This is a bit of a global pot-pourri drawn from what I’ve been reading from elsewhere.

Access to Justice in Australia
Another Thomson/West acquisition – this time a Brazilian publisher was acquired
Harvard Law Library joins the Chesapeake Project
The Guardian picks up on Rob Martin’s hyperbolic rant against Canadian Legal Education
An English law firm outsources all of its non-billable activities, including its law library, IT and knowledge management.

. . . [more]

I am in the midst of attending 5 conferences in 3 weeks, for the legal, library, publishing and business industries. The conferences are for varied audiences, and yet I am seeing some good synergies between the discussions.

I therefore found David Whelan’s blog post “A Perspective on Professional Education” to be of interest. In it he compares the Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference–held last week in Windsor in conjunction with the Michigan Association of Law Libraries–to the 5th Annual Solo and Small Firm Conference put on by the Law Society of Upper Canada on Friday. As one . . . [more]

I think I’ve finally recovered from the CALL-MichALL conference in Windsor. Congratulations to Annette Demers and her team for putting on such a thought-provoking and inspiring event. I have pages of scrawly, incoherent notes to guide my thinking for another year (assuming I can make any of it out). I thought I’d share some of my favourite learning, in hopes of provoking discussion in the SLAW community. In no particular order, some of my favourite tid-bits from Windsor:

• tables on wheels make your library a more collaborative space
• Embed the content in the workflow, (not the librarian in the work

I attended an excellent conference session this week at the CALL/ACBD/MichALL Conference in Windsor. The session, titled Media Monitoring and Current Awareness: Tools in the Information Explosion. There was a panel of speakers including Casian Moscovici from NATIONAL Public Relations, Jillian Taylor a Librarian from Fasken Martineau, and Connie Crosby of Crosby Group Consulting (and Slaw too of course). Some presentation materials are already posted.

Media monitoring and current awareness take up a lot of time in the daily routine for the library staff at my firm. The pressures of knowing immediately when something critical is taking place have been . . . [more]

Earlier this week, I was at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries in Windsor, where I had the opportunity to hear Pierre-Paul Lemyre from LexUM.

He was speaking about the Guidelines for Canadian Court Web Sites being developed by the Canadian Centre for Court Technology.

He mentioned that the Centre is organizing a Canadian Forum on Court Technology in Ottawa on September 22 and 23.

The final version of those web site guidelines should be about ready by then. Slaw contributor Patrick Cormier described the process for developing those guidelines in January 2010. . . . [more]

I had the pleasure of presenting on knowledge management at the CALL/ACBD/MichALL law library conference currently underway in Windsor, Ontario. I shared the panel with Ginevra Saylor of Fraser Milner Casgrain, Denise Bonin of andornot, and SLAW’s own Simon Fodden.

It would appear that knowledge management is alive and well, albeit perhaps in an evolving manner. I will try to post shortly in more detail on the discussions that ensued at the session but thought for now I would post here at the following link a PDF of the paper I submitted called The Evolution of Law-Related Knowledge . . . [more]

The CALL/ACBD/MichALL law library conference currently underway in Windsor, Ontario, has had lots of useful sessions, as previously mentioned here on SLAW by Shaunna Mireau.

A busy schedule at the conference, combined with outrageously expensive wireless Internet access at the Caesars Windsor conference hotel, has prevented “live” blogging but I hope to post some entries shortly on lessons learned.

In sharing a panel session of free Internet legal research with Connie Crosby and two American law library colleagues, I learned about and briefly perused Connie Crosby’s new book called Effective Blogging for Libraries available from Neal-Schuman so wanted to . . . [more]

The Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History has announced its 2010 Publishing Programme. According to an announcement published in the 2009 Annual Reports and available on their website at osgoodesociety.ca, this year the Society will publish four new works:

1. Work on Trial: Canadian Labour Law Struggles
edited by Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker and published for the Osgoode Society by Irwin Law. $45 incl GST.

2. A History of the British Columbia Court of Appeal
by Christopher Moore and published for the Osgoode Society by the University of British Columbia Press. $45 incl GST.

3. Viscount Haldane: Wicked . . . [more]

I am currently attending the 2010 World Summit & Symposium on Elder Mediation and am presenting on ethics on May 11th and advance directives on May 12th. I enclose my presentation slides as follows:

It is estimated that there are currently 3.7 million Canadians over the age of 65. With the leading edge of the “baby boomers” poised to hit retirement in 2011, seniors will soon make up close to a quarter . . . [more]

Hello from Windsor. Like many of my Slaw colleagues, I am lucky to be attending the Canadian Association of Law Libraries Annual Conference this week. The conference has been interesting, invigorating, and energizing so far. 

This evening, an event was held at the University of Windsor Law School, sponsored by Canada Law Book. The event was titled “Innovation gallery”, but really, it was a speed dating event with presentations by a number of very talented people.

Conference attendees had an opportunity to attend five 10 minute presentations highlighting a variety of interesting projects, including:

• “Developing an On-Line Search Thesaurus

May 4, 2010, marked the 100th Anniversary of the Canadian Navy, a significant milestone all the more so in this part of the country. Tracing the legal roots, the Canadian Navy was created by the The Naval Service Act, S.C. 1910, c.43. (There are issues with the scan that I’ll fix at a later point), which came into force May 4th, 1910. The Nova Scotia Provincial Archives have posted an interesting gallery on the Canadian Navy posted to accompany the anniversary.

The reason I don’t have the necessary time to fix the scan is that I’m trying to . . . [more]

The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archive has just published its 3rd annual study of link rot (see link in the top right of the home page under “Additional Resources”).

Link rot describes “a URL that no longer provides direct access to files matching the content originally harvested from the URL and currently preserved in the Chesapeake Project’s digital archive (…) In some instances, a 404 or ‘not found’ message indicates link rot at a URL; in others, the URL may direct to a site hosted by the original publishing organization or entity, but the specific resource has been removed or . . . [more]