Eight Reasons Solo Lawyers Should Use Law Libraries is a fantastic guest blog post on My Shingle.com by Mary Whisner of the M. G. Gallagher Law Library at the University of Washington School of Law, which I found courtesy of beSpacific.com (May 14/06).

Here is the summary:

One. Librarians.

Two: Books.

Three. Databases.

Four. Audiovisual materials.

Five. Space.

Six. Networking.

Seven. Services at a Distance.

Eight. Training.

Okay, some of this is obvious; however, her explanations are what make this really stand out. My favourite point is under “Space”:

* Many county law libraries also have conference rooms that you

Here is something that I’ll tuck away for possible (hopefully NOT) future reference … how to come to terms with and move on after the failure of a technology-based initiative as written by Dorothea Salo who writes at TechEssence.

Read it for yourself at TechEssence.Info. I hope you never need to know this either!

From this site’s “about page“:

Roy Tennant started TechEssence to address the need for simple, easy to understand information about information technology. He is lucky to be joined by a stellar cast of individuals who contribute their unique perspectives on technology and

There’s a new Canadian Law Blog out there … BC Criminal Law Blog … maintained by Stern & Albert. . . . [more]

LibraryThing has opened its doors to organizations such as law firms. A pricing structure has been put in place … $25 per year to 500 books and $50 per year to 5,000 books.

Check out the guidelines at Can Organizations Join LibraryThing? LibraryThing is working on some features that will prevent the collections for organization from negatively impacting the LibraryThing experience for those with personal collections. It also sounds like they will be developing further enhanced features that will be attractive to organizations with small library collections. Sounds interesting.

Considering the cost of feature-rich library software, which is sometimes more . . . [more]

Coverage of this issue has not gone very national from what I can see, but here are a couple of links to Alberta papers

Calgary Sun
Edmonton Journal (requires subscription)

The bill passed yesterday after debate was limited by the Klein government (following 6 hours of debate).

The most outlandish sections of the bill are as follows (ss. 4-6 are about briefing notes to Ministers (restricted for 5 years), s.7 restricts access to all documents supporting the auditor’s reports (15 years):

4 Section 6 is amended by adding the following after subsection (3):

(4) The right of access does not

I’ve started to work with the new Google Notebook and must say that I’m quite impressed. I’ve played around with the Firefox extension notebook and haven’t made much use of it. It only gives me one more place on my computer to make a note, and I’ve got quite a few of those already. But Google Notebook is different.

For one thing it’s Web 2.0, which means it’s available to to me wherever I have a browser and an internet connection and is, of course, cross-platform too. For another, it offers a bunch of features that seem quite handy. You . . . [more]

Major announcement this morning from a broad and loose coalition of public-interest oriented organizations and privacy and civil liberties groups.

They’ve released an open letterSignatories include, Association for Media and Technology in Education in Canada, Atlantic Provinces Library Association, BC Civil Liberties Association, BC Freedom of Information and Privacy Association, BC Library Association, Colin Bennett, Professor of Political Science, University of Victoria, Canadian Association of University Teachers, Canadian Federation of Students, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, Canadian Library Association, CLUE : The Canadian Association for Open Source, Consumers Association of Canada, Electronic Frontier Canada, Electronic Frontier Foundation, FLORA.org, . . . [more]

Nick Holmes, managing director of the UK InfoLaw and blogger at his Binary Law, which is about legal information, writes to say:

Please note my blog is now at:
http://www.binarylaw.co.uk

and the blog feed is at:
http://www.binarylaw.co.uk/index.php/feed/

I’ll be adding a Blogroll page with special mention of Slaw.

Also note that there’s a new Blogs section in infolaw Lawfinder, cataloguing all UK law (and other significant UK-relevant) blogs. I’ve included Slaw under Legal Information.
http://www.infolaw.co.uk/lawfinder/browse_type.asp?typ=Blogs

Also new on infolaw Lawfinder is the Feeds section, cataloguing all UK law and related feeds and serving up the latest 10 headlines. Your feed

Those of you who are more involved than I am in knowledge management may already be aware of this, but today I came across a peer-reviewed web-based journal on KM, the contents of which are freely available for download or viewing in .pdf. The Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management does not focus on KM in law, but Slaw readers who are also KMers may want to keep it in mind for research on KM issues or, perhaps, as a venue for publication. One note: I didn’t find that it displays all that well on my mozilla-based browser; IE users . . . [more]

I didn’t post yesterday, as I confess to being bleary eyed and jet lagged from travelling and reception libations to think clearly. I’m attending the joint meetings of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and the American Association of Research Libraries (ARL) at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa. I thought Slawyers would be interested in three of these.

The first is project Alouette Canada, about which I posted in January, they now have a website which gives some basic information although the project is still under development.

The second is the Public Knowledge Project spearheaded by the amazing . . . [more]

Inspired by recent posts encouraging a general taxonomy initiative and, as well, participation in firm (0r other internal) KM initiatives, I thought I’d bring to the attention of the KMers among us an upcoming SLA Click U course which sounds as though it will bring the two subjects together: Taxonomy KM — Where to Go Once the KM Program Is Already in Place. I have no other information about this course or the instructor apart from what is on the site, nor have I any personal experience with SLA’s Click U web-delivered courses. However, particularly as a single . . . [more]

For a while I would get Statistics Canada‘s The Daily via a news feed from the federal government newsroom. The trouble I found was that the feed only gave you a link to the website for the Daily, which was hardly worth anything at all.

Now I see that there are separate feeds for a variety of subjects that The Daily reports on. This may be news to some, so herewith those subjects and a link to the StatsCan feed:

• Agriculture
• Arts, culture and recreation
• Business enterprises
• Communications
• Construction
• Education
• Energy
• Environment
• Government
• Health
• Justice
• Labour
• Manufacturing
• National