I’m at the point in a couple of projects at the law school where issues are starting to coalesce and cause interesting interference patterns — a methodological moiré.

In one project, I’m worried about the information architecture for the law school’s website that I’m restructuring: how much should be (and be presented as) hierarchical and how much should I feel free to web with linking strands across hierarchies; should content be used twice or only once and referenced twice if need be, etc. — and how should all of this get translated into a decently usable interface and navigation . . . [more]

Robert Ambrogi makes a few good points about the newest edition of Google Desktop Search (GDS) and the protection of client privacy. Specifically, if you enable the ‘Search Across Multiple Computers’ function, Google will upload copies of your documents to Google’s servers.

Canadian law firms, already on the lookout for protecting client data in the Patriot Act era, will have to be extra careful that this function is turned off.

I feel sorry for the systems people out there. This would seem to be yet another download that will have to be policed via firewall blocking and registry configurations.

Update: . . . [more]

Hello everyone – my first post, well overdue.

At last I have some news in response to Nick’s email some time ago querying the status of UK online legislation. An internal pilot of the Statute Law Database has recently been completed and is being evaluated.

The database is expected to be made available to Government departments in April. A pilot of the public service will follow in May, with the service expected to go live by the end of this year. The publicly-accessible database is intended to be freely available.

However our English colleagues are a little wary of these . . . [more]

In a less esoteric approach to this day of celebration of romance, here is a link to the history of Valentine’s Day you might enjoy, and use for office trivia banter… . . . [more]

Moving away from tales of love, I thought I’d mention a fabulous Web site from Oxford, called the Internet Library of Early Journals. It includes the full text facsmile and searchable versions of a number of very important early journals, or news magazines, the equivalent’s in part of today’s Macleans or Time. The collection includes titles like The Gentleman’s Magazine (no, not published by anyone named Hugh). As well as being a source of endless distraction for anyone who delves into them, as they include amusing letters and poetry, the journals are also an important source of legislative . . . [more]

Simon Chester has really covered the subject in his Valentine's Day post, and all that remains for me is to be picky and point out that, with one exception, the term “love” does not appear in any Canadian statute referring to love between adults.

The law can tell us a few things about love. Legislation, jurisprudence and doctrine.

Remember Wystan Auden’s poem, Law Like Love which you can hear read in the great man’s voice:

Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I’ve told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.

And Auden goes on to contrast that with love – but you really should read the work yourselves.

Let’s start with legislation. All young . . . [more]

Thanks to Steve Abram’s blog for a quite deliciously concise translation by Peter Binkley of Shiyali Ramamrita Ranganathan’s Five LawsRanganathan, S. R. (1957). The five laws of library science. London: Blunt and Sons, Ltd. The implications of Ranganathan’s work continue to be explored in the world of Web 2.0.

Libri utendi.
Omni libro lector.
Omni lectori liber.
Otium lectoris servandum.
Virescat biblioteca

So elegant in its simplicity . . . [more]

The front page of today's Globe and Mail had a piece on a project/application called Psiphon, which is aimed at helping those in closed societies circumvent government restrictions.

The wonderful Erik Heels told me ten years ago about a websiteCould it have been Random Website, Erik? that took one at random to unexpected destinations on Mr. Gore’s Information Superhighway.

I’ve lost the link, of course, but each week I try and stop by a wonderfully quirky collection of links at Web Zen.

This week’s links will I think appeal to Slaw readers, who are quintessentially people of the written wordI had initially written people of the book without realizing that this has a quite precise meaning in Islamic teaching.

The keeper is the Ask . . . [more]

1. Ongoing: Everybody’s Blogging
2. Sifry’s Alerts: State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth
3. The Basement: The Blog Bang – Is the Blogosphere Contracting?
4. Prism Legal – Strategic Legal Technology: Good KM Article in National
5. CBA National
6. CBA National Vol. 15 No. 1 [pdf version]
7. Selkirk College: Knowledge Management Information Paper, Oct. 2003 [pdf]
8. Pacific Legal Technology Conference, Oct. 2002: S. Chester, “Knowledge Management in a Canadian Law Firm”
9. IBM Systems Journal, Volume 32, Number 1, 1993
10. IBM Systems Journal, Volume 32, 1993, index
11. Leadership Tools: Leadership Versus Management
12. Minister of Justice
13. The. Hon. Vic Toews
14. R. v.

. . . [more]

…[T]he number of known blogs, now somewhere around 25 million, has been doubling every 5½ months… At this rate, in August 2009, the number of known blogs will more or less equal the population of the world.
Ongoing: Everybody’s Blogging

For a seriously detailed look at the blogosphere, see Sifry’s Alerts: State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth. . . . [more]