By way of the CanLII listserv, Principal Editor Ivan Mokanov has just announced that the first two hundred Supreme Court of Canada decisions prior to 1985 have been digitized and published on the CanLII website.

If you surf to the SCC decisions page above, you can see that the years 1976 to 1984 have been fleshed out and are ready for more material. It’s good to see that while the decisions are scanned, they are also OCR’d and made available (and searchable) in full text format.

A great project, and very necessary… Encore CanLII, Encore!!! . . . [more]

I’m going to what looks to be a fantastic ABA conference on law school facilities: “Bricks, Bytes and Continuous Renovation” in Seattle in late March. Its very timely for us as Osgoode is hoping to engage in a major renovation programme in the next couple of years, and the library will be a verybig part of that. My question for Slawyers – all of you use law libraries I’m thinking – use your imaginations and tell me what features you’ve always wanted to see in a library. I’ve got a lot of ideas of course but it would . . . [more]

Mr. Justice Marshall Rothstein of the Federal Court of Appeal has been nominated by Prime Minister Harper to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court of Canada. The Office of the Commissioner of Judicial Affairs has put together a website on Mr. Justice Rothstein that contains a good deal of information about the person and his professional work.

However, upon further examination of the website, we at Slaw felt it could and should be improved upon. Accordingly, we present:

The Marshall Rothstein Pages . . . [more]

As all the world (nearby) likely knows by now, Mr. Justice Rothstein will attend at a meeting of an ad hoc committee made up of members of Parliament in order to answer their questions concerning… exactly what, we’re not yet sure. This will happen on Monday afternoon, February 27.

Here’s the deal: What question would you like the committee to pose to its guest?

Slawyers, write in over the weekend — via comments — with that all-important question, and we’ll do what we can on Monday morning to make them available to, well, all the world. Remember, only one question. . . . [more]

1. Dirty Dancing quotes
2. VLLB
3. BCCLS
4. British Columbia Courthouse Library Society – More News
5. Vancouver Law Librarian Blog: UBC RSS Feeds Now Live
6. Connie Crosby
7. RocketBoom
8. About Rocketboom
9. Democracy: the free and open source Internet TV platform
10. Rocketboom: Feb. 23, 2006
11. Wikipedia: Streaming Media
12. StreamingMedia.com
13. Streaming Media West
14. KM World and Intranets
15. senatorhung’s pad
16. Library Journal: “Lib-dating” in Belgium: Book Lovers May Become Just Lovers
17. Justice Rothstein
18. Writely
19. News Release – PMO – February 23, 2006
20. Office of the Commissioner of Judicial Affairs 
21. CCH decision
22. Attorneys Are Not Knowledge Workers. Between Lawyers: technology + culture + law
23. the [non]billable hour:

. . . [more]

Back to the serious business of law libraries. (Are you kidding? Late on a Friday afternoon?)

I’d like to take a few moments to commiserate (not to be mistaken for whining) with other librarians, particularly solos, who bravely bear their burdens alone.

Here’s my last couple of days (you’ve had days like this, too, I know) …

I’m slugging my way through an uncommonly large backlog of information and research requests. I’m thinking that I might almost have it under control by the end of the week if I really work my butt off and sequester myself away. But then . . . [more]

[Cross posted on the VLLB]

After our recent kudos for the BCCLS website, I’m happy to announce that they are now offering yet another hidden gem from the BC legal market, this time for your RSS reader!

I just received an email from Mandy Ostick, Virtual Library Manager at the BCCLS, announcing that the What’s New blog (& the source for news items on the BCCLS homepage) is now available via RSS. While the feed is becoming less and less of the story here (see also UBC’s recent announcement), what’s more important is the source . . . [more]

The last few years, with the rising number of television channels and the phenomenon of reality shows, I would jokingly tell my friends it was only a matter of time before we’d all have our own shows. Amusingly enough, I wasn’t that far off. It is, however, television in a different form–the video blog or video feed–that is quickly becoming the new alternative to mainstream broadcasting. Especially with the number of Video iPods that people purchased this past Christmas, this is definitely not something we can ignore. There are no limits to the number of channels when you select the . . . [more]

If I were in the dating market, this would be more intriguing to me than some of the other options out there.

“Basically it’s speed-dating, but in a new setting—with books,” is how Belgian librarian Eric Van der Straeten describes the “lib-dating” service he created with fellow librarian Danny Theuwis that pairs readers in a comfortable setting—a library. The duo already have played matchmaker to numerous couples and are now training librarians from as many as 300 facilities to set up their own dating service. Theuwis told the AP he places flowers, candles, and wine on each table, and pairs

. . . [more]

Posts have been a little thin on the ground this week, mainly because a bunch of us contributors were sidetracked by working on a project to put up as much useful information as we could about the new Supreme Court appointment. Originally an idea of Simon Chester’s, a number of us signed on to go like crazy at the last minute to use our research skills and show everyone how it’s done.

Well. First of all the short list got leaked, and so we had rather more time than we’d expected — and rather more targets. Like most everyone else, . . . [more]

The Prime Minister’s Office announced this morning that the Honourable Mr. Justice Marshall E. Rothstein, currently a member of the Federal Court of Appeal, is the candidate to be interviewed as nominee for new member of the Supreme Court of Canada.

News Release – PMO – February 23, 2006

For an excellent (and I do mean excellent) summary of Justice Rothstein’s career to date, see this page on the Office of the Commissioner of Judicial Affairs website:

Justice Rothstein

It includes curriculum vitae, extensive lists and links to his many written decisions, examples of his written decisions at the . . . [more]

Lawyers are knowledge workers. I fundamentally disagree, for semantic reasons, with the proposition that "lawyers are not knowledge workers". I do not take issue with the laudable characteristics that should be associated with "lawyers as knowledge workers".