I’ve never watched so many videos on YouTube as this week. Thanks to everyone who has been sending me links to these!~~

The Librarian and the IT Professional (Mac commercial parody)

Web 2.0 explained

Discover What You Know – Knowledge Management

Okay, I know this is all advertising. But they are very well done and have messages that can be taken independently, without buying something. . . . [more]

In conjunction with the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada’s conference marking the 25th anniversary of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Montreal-based Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP) asked polling firm SES Research to do a detailed survey of the attitudes of Canadians towards the Charter.

Among the more interesting findings:

• “Much has been made of equating Charter values to Canadian values, but we found that the Charter is by no means central to Canadian identity”.
• “[There is] a clear generational divide on this question — younger Canadians tend to idealize the Charter

As most of our readers will know, the Ontario Court of Appeal hearing of the Steven Truscott matter is being broadcast live via CBC TV. In addition to the live feed there are also recordings available of the prior days’ hearings.

The CBC has done an absolutely splendid job of providing the interested viewer with all of the information necessary to understand the hearing, even supplying the appellant’s compendium and an index to it, so that viewer’s can follow along as the court is referred to parts of it. There are backgrounders, including a link to The Fifth Estate’s . . . [more]

Thomson is doing well.

Thomson Corp reported today that its 2006 revenues increased 8%, to $6.6 billion, and operating profit increased 7%, to $1.3 billion. For the fourth quarter of 2006, revenues increased 8% to $1.9 billion, led by its Legal and Regulatory segment.

Revenue highlights by business segment:

Legal and Regulatory
Revenues increased 8% in both the fourth quarter and full year, to $1 billion and $3.6 billion. In the fourth quarter, legal products and services achieved a solid revenue growth of 7%, led by US Westlaw. The fourth quarter revenues for Tax and Accounting products grew 12%, led . . . [more]

The Library of Congress announces its birthday plans this morning.

Law Library of Congress To Celebrate 175th Anniversary in 2007

In celebration of its 175 years of service to Congress and the nation, the Law Library of Congress is launching a yearlong series of events designed to celebrate its achievements and showcase its unparalleled resources.

The celebration began with a special ceremony held at the Library of Congress on Jan. 18. The American Bar Association presented the Law Library with a resolution recognizing this historic milestone, and the American Association of Law Libraries presented the Law Library with a commemorative

The spread of customized searching continues in the library world.

David Sharp, the Government Publications Librarian at the Maps, Data and Government Information Centre at Carleton University in Ottawa, has recently developed a customized search tool for Canadian government documents. It is in the middle of the page.

According to a post on the Access to Government Information blog:

“For now, it searches on the federal level, including select crown corporations, the provincial and territorial level; as well, it searches 80 municipal sites from across Canada. (The 80 municipalities were chosen from a list of Statistic Canada’s Census

UBC Archives has digitized and published online a collection of 52 letters by Charles Darwin.

“As far as we know, this project marks the first time that digital images of these Darwin letters are available online,” says Chris Hives, University Archivist.

The letters include correspondence between Darwin and John Scott Burdon Sanderson (1828-1905), involving research that Darwin and Burdon Sanderson conducted on the digestive powers and leaf movements of insect-eating plants.

In addition, UBC students are transcribing the digitized letters, and transcriptions will be added to the Archives site as they become available later this year.

“This project offers UBC

Diary of Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraq National Library and Archive. Hosted by the British Library and featured in a New York Times article today (February 7, 2007). . . . [more]

The Lewis and Clark Law Review volume 10:4 (Winter 2006) is devoted to papers from a symposium for open access publishing and the future of legal scholarship. One of the lead articles by Michael Carrol, “The Movement for Open Access to Law” describes the development of the open access movement that gave rise to CANLII and WorldlI but wishes to see this go further and argues that the “time is ripe for legal scholars and scholarly legal periodicals to fully join this movement for open access to law” (741). While most Canadian law reviews are members of the Legal Scholarship . . . [more]

Exhibit 1

Exhibit 2

And a tip of the hat to LibraryBoy who got there first . . . [more]

La question m’a été récemment posée par un collègue : un blogue, pour un professeur, à quoi cela sert ? Cela me permet aussi de faire un lien avec un tout récent billet d’un de mes non-juristes favoris, Bruce Schneier, spécialiste en sécurité, s’intitulant « Bloggers on Blogging ».

Et bien, il me semble que l’intérêt premier, en ce qui me concerne, et de très loin, est académique. Académique quoiqu’un tantinet iconoclaste d’avec la forme traditionnelle d’enseignement. Surtout dans mes cours de maîtrise, il est parfois difficile d’inciter les étudiants à faire leurs lectures à chaque semaine ; . . . [more]

I love a clever headline. Sadly, I’m better at enjoying them than I am at creating them but every now and then, genius strikes me and you can bet I want to headline it! Largely, though, it has worked in my favour that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) frowns on the pithy headline. The trade off? B-O-R-I-N-G!! I post every day to our law firm’s internal blog and what’s even more challenging than creating a clever title for a post is creating a clever title that is also clearly descriptive of the content. Mostly, the headlines run to the latter.

I . . . [more]