While the Canadian Bar Association says that they’re unlocking the digital vault on the Bar Review on Monday, the search engine works today.

The content is extraordinarily rich. PDF’s of everything. The historical depth is extraordinary and the scholarship can be excellent.

I was upset when my old firm trashed an entire set of the Bar Review due to space restrictions. Now I’ve got everything on the desktop – and I’m a happy researcher.

The interface is a bit clunky. It’s essentially the old Index volumes to the journal linked to the relevant PDF. No full text searching, although you . . . [more]

My summer project is finally in play!

My law firm in Vancouver, Canada is announcing today the launch of 14 RSS feeds for our firm publications. The feeds will contain the headlines from our various newsletter articles and e-bulletins, and will provide instant notification when we publish to the website.

One of the really interesting aspects of this project (for me) was the use of RSS outside of the blogging world. Too often RSS gets tied to blogs and isn’t valued for the great information delivery tool it is. With more and more email getting caught in spam filters, . . . [more]

In Chapter 4 of my soon-to-be-completed LL.M. thesis on access to law-related information in Canada in the digital age, I argue that the retention in Canada of Crown copyright and Crown prerogative over printing of statutes (and perhaps case law) and other government law-related information is anachronistic and a damper on easy access to law-related information. I claim no orginality in this argument since a number of critics have already made the case. However, in the age of the Internet, it is time for the Canadian federal (and provincial governments) to articulate a clearer information policy that includes that abolition . . . [more]

The federal government’s website MedEffect is officially launched. The site is intended to let consumers and health professionals file adverse reaction reports.

This is a site that health law professionals or litigation departments might find useful.

By the by, there’s a section on the medical uses of “marihuana” (sic). How come it’s spelled with an “h” here — despite the fact that everyone, including the title to the report “Expert Advisory Committee on Marijuana for Medical Purposes” linked on the MedEffect site, uses a “j”? . . . [more]

Technorati Weblog makes a point of continuously monitoring the “State of the Blogosphere”. In its latest installment, State of the Blogosphere, August 2005, Part 3: Tags they look at tagging or indexing for the first time. . . . [more]

There is a downside to technology – Internet addiction. The CBC News Online reports “Man dies after marathon video game session” in which a 28-year old Korean man, who had quit his job to devote more time to Internet gaming, had apparently died of heart failure and exhaustion after playing an online game for 50-hours non-stop. . . . [more]

Current Cites, the excellent online annotated bibliography on information technology is now 15 years old. Roy Tennant, the editor, reminds us of this remarkable fact in an email to subscribers today. It seems amazing that the whole internet thing has been going for even more years than that. . . . [more]

I have marked up a version of the Copyright Act incorporating the proposed amendments from the first reading version of Bill C-60. My marked up version is here (additions to the Act are shown in yellow, deletions are shown in green and transitional provisions are shown in purple). I believe that my marked up version is accurate, but if readers spot any errors or omissions, let me know and I can update the marked up version. . . . [more]

The Association pour l’avancement des sciences et des techniques de la documentation (l’ASTED) has released an August 4, 2005, French-language PDF news release criticizing the Canadian federal government’s approach to Bill C-60 dealing with Copyright Act amendments (an English news release is apparently pending). The organization is critical of the lack of balance in the proposed amendments. From the news release: . . . [more]

Google News is reporting that IBM is about to give away a concept-based search engine for unstructured data:

link

This piece explains the concept

Search concepts, not keywords, IBM tells business
Mon Aug 8, 2005 12:02 AM EDT

By Eric Auchard

NEW YORK (Reuters) – IBM plans to give away key search technologies for corporate data retrieval that use concepts and facts instead of simpler “keyword” searches relied upon by consumer Web companies such as Google Inc., the world’s largest computer company said on Monday.

While simple but powerful keyword searches have revolutionized how Internet users locate and retrieve . . . [more]

Tobe Liebert writes to say that there’s now an RSS feed for his Current Copyright Literature service at Tarlton Library, UT. The feed URL is:
http://web.austin.utexas.edu/law_library/copyright/rss.cfm.
And once again the URL for the web site is: http://web.austin.utexas.edu/law_library/copyright/. . . . [more]

There was a recent news story on CBC about the stock of the Chinese search engine Baidu being traded on NASDAQ with an opening day gain of 354%. This reminded me of the important research being done through The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School on Internet filtering and censorship by the Chinese government. There is a full text report entitled Internet Filtering in China in 2004-200: A Country Study. From the executive summary of this report: . . . [more]