It seems law professors just don’t have enough to do these days and some at least turn to the field of novel writing (as if law schools weren’t providing enough fiction). An article in Saturday’s New York Times has an interesting piece about a book coming out this Fall from Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld- a murder tale tied in with a visit that Freud took to the US in 1909. Its touted as this year’s “The Historian”, a first novel from another academic (non law) last year – a great read for anyone who’s not yet read it. . . . [more]

Each summer I try to get a substantial web project launched. And like last summer, this post should add some transparency to that work, and describe some of the directions taken.

As of yesterday, my firm launched the Canadian Trademark Blog. It’s a collaborative blog approach, similar to slaw, mixing the perspectives of a solicitor, litigator and trade-mark agent. If you read the official first post, you can see that we’ve tried to define the blog in a focused way, but also leave room to provide commentary on other related topics & disciplines. To me, both are . . . [more]

Sharon Wang, Reference Librarian at Osgoode Hall Law School, has asked me to tell you that she has completed a draft of a research guide to intellectual property law and would very much appreciate your comments by email or via comments here.

The guide is available in MS Word format and pdf. . . . [more]

CARIBANA 2006, originally uploaded by Osei (Ozzy). Some rights reserved under Creative Commons.

This week at my individual blog I am hosting Carnival of the Infosciences #49. It is worth a visit!

Cheers,
Connie . . . [more]

Nous l’avons dit à plusieurs reprises sur notre blogue, l’affaire Dell, depuis que l’on sait qu’elle va être entendu par la Cour suprême, est l’affaire « phare » en matière de contrat électronique. Néanmoins, il va désormais falloir compter sur une autre belle jurisprudence, provenant encore de la Cour d’appel du Québec, à savoir, l’affaire Muroff c. Rogers Wireless. Une affaire pas totalement électronique dans le mesure où le contrat semble avoir été conclu sur du papier même s’il est également disponible sur le site Internet de la compagnie. Et bien oui, encore une fois, l’actualité de cette . . . [more]

Just a quick note to say that Slaw has been added to the Blawg directory. . . . [more]

For me, any information about Paris HiltonBTW any encyclopedia that claims to match Brittanica and has articles like this has a wondrous sense of irony. is too much information.

Too Much Information! BIALL 2007 Conference Call For Papers

‘Too Much Information!’ is the theme for the 38th BIALL Annual Study Conference and Exhibition which will take place Sheffield City Hall, Thursday 14th – Saturday 16th June 2007. BIALL has issued a call for papers.

The central theme is information overload, a major concern throughout the profession and a problem for all those we serve. How can we help them . . . [more]

Given the week’s theme of grey lit, it seemed only right to pursue that colour’s manifestations, shall we say.

I acknowledge a serious debt to web zen. (Okay, okay: I copied them. Picky picky picky.)

. . . [more]

The following is by guest blogger John Willinsky.

John is a Professor at the Department of Language and Literacy Education at UBC, and the Public Knowledge Project.

Michael Lines has asked Professor Willinsky to comment on the open access movement and the changing sense of what it means to publish in relation to scholarly inquiry.

Once there was a way to tell the grey literature from what had been clearly and cleanly published in black and white. It was all in the font and binding. For the better part of the twentieth century, the grey literature was typically . . . [more]

I have but two small tidbits to contribute to Grey Lit week. Institutional repositories and academic institutions were touched on earlier this week, but I would like to mention our own effort here at Dal Law. A source from our collection was mentioned several weeks back on Slaw, but the whole thing is here. This is a list of publications by members or graduate students here at the Faculty of Law. Preliminary talks amongst the interested parties at Dal have already occured to create a wider repository/electronic press across the entire university, but this is our own small . . . [more]

WebCite is “an academic project, hosted at the University of Toronto / University Health Network's Centre for Global eHealth Innovation” the aim of which is to cache web pages cited by academic writers and to provide not merely a stable URL but long-term, if not permanent, access to the cited web material.

I’ll be interested to see what John has to say about how publishing is changing. Clearly, with Web 2.0, Library 2.0, and even Book 2.0, the changes are coming fast and thick. We’ve seen that a definition of GL is a moving target, and possibly the lines between GL and other forms of publishing, such as they are, will blur to the point that it will not be useful to distinguish. But announcing the demise of the publishing industry as we know it may be premature, as Slawers have noted.

I started this week thinking that one of . . . [more]