future Palm OS® based Treo smartphones with secure, push-based wireless email via BlackBerry Enterprise Server™. The solution will enable the following:

• push-based email using BlackBerry Connect with Palm’s VersaMail® email client;

. . . [more]

1. Harriet Miers’s collected writings
2. Harriet Miers’s Blog
3. NY Sun: Dangers of Blogging
4. List of titles under subject heading: law [zip file]
5. Law Library Microform Consortium
6. Out of the Jungle: Crosby: print vs. electronic

. . . [more]