This from Annette Demers: Reference Librarian, Paul Martin Law Library, University of Windsor

When I worked at the Harvard Law School Library, there was a young woman there who was working on her SJD and she was visually impaired. I spent many hours trying to find articles and books for her in an electronic format (which was the only format other than braille with which she could work.) She was a wizard on her computer, and her text reading software was JAWS. When the Harvard libraries Committee on Electronic Resources and Services (to which I was a representative) began to . . . [more]

This from Anette Demers:Reference Librarian, Paul Martin Law Library, University of Windsor

I just thought I would mention a few items that may be of interest to the greater community. Forgive me if these have already been widely published.

First of all I have been informed by WestlaweCarswell of the following change to our access to BNA International Trade Reporter (and other BNA products):

September 6, 2006. There has been a change in the access to BNA. We are no longer able to provide complimentary access to these databases. We do have a special pricing model that permits cross

. . . [more]

As a proponent of RSS, I try my best to follow the RSS feeds from a number of “very active” BLOGs. Recent postings on SLAW and other BLOGs have highlighted a problem with RSS – it’s a great way to divert content from bloated in boxes, but it’s just not as intuitive as email for many lawyers.

Perhaps more importantly (for me personally), the RSS vs. email issue merely illustrates the bigger issue – how can lawyers spend productive days in the office given the ever increasing demands on their time and attention? From emails and RSS whose only purpose . . . [more]

KMWorld hosted a webinar today on Enterprise Content Management for Corporate Blogs and Wikis (this link is supposed to be active for 90 days). The presenter, a consultant from Stellent, gave a useful review of the basics of the two tools and some thoughts on the advantages and challenges offered by them.

Based on the audience survey, interest in blogs and wikis continues to grow – although at this point, there may be more interest than action. . . . [more]

A reference at the end of the BBC news discussion of the Google News Archive led me to the stimulating writings of Professor Roy Rosenzweig, a historian from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason UniversityYou can see what he looks like here.

“I’m strongly in favour of the democratisation of access to historical documents, but also cautious about how much information Google now controls. Increasingly the model of how we access information and what information we have access to is changing, as public archives such as libraries are replaced by private companies”.

He has written . . . [more]

Slawyer and Library Boy blogger, Michel-Adrien Sheppard, has just published the monthly list of new additions to the Supreme Court of Canada library — letting us know that although the official site says they don’t lend the books, the material is in fact available through inter-library loan to authorized libraries, and that you can subscribe to the monthly list by email.

Sad that the SCC doesn’t do RSS, I thought. So I subscribed by email and arranged to forward the monthly emails to Mailbucket, where I’ve created a feed for Slawyers to use: http://www.mailbucket.org/slaw.xml. Seems llike it’s going . . . [more]

Since we don’t have that many cross-Commonwealth substantive blogs, hat’s off to conflictoflaws.net, which

is intended as a news and discussion portal to those interested in the conflict of laws (otherwise known as private international law). Its international focus is reflected by the team of editors, representing scholars from most major jurisdictions around the world. It is hoped that this collaborative effort in bringing news and views to those interested in private international law will provide a real outlet in allowing scholars, pracitioners and others to share their understanding of the wide-ranging challenges in different jurisdictions that currently face

. . . [more]

New Zealand High Court decisions online

Décidément, l’hiver va être chaud à Ottawa car après les affaires Dell et Rogers, qui seront entendues par la Cour suprême respectivement le 13 et 14 décembre 2006 (voir le dernier billet à ce sujet), voici que concernant l’affaire Euro-excellence c. Kraft Canada, que nous avons déjà également évoquée, les auditions sont prévues, provisoirement du moins, pour le 16 janvier 2007. On peut aussi y voir que ce mercredi 06 septembre, l’appelante a déposé son mémoire, mémoire que voici. Merci aux avocats du dossier, Pierre-Emmanuel Moyse (également Wainwright Fellow à la Faculté de droit . . . [more]

The Pocket Part (“A Companion to the Yale Law Journal”) tackles the impact of the web on legal scholarship. Itself an uncertain manifestation of the online scholarship phenomenon, the PP gives us some bite sized things to provoke thought:

• Christopher A. Bracey , A Blog Supreme?
  

  Although online scholarship takes shape within and against prevailing modes of scholarly production, it has developed, like jazz, into a distinctive idiom of intellectual engagement with its own cultural aesthetic, norms, and the like. And like jazz, it retains a certain mystery and mystique that proves compelling to proponents and confounding to its critics.

. . . [more]

Définitivement! Le Conseil canadien de la magistrature bénéficie depuis un bon moment déjà du Comité consultatif sur la technologie qui a pour mandat de lui présenter des recommandations et donner des avis liés à l'utilisation efficace des nouvelles technologies par les tribunaux. Par contre, comme bien d'autres, les juges sont tributaires des investissements gouvernementaux afin d'obtenir les outils nécessaires à leur travail. À bon entendeur salut!

Believe it or not, but legal prose can be turbid, turgid and really quite impenetrable. It can, it can. (It might be fun to share our own favourite “paragraph of shame” from lawyerly or judicial — okay, okay, or legal academic — writing, a Slaw version of the “It was a dark and stormy night” contest.)

But if you want to have a good laugh and shake your head at some seriously bad writing, take the Postmodernism Text Generator for a spin. It’s a marvelous machine that can generate horribly lifelike swatches of Foucaultian or Lacanian prose all wrapped . . . [more]