I had occasion recently to take a look at Canadian Technology & IP Law, a blog put out by Stikeman Elliott. Their IP practice area page says the blog is new, but I was surprised to see that it’s been in existence since March of 2008: in all the time between then and now there have been a total of 40 posts, which is an average of something less than one entry every two weeks. There have been bursts of activity, from time to time; but dry spells have persisted as well, right up to the present: one . . . [more]

How can we reduce our workloads, and do the more interesting knowledge work? In his April 15th presentation “The Nature of Knowledge Work” Keith D. Swenson, VP of R & D for Fujistu America defined knowledge work as:

• Non-repeated
• Unpredictable
• Emergent
• Robust in the face of variable conditions

Presumably, then, all other work done by knowledge workers is information work. It is work that is repeated, predictable, routine or otherwise fairly straight-forward.

This is not a new consideration. We have been good at ensuring the repetitive or predictable work is given to people at more junior levels so . . . [more]

The U.S. Federal Judiciary launched a radical redesign of its website recently.

As part of the redesign, it even created its own YouTube channel.

Other law-themed YouTube channels I have come across include:

• euTube (European Union)
• ICLR Channel (Incorporated Council of Law Reporting – publisher of the Law Reports in the UK)
• Law Library of Congress
• Courthouse Libraries BC
• HeinOnline

Those are just a few examples of what is out there. . . . [more]

I learned a lot at the recent CALL/ACBD/MichALL Conference. I am very happy to report (just in case my management team wonders why they send me to these things) that I am putting one of the things I learned into immediate practice.

Susan Gibbons, Vice Provost and Andrew H. & Janet Dayton Neilly Dean at River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester, gave a plenary presentation on May 11 titled “Avoiding Obsolescence: Understanding and Engaging the Net Generation”. Susan’s talk had several objectives including understanding what the new generation of library users expect from libraries. She discussed . . . [more]

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]