Exciting developments in citizen lawmaking and technology have enlivened the last several weeks. These efforts suggest that in the coming year, more and more of the Web’s democratic promise may come to fruition:

Respecting ePetition and eConsultation:

• Beginning in 2011, UK citizens will be able to propose legislation on the Direct.gov.uk Website. Proposals receiving a threshold level of popular support will form the basis for legislation which will be introduced in Parliament.
• Rules have been finalized for the European Citizens’ Initiative, a direct online democracy mechanism for the European Union. Initiatives receiving a certain level of support

 In the business cycle of the Legislative Library, the planning process has begun once again. In the dark days of winter, it’s time to plant the seeds of the future. 

 “Innovation” has emerged as an important theme for our management team, and it has featured prominently in our discussions. We’re challenged by our senior executives to scan the horizon, to detect emerging issues and suggest possible responses. Exciting stuff! Our clients, on the other hand, expect the information infrastructure to remain intact. If the division doesn’t carry out its core functions: providing information management, IT and library services – we’ve . . . [more]

In what seems like another age I wondered about the same question and decided to start publishing an online newsletter that most readers of this article will be aware of, Law Librarians News.

Then to keep up with trends and technology I also started publishing the House Of Butter blog and subsequently a Law Librarians News Twitter both of which appear, I hope, to be popular with an online readership.

It might appear that I’m doing my utmost to blow my own trumpet but it has always been somewhat of a surprise that it’s only those from the U.S. and . . . [more]

The relative size of library collections was once a source of pride for institutions, a tangible means of measuring their scholarly worthiness. In the 1990’s this gradually started to change, as the growth of collections continued well beyond the ability of the libraries to house all their books, either on open or rolling stacks. Libraries started to plan off site storage for the lesser used collections, and often collaborated via consortia arrangements to afford the construction and ongoing maintenance costs of the storage facilities. In some instances ‘last copy only’ schemes were devised to avoid duplication, and the methods of . . . [more]

We’ve discussed Google Scholar on SLAW before. Google Scholar allows you to search legal opinions and journals for free, and while the coverage is primarily American, there are a significant amount of Canadian materials available. Not everything in Google Scholar is available in full-text; in some cases only the citations are included.

Google Scholar supports most of Google Search’s advanced operators (e.g. “phrase search”, + and -). It also allows users to limit their searches by date with the caveat that “that some web sources don’t include publication dates, and a date-restricted search will not return articles for which Google . . . [more]

Information overload, and ways to overcome it, has been mentioned on Slaw several times. I came across this article from SSRN titled “What We Don’t Know We Don’t Know” and it reminded me of the consequences of ignorance. Although I thought the article was going to be about ways to overcome information overload, it quickly shifted to an analysis of scholarly research and the metrics used to measure it, such as the impact factor (IF). I found the use of measurement very transferable to legal research, such as the IF in a legal decision of the number of citations by . . . [more]

In India, a woman may marry a goat. In Canada, it’s illegal to board a plane while it’s in flight. In Sweden, it’s illegal to buy sex, but okay to sell it. In France, it’s illegal to name a pig Napoleon. Dueling is legal in Uruguay – provided both parties are registered blood donors. Pillows are considered “passive” weapons under German law. Several countries have laws against kissing in public. Some laws make you laugh out loud, some make you shake your head in wonder, and some are just puzzlers. Could something have been lost in translation? Were these really . . . [more]

Morris Leo Cohen died on Saturday, December 18, 2010. He had recently celebrated his 83^rd birthday. More than a few of us call Morris mentor. During his years at Yale, Harvard, Penn and SUNY Buffalo, he attracted disciples with ease and grace. I trust that a round of tributes will follow his passing, but one aspect that may be neglected is the symbolic value of it for librarianship. Morris was the last great scholar bibliographer of his generation in American law librarianship. Not a scholar who stepped into the role of librarian, Morris was a scholarly bibliographer, a man . . . [more]

[This is the third in a series of articles about the trends, theories, principles and realities that have influenced the redesign of the new library of Osgoode Hall Law School – part of the renovation and rebuilding of the law school currently underway. This instalment is written in response to Eric Appleby’s recent post on “The Future of Headnotes”.

When you walk into an academic law library, the first that meets your eye is row upon row of bookstacks as far as the eye can see, filled with published law reports. It’s an impressive sight; and, in the 21st . . . [more]

My last column addressed an odd feature of current legal periodical publishing: a number of legal publishers do not expose interoperable metadata for their periodical articles on the free Web, and do not sell or license individual periodical articles online.

We saw that these practices seem unusual because they are inconsistent with industry trends, and because these publishers already use digital publishing processes, have access to free or low-cost ejournal platform and ecommerce software, often have access within their own corporate families to expertise in implementing such software and services, and, given the size of the global market and the . . . [more]

Toronto’s first Webcom was held on November 3^rd. The conference, in its ninth iteration in Montréal, brought together a diverse group from various information professions – communications and technology folk rubbed shoulders with librarians, consultants and marketing executives. We were treated to an equally diverse range of speakers. The program looked at social networking, collaboration and a wealth of case studies in the application of social media in the enterprise. Connie Crosby did us proud with a lightning presentation of social media tools in the enterprise. 

Shel Holtz started the day with Tactical Transparency : the Value of . . . [more]

There have been a couple of blogposts recently that are worth noting – the first one marks the impending breaking of the $1 billion mark for e-books – posted on James McQuivey’s blog – and a related post a few days earlier on Law Librarian Blog about the release of 40,000 e-books by Springer without any DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions.

Our library is like many others – we have purchased e-books to provide the best range of resources to our academics and students. These are in addition to the paper, because we are lucky and for the UK at . . . [more]