Last week Nicole Garton Jones, a BC-based lawyer and fellow Slaw contributor, provided some thought-provoking commentary on the position of the Law Society of British Columbia on the topic of Virtual Law Firms, as discussed in the latest edition of the organization’s Bencher’s Bulletin. In the bulletin, and subsequent response to Ms. Garton-Jones’ post, the LSBC identifies several key concerns relating to cloud computing for BC-based law firms, namely:

Zotero has announced that it will be releasing a standalone desktop version of the program that will integrate with Internet Explorer, Safari, and Chrome. At the present, Zotero is only an extension to the Firefox browser.

Zotero is a free note-taking application much favoured by researchers and others who need to clip, annotate, and organize material from the web along with bibliographic metadata. Zotero comes with a variety of bibliographic and citation styles built in (though not, I think, the Canadian legal citation format).

This move will make Zotero Everywhere a sensible alternative to other popular note-taking tools, such as . . . [more]

Toby Fyfe and Paul Crookall wrote a report earlier this year entitled Social Media and Public Sector Policy Dilemmas. It was written for the Institute of Public Administration of Canada (IPAC), an organization whose role is to promote excellence in public service.

The report is based on consultations with stakeholders from across Canada and discusses many of the impediments to the use and spread of social media (blogs, wikis, Facebook-style tools) in the public/government sector:

This research paper examines the thoughts and attitudes of public servants from three levels of
government, academics, consultants, and members of think tanks on

The Google Reader blog recently published the following graph that shows their growth of accounts over the past five years:

Online pundits have been calling RSS a dying technology for a while now. If you’ve read Slaw for any period of time, you’ll probably recognize what a huge fan I am of the technology. It’s still part of my daily routine, and I continue to find incredible value in a properly tuned personal RSS reader.

Many thanks to Andy Beal for his post: If RSS is Dead, Someone Please Explain This Chart to Me! I agree completely. . . . [more]

What follows in this post are some initial thoughts on what I think is a fairly important topic for law librarians and legal researchers: (a topic I might consider researching in detail if I ever were to pursue a doctorate in information studies): what, if anything, can be done to lessen the anxiety that legal researchers suffer during the research process?

That legal researchers suffer anxiety goes without saying. The researcher may be uncertain where to begin, they may be suffering from too much information, or they may lack confidence in concluding they have reached the “correct” answer (I myself . . . [more]

A former Field summer student wrote this on my Facebook Wall:

I read your post on Slaw, but I can’t tell: what do you think of the new McGill changes? Are they retroactive– should we cite old cases with the new style? Won’t that make it difficult or impossible to do effective Westlaw citation searches? Do we *have* to follow the dumb ‘no periods!’ suggestion despite it being totally ridiculous? I’ve noticed the new AB courts judgments haven’t changed their style. If the SCC doesn’t start using the new guide suggestions (esp. the periods thing) in the upcoming term,

Though we frequently mention New Jersey, we haven’t mentioned the Channel Islands – and their unique local laws and language. The local BBC news on Jersey mentions today that the Jersey Legal Information site was according to the BBC designed by Richard Susskind and that Richard is leading a conference on the use of social media within law, and how social media might enhance a legal information institute portal.

The event will look at using social media such as Twitter and Facebook to provide legal information for lawyers and citizens alike.

Richard notes that smaller jurisdictions may be . . . [more]

This post concludes a series of post on the subject topic:

• Presentation of the CCCT IntellAction Working Group on Court Web Site Guidelines (21 Jan 2010)
• Presentation of the Working Group selection of principles included in the subject guidelines; principles 1, 2 and 3 explained (The Right Information for Specific Audiences, Empowerment, Timeliness – 17 Aug 2010)
• Presentation of Principles 4, 5 and 6 (Notification, Content, Security – 20 Aug 2010)
• Presentation of Principles 7, 8 and 9 (Bilinguism, Accessibility, Interactivity – 25 Aug 2010)

As always, your comments and suggestions are welcome. . . . [more]

We didn’t get around to noticing the Law Library of Congress’ new blog In Custodia Legis, which explains its name and aim here.

Today, it featured a new post on the developments at Thomas to make legislative information more accessible. There aren’t a lot of comments yet, but it’s early days.

The high spots for me were on Social Media and a Legislative Map at the State level, which looks simple but is only simple to use.

Social Media Box

In addition to easier access to the Library’s social media, there is a new box to highlight ways . . . [more]

We all know that editing a Wikipedia entry is fairly straightforward – and that the Wikiguardians keep a vigilant eye over entries and edits that stray from the norms of objectivity and verifiability.

So the announcement that the Correctional Service’s internal operations arm is investigating an edit made to the Wikipedia entry on Canada’s Official Languages Act, which appears to have been made from a government computer connected to the Corrections Canada server at the department’s offices on Laurier Street in Ottawa, is arousing the interest of the mainstream media. Denis Coderre appears to have noticed the edit a . . . [more]

Earlier last week, I presented the CCCT IntellAction Working Group selection of principles that should guide the design and organization of court web sites and further explained, in a later post, principles 4, 5 and 6 on notification, content organization & search and security. In this post, I further explain the next three principles:

• Principle #7: Bilinguism
• Principle #8: Accessibility
• Principle #9: Interactivity

Comments and suggestions are welcome! . . . [more]

Because URLs are often clumsy and hard to remember, we use bookmarks. Right? If you’re like me, you’ve got certain critical ones strung across your personal bookmarks toolbar, more stacked in folders there, and perhaps hundreds buried in the entrails of your browser’s file system.

But sometimes you’re away from your own machines. Or you can’t quickly come up with one of your hidden bookmarks. It’s good, then, to be able simply to type in the URL and go to your destination. This, of course, depends on whether a URL is memorable. Some are — I have no trouble remembering . . . [more]