Up near the top of my list of journals and magazines you’ll find The New Yorker. The articles and fiction are first rate, the cartoons without peer, and the overall wash of general and current knowledge truly valuable in my effort to stay au fait — at least at what I think of as the “well-informed lawyer” level (I could never hope to achieve the general knowledge of a librarian!). It’s always been a print thing for me: I would only go to their website to grab a URL for an article I’d read in the mag so I . . . [more]

Not one of our usual subjects, but because it’s going to be a hot topic – this just from the SCC

  . . . [more]

A First Announcement has gone out that IFLA, the International Federal of Library Associations and Institutions, will be holding its 74th general conference and council in Quebec City, August 10-15, 2008. The conference theme sounds, hmm, vaguely familiar: “Libraries without borders: Navigating towards global understanding”. More details to follow. Oh, if you are part of the masses signing up for Facebook this month, check out their Facebook page.

On a related note, this year’s conference is being held in Durban, South Africa. 2009 will be in Milan, Italy.

The Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations and . . . [more]

LexisNexis has announced the results of a survey examining how information professionals are adding value to their organizations through the use of Web 2.0 technologies and knowledge management. Some key findings:
-Most info pros are using intranets for managing and distributing information. They also regard collaborative workspaces, wireless and portals as important to the future distribution of information.
-While many info pros use blogs and wikis to access information, not alot of use is being made of audio and video podcasts.
-Training, IP services and quality control procedures are just a few of the responses given by info pros when . . . [more]

When you change a post to a blog you’ll likely send out a repeat of the original feed for that item with your changes. In most RSS readers, that will show up as a duplication, I think. But in mine, at least, I have the option of making the edits visible in the original entry. So, it’s fun to see what an excerpt from a BBC news feed originally looked like (in red) and what the editor ultimately chose as replacement phrases (in blue). I wonder if it’s summer intern time at the Beeb.

US accused over ‘ghost detainees’
BBC

Simon Archer directs us to a Sydney Morning Herald piece from a couple of weeks ago reporting the public offering of shares in a law firm, Slater & Gordon Ltd., pretty much a first in the common law world. As Simon A. points out, Australia changed its laws to allow such public participation. The prime concern about letting law firms adopt this corporate financing model has to do with a potential conflict between a company’s duty to its shareholders to profit and lawyers’ duties to the client and the administration of justice. The SMH piece says that Slater & . . . [more]

I use an offline RSS newsreader — NetNewsWire (for Mac), syncing via the online reader, NewsGator — and find that having my feeds available all the time is a help when I travel. Now for Mac and Windows users alike Google Reader is available offline once you install Google Gears, their new RIA framework I blogged about last week. This makes an ever improving news reader just that bit better. . . . [more]

While I was at the CALL conference in May, Luc Meloche was very kind to introduce me to Stephanie Parisien, Manager, Customer Support for QL. I raised this issue to Stephanie.

Essentially, I had noticed a few changes had taken place to Sources on Quicklaw from August of last year to winter of this year. (I had named specific sources in a presentation in September that were no longer there by the same name in February). For example, in some cases Sources were renamed, and in other cases Sources were removed entirely (I suspected).

I asked Stephanie if it might . . . [more]

Too many cool things to blog about, and not enough time to review properly.

• New Ask.com interface is now live. I did some quick testing and really liked the usability of the site.
• Avvo site for lawyer profiles was launched today. No Canadian content. I’ll pass on any judgement until I get some more time in front of it.
• Feedrinse is now free. My favourite service for filtering RSS feeds, and now the Premium edition is free. Nice! [thanks to Research Buzz for the tip.]

John DiMarco
CIO, Justice Cluster
Ministry of the Attorney General of Ontario
Suite 300
21 College St
Toronto ON M5G2B3

Dear Sir,

My name is Annette Demers and I am a Reference Librarian at the Paul Martin Law Library at the University of Windsor. I am writing to you today to mention a gap in your publications that I think you should be aware of.

As you know, the various tables which assist users in finding legislative information, which were published in the back of volume 2 of the annual Statutes of Ontario until the end of 2001, have now . . . [more]

I can’t find a copy of the order by the U.S. Military Tribunal in Guantanamo that dismisses all charges against Khadr. Instead the U.S. sources have thrown up the same (similar?) decision in the Hamdan case [PDF]. . . . [more]

Science Commons, a project of (U.S.) Creative Commons, now has a simple “wizard” to enable scholars to print out an addendum for attachment to a publisher’s copyright agreement reserving for the scholar various rights, depending on what boxes are ticked in the wizard. I’ve done a sample and reproduce the text below. (A properly formatted PDF version is available.) . . . [more]