With a hat tip to my colleague Ben Keen, who spotted the story below on the Torstar website.

“Internet Archive Canada, a small non-profit company, fired 35 of its 47 employees on Wednesday due to a massive drop in donations. Most will leave Aug. 12 unless a white knight appears soon”.

It’s difficult to find out exactly what the issue is – the website offers no explanation.

The story ends:

“The loss will be felt by more than those who will be out of work.”

Here they all are – they’ve made a major contribution in digitizing Canada’s . . . [more]

Fellow law library consultant Kathie Sullivan and I have been working together to track new collaboration tools and document the challenges that groups face in using them. New project management platforms such as Basecamp, collaborative mindmapping, and wireframe/mockup tools like Mockingbird and Balsamiq join familiar tools like wikis and Google Docs to make teamwork easier, regardless of where everyone is located. We are specifically interested in how these might be used in library and legal settings.

We are building a wiki that will document the tools and related stories (still to be made public), and will be speaking at two . . . [more]

Set out below is one technique I use to make doing legal research on the iPad easier. If readers have other suggestions, I would welcome comments.

Rather than create Safari browser “Bookmarks” on my iPad, I instead found it more useful to use the option of “Add to Home Page.”

What I have therefore done was this: I use a customized HTML “home page” at work and on my home laptop that is organized into 6 “boxes” providing links (and password information) to web resources covering such things as reference tools, books, publishers, journals, research databases, news, case law, precedents . . . [more]

Last week Simon linked to the piece in the New York Times which described the remarkable trend in the USSC towards resorting to dictionaries to determine legal meaning.

The US doctrinal literature has quite a history in a trilogy of articles by Judge Samuel A. Thumma & Jeffrey L. Kirchmeier, The Lexicon Has Become a Fortress: The United States Supreme Court’s Use of Dictionaries, 47 Buff. L. Rev. 227 (1999); Appendix A, Appendix B, The Lexicon Remains a Fortress: An Update, 5 Green Bag 51 (2001), and Scaling the Lexicon Fortress: The United States Supreme . . . [more]

What's *NEW* in the updated webpages?

From Dr. M Veerappa Moily, the Centre’s Minister of Law & Justice comes a Press Release:

The scope of this program is creation and management of the ‘National Legal e-library’ for 933 schools in India, Bar Associations, Government Legal departments etc. and meet the needs of academic librarians, students, faculty and young practitioners. It aims to provide a practitioners view and a comprehensive understanding of core subject areas of law.

Various technology tools that make the concept of E-Library indispensable are Easy Access to provide a campus wide access using IP Authentication, Results clustering to familiarize new users

. . . [more]

Forgive me, please if this is a tad parochial, but yesterday the Toronto Civil Court Lists were made available on the Internet

The Toronto Lawyers Association announced that working with Regional Senior Justice Ed Then, and his Court staff they have finally secured for the benefit of the profession internet access to the Toronto Civil Court lists.

They should be available here. They undertake to post the next day’s list by 5 pm each day (the lists are subject to change).

Currently they have Trials, Pre-Trial & Case Conferences, Motions and Masters’ Motions available. Soon they hope . . . [more]

With digital publishing coming of age, many publishers are rethinking how they produce and sell their content. One of the main challenges we face as publishers is making our content and products accessible.

I had the pleasure last week of presenting at the annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries / /L’Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit on the topic “Legal Project Management: Is There a Role for Law Librarians?”

My co-speaker was Andrew Terrett, the National Director of Knowledge Management at BLG who provided a great, pragmatic overview of project management in law firms.

Although in my paper I also provided a brief overview of legal project management and what various law firms were doing about it, the focus of my talk was instead on the third part of . . . [more]

As recently announced, Carlos Rossel, Publisher, The World Bank, is guiding the transition of the Bank’s print publishing to largely electronic, open access publishing. As part of this transition, The World Bank invited several of its employees including editors, economists, researchers, lawyers and invited non-Bank guests to a two-hour session yesterday in Washington, DC.

Carlos opened the session introducing the issues and speakers. I then gave an overview of relevant copyright and licensing/contractual issues relating to OA publishing. The information I provided was based on U.S. law as well as international copyright principles from the leading copyright treaty, the  . . . [more]

With the relative newness of digital licensing and the growing opportunities for licensing electronic content (including on social networking sites), there are a number of misconceptions already developing. By discussing and clearing up these misconceptions, it will help clear the path to an easier negotiating road and to better licenses.

Misconception #1: Not all licenses are negotiable. Almost every licence is negotiable, but often you have to ask the other side if they are willing to negotiate so that you will have a licence that meets your needs. Always remember to only accept a licence and arrangement that works for . . . [more]

The time is ripe for the creation of an online repository and clearinghouse for Canadian legal scholarship in digital form. There are perhaps 70 Canadian journals publishing articles on or immediately relevant to law, making for a manageable supply of material. And the software and associated technology is readily available for free or at a very low cost. Of course, the labour necessary to construct and manage such a resource is not free, and may be less than readily available; but it seems to me that the major obstacle at the moment is simply the lack of will. Someone — . . . [more]