It’s been a busy week here at Slaw central. We have another occasional contributor to welcome. Patrick Cormier is a legal officer (i.e. lawyer) in the Office of the Judge Advocate General in the Department of Defence and currently Project Director of the “Comprehensive Information Management Project” there. In case this isn’t enough, he’s a blogger as well at Information Management Now. . . . [more]

I was just notified this morning that OCLC has released a report called Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources (2005). The report summarizes findings of an international study on information-seeking habits and preferences in Australia, Canada, India, Singapore, the UK, and the U.S.

I haven’t had a chance to sit down and go through it in detail, but there looks to be some pretty good stuff in the report. According to the blurb on the webpage, the findings indicate:

that information consumers view libraries as places to borrow print books, but they are unaware of the rich electronic resources they . . . [more]

Researchers who are frustrated by the fact that search engine relevance rankings are so often skewed will benefit from a great piece in today’s Technology supplement of our local That is when we’re in Chennaipaper, the Hindu .
It summarizes quite accessibly an important piece on Web Spam Taxonomy by Zoltán Gyöngyi and Hector Garcia-Molina of Stanford University’s Computer Science Department.

As the journalist, D. Morali puts it this exhaustive research paper offers “the first comprehensive taxonomy of all important spamming techniques known to date.” Read up to get wiser.

He summarizes:
“Nothing in this paper is secret to the . . . [more]

The ‘mad’ pace of posting here at Slaw is fast making it a must read for legal research & technology professionals. But even as a contributor, I sometimes find it hard to keep up with all the content we’re producing.

I’m obviously subscribed to the new postings feed, but the real value to a collaborative blog like this is in the online discussion, and I recently found myself linking into each post so I wouldn’t miss out on the comments [The comments are the good stuff! :-)]. Well, I’ve made a few changes recently, and started to use the . . . [more]

Do any readers of the list know about current and future plans for further development of the DFAIT treaties web-site? Its been growing very slowly for some time now but still seems to be far short of the ideal goal of including the full text of all treaties, signatory details and supporting explanatory material. There is very little information at the site itself about any such plans. . . . [more]

Well now that the first election of 2006 is over, a few thoughts on how the Internet provided information to us.

I’ve been following British elections using the BBC and Guardian websites, which were elegant and efficient in how they delivered breaking information.
In Canada, with the last 2004 Election, I forewent my usual radio and Tv surfing for results since I discovered that between the Globe and Mail and the CBC, web-based results services gave me much faster and deeper results than the usual talking heads, with a ticker-tape banner of highlights.

Indeed the web seemed to be . . . [more]

Slaw is proud to say that in the last few days we’ve been joined by John Lawford and Michael Lines, who have agreed to become occasional contributors, and by Heather Acton, who is joining as a core contributor.

John Lawford is counsel with the Public Interest Advocacy Centre in Ottawa. He has experience doing medical-legal research with a large firm; he has been a research director at a major Ottawa firm; and was for a number of years Special Projects Director and Webmaster at Quicklaw.

Michael Lines is the law librarian and information coordinator at the Forum on Civil Justice, . . . [more]

Clarity is the semi-annual journal of “the international movement to simplify legal language,” also Clarity. Since number 50 (Nov. 2003), there has been a pronounced increase in Canadian authors and guest editors. The current editor is Nicole Fernbach of Juricom. Recent authors include our Chief Justice, the Right Honourable Beverly McLachlan in number 51. Back issues are available from the website. . . . [more]

Quick! How many registered political parties are there in Canada?

Answer . . . [more]

The Canadian Library Association has put together this handy Review of Party Platforms . . . . [more]

Google seems to be an idea factory moving in more directions than we can track (unless you set up your own Google Alert) or subscribe to the somewhat perky Google Blog.

That’s why yesterday’s Observer feature on Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience was really helpful. And on Friday, BBC’s Money programme had a web broadcast on her called The World According to Google. . . . [more]

Experience researchers know how valuable legal dictionaries can beAnd if you don’t know why this brief note by Ed Akkawi and me will tell you.
This month with the addition of Bouvier’s Legal Dictionary, the LawyerIntl.com
goes to the front of the competition for free online legal dictionaries.
The announcement is worth reading.
It does seem to be more tuned to the legal user than the law.com’s legal dictionary which is built on Merriam-Webster’s Legal Dictionary

As for Canada, Lloyd Duhaime’s work covers some Canadian terms but isn’t anything like as comprehensive as Daphne Dukelow‘s print version.

Bottom line . . . [more]