The Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), conducted the Top Tech Trends panel at the 2008 ALA Annual conference in July. Consisting of ten library technology experts, including two virtual participants, the key topics discussed included:

• Open source software and APIs
• Increasing demands on bandwidth and infrastructure from streaming audio and video
• Growing usage of mobile devices
• Future of bibliographic control

The full audio of the Top Tech Trends panel is posted at the LITA blog. . . . [more]

If you’re planning to be near Kingston Ontario come August 7, 8 and 9, you might want to check out “copyright’s counterparts,” an academic workshop on the connection between copyright and creativity. From the “about” page:

In some forms and circumstances, copyright, the main reference point for the workshop, can encourage creativity, promote and regulate the circulation and preservation of knowledge and creative work, and ensure compensation for authors. But this workshop ventures in a different direction: it will invite scholars to compare the workings of a number of existing alternative systems, both ancient and emerging,

beSpacific reports that LLRX has posted a positive description of Zotero. The review does not mention that there is only a draft version of a citation style for the Blue Book, and nothing in the works to make Zotero work with our own inimitable Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation.

I think Zotero is the product of the near-to-mid future, and I expect legal writers will move to it as soon as there is a style for them to use, because most of us are fed up with the vagaries of Endnote and related products (lack of networkablility . . . [more]

Some time back we posted about Google’s wisdom of the crowds encyclopedia knol, the idea being that it would be useful to have experts write about what they know and authenticate the pieces by attaching their names and info to them. Google now tells us that the experimental phase is over and you, too, can contribute to the store of the world’s knowledge by either writing your own knol or by making suggestions to those of others, suggestions they’re free to accept or not, of course (a process Google has called “moderated collaboration”).

I have to say that thus . . . [more]

The ninth International Conference on Law Via the Internet will be held this year in Florence, on October 30 and 31, and is to be hosted by the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the Italian National Research Council. The topics to be discussed are as follows:

* Free access to law: the situation in different geographic areas
* Legal aspects concerning management, creation and filing of digital information
* Legal blogs and wikis
* Open legal archives
* Quality of legal information available on the web
* Right to legal information as a fundamental right
* Semantic

Can’t believe I am only just noticing this. The stellar law school blog Law is Cool is not just a blog, but also a podcast! They periodically put out audio with interviews and discussion targeted at law students.

I just listened to the recent Episode 10 discussing the 7 Year Law Degree with Jordan Furlong; using a law degree for alternative careers with David Aylward, founder and director of COMCARE Emergency Response Alliance; and access to justice and the Justice on Target program with Minister Chis Bentley, the Attorney-General of Ontario. Kudos to this episode’s . . . [more]

An article in yesterday’s The Globe and Mail “Ontario Schools Compete for Law Faculties” outlines the efforts of three Ontario universities in trying to set up the first Canadian law school in almost thirty years. New law faculties are being planned by Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, and Laurentian University in Sudbury. The article goes on to discuss the debate surrounding whether Ontario or Canada actually needs more law schools. . . . [more]

The AALL’s Computing Services Special Interest Section (CS-SIS — which does come off sounding a whole lot like our wholly different CSIS, no?) is offering a free online 5-week course for law librarians to introduce them to the new web technologies. The course will take a couple of hours a week, and the weekly outline looks like this:

• Week 1: Blogs & RSS
• Week 2: Wikis
• Week 3: Social Networking and Second Life
• Week 4: Flickr & Social Bookmarking
• Week 5: Next Steps: Web 2.0 @ Your Library

You can get more info — and sign up — at . . . [more]

How many Canadian law students could identify John Humphrey or explain his significance to the law? I certainly couldn’t when we met at a meeting in 1976, convened by the Ontario Human Rights Commission. He was then seventy, a tweedy academic in bow tie, who had come down from the McGill Law School. Only at a break did a friend lean over and tell me that this academic had held the pen for the drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights . . . [more]

The Lawyer’s Weekly reports that the law society of Saskatchewan has introduced mandatory professional development for all lawyers in the province to begin in 2010. Apparently, in the current set-up, where attendance at annual conferences would keep liability insurance at a lower level, a lot of lawyers were prepared to pay the “fine” of higher insurance fees that truancy cost them. The explanation put forward is that they didn’t want to lose a day’s pay to attend.

One wonders whether (cough, cough…) modern legal research will be on the required curriculum. . . . [more]

Northwestern University now offers incoming students a two-year law degree, the first so-called “elite” faculty of law to do so. Students start in the summer they are admitted and then take the next four semesters, carrying a somewhat heavier course load. It’s not clear whether the hurry-up plan will cost students more. At the moment, students in the snail’s-pace plan pay the astonishing sum of $42,672 per year.

Inside Higher Ed has the story, and details of the program and the law school’s other curriculum reforms are available on the law school website. . . . [more]

The Dean at the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto has announced an exciting development (exciting to me as an alumni): Effective June 30, 2008, their new name will be the Faculty of Information. I assume Dean Cantwell Smith will not mind me quoting part of his announcement:

While superficially minor (deletion of the single word “Studies”), we view this as a significant and exciting development. As we enter a period of leadership change, with Jens-Erik Mai serving as Acting Dean from July 1 through Dec 31 of 2008, and Seamus Ross arriving as new Dean on